Do you watch sports, football, the Olympics? If not I'm sure you know someone who does. Same category as this. Each of the 32 NFL team is worth about the cost of 1-2 Artemis launches. The entire league could fund the whole Artemis program nearly twice. Hosting the Olympics is worth about 3-10 launches.
Like sports, the objective is ultimately useless except as a showcase of what humanity has to offer, and people like to see that.
I think in general space exploration is a great use of taxpayer money, but the artemis program doesn't seem great from either a "science per dollar" or "novel accomplishment per dollar" standpoint.
If the goal was just to flex on the rest of the world I would've much rather we focused on going somewhere new or returning to the moon in a more sustainable way
Each Artemis launch costs something like $4b (that's the incremental cost of a new rocket, it's much higher if you amortize the design costs).
IMO the program is not optimized for cost or sustainability, it's optimized for creating jobs in various congressional districts. Of course that provides a certain amount of political sustainability to the so-called Senate Launch System.
I just don't see a future where NASA can afford multiple SLS launches per year to maintain a continuous Lunar presence
I think that is the point, but whether this mission will actually do that is rather unconvincing.
After (and if) Artemis III lands on the moon and brings home the astronauts there seems to be very little planned on how we actually get to the moon base which NASA is claiming this will lead to, let alone the manned Mars mission that is also supposed to follow.
In other words, I think NASA is greatly exaggerating, and possibly lying, about the utility of this mission.
> there seems to be very little planned on how we actually get to the moon base
There is a lot of research going into in situ construction methods and even nuclear power plants on the moon [1]. (Which would be necessary to bootstrap eventual indigenous panel production [2].)
To me it’s encouraging to see this fundamental work being attacked than an endless sea of renderings. The reason you aren’t seeing heavy detailing, despite construction slated to begin with Artemis V, is we’re waiting for the launch vehicles. (“Any exploration program which "just happens" to include a new launch vehicle is, de facto, a launch vehicle program” [3].)
> This effort ensures the United States leads the world in space exploration and commerce.
> “History shows that when American science and innovation come together, from the Manhattan Project to the Apollo Mission, our nation leads the world to reach new frontiers once thought impossible,”
> Under President Trump’s national space policy
I smell politics and American exceptionalism, not science. There are a lot of could-bes in these statements as well, I have serious suspicions that these goals are not serious engineering. I am 99.999% certain that NASA will not build a nuclear reactor on the moon this decade, nor even the next decade. NASA is not giving me any signals they are capable of that.
> I am 99.999% certain that NASA will not build a nuclear reactor on the moon this decade, nor even the next decade. NASA is not giving me any signals they are capable of that
You don’t think NASA and the DOE, together with Lockheed and Westinghouse, can build a reactor? Why? The major technical issues were largely de-risked with the 2022 solicitation.
Even if you think Space travel is worth the money (which I personally do), adding humans to the mix makes projects incredibly more expensive. Even in the realm of space travel and research, sending humans is a questionable use of the money.
The most important (if not entertaining) things you can do in space don't involve humans. Telescopes, communications, earth observation, sending probes to distant bodies, etc.
It's nice that we can send humans to space and it's good to keep that capability going so that the knowledge doesn't die. But the unmanned missions tend to pull the weight of actually accomplishing useful things. Humans just get in the way.
I think there is a major difference though. Sports events are not pretending to be anything else. The Artemis mission claims to be advancing science and claims to be a stepping stone for an eventual moon base and a manned mission to Mars. I personally have serious questions about all of these.
Do you really disagree that it’s advancing science? Surely actually testing hardware, building knowledge on how to run this type of mission, learning to use lunar resources, figuring out how to keep people alive, etc. will teach us things we couldn’t learn any other way.
Fwiw do share your concerns about the methods (sending humans on this specific mission is questionable, SLS is questionable compared to SpaceX approach).
It's not science, it's engineering. I don't think it's advancing science in a way that wouldn't be possible with a fraction of the cost without sending humans there.
Do you think we will learn more from Artemis or the Asteroid Redirect Mission? Because that's a concrete example of how funding this mission caused other experiments to be cancelled.
Fair point, but that’s an argument about prioritization within NASA’s budget (and its size relative to other spending), not the scientific value of the mission.
There's never non-zero value to any challenging engineering problem. The question is whether the finite resources spent to solve it are best spent on it versus other projects.
And in this mission in particular, you can't divorce science from politics. NASA's budget was reined in by Trump 45 and his admin picked Artemis because a manned mission to the moon invokes a particular feeling and memory, not because it benefits science. The moon is a known quantity, and going there is not more valuable than the other projects the government could have spent $100 billion on.
Keep in mind, this is one of the most expensive single launches in history while there is a partial government shutdown and the rest of the federal government that does real research has been gutted by this same administration. So it's tough to talk about "scientific value" when it's obvious that this mission is doing little science at the same time the government has decreed it won't be in the business of paying for science.
The moon isn’t a known quantity, we sent a handful of people there for a combined few days half a century ago. There’s immense scientific and engineering value in keeping a generation of engineers fluent in deep space operations.
If you’re angry about this dumpster fire of an administration wasting money and gutting research (I am too), the answer is to fight for better funding across the board, not to tear down one of the few ambitious programs left that’s actually pushing the boundaries on what we can do. NASA’s budget amounts to a rounding error and isn’t zero sum with the rest of federal science funding, these are separate appropriations.
The fact that we hope to get some new tech with this whereas sports aims for nothing is just icing on the cake. I think big space missions are worth it every now and then on a humanitarian level; even if no new discoveries are made, a new generation of engineers will become fluent in what we have already discovered. Humanity's education is not "done" when the last fact is written in a book, it needs to be constantly refreshed or it will disappear.
Even in sports you do not get "nothing", it has certainty helped advance the field of medicine.
> a new generation of engineers will become fluent in what we have already discovered.
We seem to have lost the technology of going to the moon we gained from Apollo. So without an actual follow-up and a tangible long term plan I suspect the exact same will happen this time around.
Or, more likely, it is an indication that manned moon missions are simply not that important, that this technology is simply not worth the cost of maintaining.
In contrast, we kept the technology of doing robotic missions in space, on the moon, and even on other planets and even asteroids (the latter two have much to improve upon though).
Mars pushes the frontier (even if no one might survive the trip due to human body deteriorating), going around the Moon is meh - we were there ~57 years ago multiple times so what's the point?
Mars isn’t a frontier, it is a wrong turn that leads to a dried out toxic well in the middle of nowhere.
We should aim for the asteroid belt. Maybe we can mine them or something. It’d be less like a frontier and more like an offshore oil platform, but still, it is at least semi-plausible.
Whether a moon base is needed or even beneficial is a question I have not heard a convincing answer in favor. And even if moon base is indeed needed and/or beneficial to future space exploration / resource extraction why robots cannot more efficiently build (or assemble) such a moon base is another question I need an answer to.
We are sending humans to (or around) the moon now, but it may just turn out to be a wasted effort, done solely for the opulence (or more cynically bragging rights / nationalist propaganda).
> Whether a moon base is needed or even beneficial is a question I have not heard a convincing answer in favor
If we want to go to Mars, the Moon is a good place to learn. Simple things like how to do trauma medicine in low g; how to accommodate a variety of human shapes, sizes and fitness levels; how to do in situ manufacturing; all the way to more-speculative science like how to gestate a mammal. These are easier to do on the Moon than Mars. And the data are more meaningful than simulating it in LEO. If we get ISRU going, doing it on the Moon should actually be cheaper.
If we don’t want to colonize space, the Moon is mostly a vanity mission. That said, the forcing function of developing semi-closed ecologies almost certainly has sustainability side effects on the ground.
I think I mostly agree with the other comment by runarberg—Earth is the place to be. But it is also worth noting that even if we do end up colonizing space, Mars is still really pointless. Mars is not significantly more habitable than orbit.
There’s some gravity: the wrong amount. In space, you can at least get 1G with centripetal force.
In orbit, you are halfway to anywhere. On Mars, you’ve gone back down the well. Make sure to bring enough gas to get out again…
Mars is just a bunch of irradiated rocks. Bring your own ecosystem, and wait a couple thousand years while it installs.
The only thing Mars has going for it is that it’s really far away, so we can still pretend to entertain sci-fi plans about colonizing it. The practical next step for space colonies would be large investments in additional space stations, a step so imminently possible that the only way to take it seriously would be to do it.
> Earth is the place to be. But it is also worth noting that even if we do end up colonizing space, Mars is still really pointless. Mars is not significantly more habitable than orbit
I’m not pitching a specific destination. And I’m not pitching exploration to the masses. Most people on the planet never have and never will leave their home country.
If we want to go to space, we probably want a lunar base.
> There’s some gravity: the wrong amount. In space, you can at least get 1G with centripetal force
Maybe this is important. Maybe it’s not. We need physiological experiments.
> In orbit, you are halfway to anywhere. On Mars, you’ve gone back down the well
In orbit you’re perpetually nowhere. On a surface you have in situ resources.
> Mars is just a bunch of irradiated rocks. Bring your own ecosystem, and wait a couple thousand years while it installs
Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s moving from New York to Wyoming. Maybe those are the same thing. But I’m more of a red Mars advocate today than I was when I read Robinson’s trilogy in my twenties.
> only thing Mars has going for it is that it’s really far away, so we can still pretend to entertain sci-fi plans about colonizing it
It’s mass and an atmosphere. That’s a lot to what Earth has going for us.
> practical next step for space colonies would be large investments in additional space stations
Practical next steps are lots of experiments in centrifuges and micro and low gravity. To fund and focus that you need a goal.
>> In orbit, you are halfway to anywhere. On Mars, you’ve gone back down the well
> In orbit you’re perpetually nowhere. On a surface you have in situ resources.
It’s the bottom of a dried-out well in the middle of nowhere, that’s not an improvement over just being in the middle of nowhere with a full tank of gas.
>> practical next step for space colonies would be large investments in additional space stations
> Practical next steps are lots of experiments in centrifuges and micro and low gravity. To fund and focus that you need a goal.
The at least semi-plausible goal is the asteroid belt.
We don‘t want to colonize space. Colonizing space is science fiction, not a serious goal for humanity, and certainly not an engineering challenge. There is no reason for humans to live anywhere other then on Earth. We have more reasons to live on Antarctica or the deep ocean then on the Moon, Mars or Alpha Centauri.
What I really want is for us to send a lander and a launcher to Mars capable of returning to earth the the capsules Perseverance has been collecting. I would love for geologists on earth to examine Mars rock under a microscope. I would want them to take detailed pictures of an exoplanet using the Sun as a gravitational lens. And I would love it if they could send probes to Alpha Proxima using solar sails to get there within a couple of decades.
None of these would benefit from having a moon base. In fact this moon base seems to be diverting funds away from missions with more chance of success and more scientific value.
I do. Plenty of people do. Plenty of people also think exoplanet science is useless. I disagree with them. It the arguments are symmetric to those against human spaceflight.
> certainly not an engineering challenge
…how? We don’t have the technology to do this.
> There is no reason for humans to live anywhere other then on Earth. We have more reasons to live on Antarctica or the deep ocean then on the Moon, Mars or Alpha Centauri
> None of these would benefit from having a moon base
Of course it does. ISRU (and baseload launch demand) decreases costs of access to deep space.
> diverting funds away from missions with more chance of success and more scientific value
The science slakes our curiosity. The engineering slakes our needs. And they both benefit from each other. Claiming Starship and in-orbit refueling won’t benefit scientific missions is myopic.
No you don‘t want to colonize space, nobody actually wants it. You may think you want to colonize space but actually you don’t. Space colonization is science fiction and not an engineering goal. It is a video game you can fantasize about but you don’t actually want to do it. Nobody does.
Surely you must see the difference between expolanet science and dreams of space colonization. The former is actual science which further our knowledge of the universe with tangible results, and the latter simply isn’t. People who don‘t like exoplanet science may have their reasons, but people who don‘t like space colonization are simply being realistic. Because the former is science, the latter is science fiction.
Finally there is nothing about space refueling technology which requires a moon base, and especially not manned moon missions. If you want space refueling infrastructure manned moon missions is not the only way to get there, and probably not even the best way. I also have my doubts here. If space refueling is so important we would be doing it already. Sending fuel from earth in a separate lunch. A case in point James Webb was originally designed with refueling in mind. They dropped it from the final module because it simply wasn’t worth it.
We are nowhere near the capability to launch robots to the moon that can autonomously build or assemble a moon base for any useful definition of moon base.
> We are sending humans to (or around) the moon now, but it may just turn out to be a wasted effort, done solely for the opulence
My 4 year old is extremely excited to watch the launch tonight because it’s manned. I’d say a few billion is worth it if all it does is inspire a new generation of astronauts, engineers, and scientists.
And neither are we anywhere near the capability to lunch construction workers to the moon which can build or assemble an equivalent moon base with their human labor. So this answer does not satisfy me one bit.
> inspire a new generation of astronauts, engineers, and scientists
This is a good point. And I would like it to be true. However when you have to lie about (or exaggerate) the scientific value of the mission, that is not exactly inspiring is it. Your 4 year old could be equally inspired by the amazing photos James Webb has given us, and unlike Artemis, James Webb is providing us with unique data which is inspiring all sorts of new science.
> And neither are we anywhere near the capability to lunch construction workers to the moon which can build or assemble an equivalent moon base with their human labor. So this answer does not satisfy me one bit.
We have the capability to do that. We don’t have the will to do it, but we have the technology. We don’t even have autonomous robots that are capable of building a moon base on earth.
> Your 4 year old could be equally inspired by the amazing photos James Webb has given us, and unlike Artemis, James Webb is providing us with unique data which is inspiring all sorts of new science.
He’s not though. People gather around as a family and watch manned space missions. It’s exciting in a way that a telescope or a probe isn’t.
Indeed, in 1969, as a small child, I watched the Moon landing together with my parents, in Europe, like also the following missions, in the next years.
They have certainly contributed to my formation as a future engineer.
The key here is “could be”. But most four (or in my case, six) year olds can’t really grasp the abstract concepts of what JWST is or the data it’s sending back. For that matter most 40 year olds can’t.
A manned mission on the other hand is tangible in a way a probe isn’t. “See the big round thing in the night sky? There are four people going around it in a spacecraft”.
It isn’t a _complete_ argument in favour of manned missions- that has to account for the risk of the endeavour and reward of the science potential of having people there to react in ways robots can’t. But it’s hard to pretend that the inspiration pretty much everyone feels when they see manned missions is somehow achievable purely by robotic ones.
> neither are we anywhere near the capability to lunch construction workers to the moon which can build or assemble an equivalent moon base with their human labor
Why do you say this? What is the bottleneck you feel we are more than half a decade from?
The moon has about the same make up as the Earth when it comes to distribution of elements in the crust. If it's anywhere near 8% like Earth then it makes sense to mine aluminum and other metals on the moon in order to build megastructures in orbit. Since the moon has no atmosphere you can accelerate things using mechanical mass drivers. Basically rail systems. At 5,300 mph you hit escape velocity and can then move payload somewhere with no rockets. It would keep us from polluting Earth too. This is the precursor to O'Neil cylinder type structures. AI robots will probably be the play but you still want a transportation system that works and frankly building a landing zone would improve overall outcomes regardless.
The rocks at the surface of the Moon are richer in metals than the crust of the Earth. They are especially richer in iron and titanium.
Without oxidizing air, it is easier to extract metals from the Moon rocks.
There is little doubt that it would be possible to build big spaceships on the Moon.
However, what is missing on the Moon is fuel. For interplanetary spacecraft, nuclear reactors would be preferable anyway, which could be assembled there from parts shipped from Earth, but for propulsion those still need a large amount of some working gas,to be heated and ejected.
It remains to be seen if there is any useful amount of water at the poles, but I doubt that there is enough for a long term exploitation.
I imagine a foundry would use solar power and lasers to heat up the material. No atmosphere means less heat energy wasted. My thinking has been how to get enough actual build material to build something like an O'Neill cylinder. Well you'd need really thick metal plates. And then you'd want to get them into orbit without rockets. And these stations would likely be at the same orbit as Earth or nearby. Mainly because of how much sun energy you get around here. Going out to the outer solar system is a different beast all together.
Of course the money doesn't make them terrible. Being terrible makes them money. Lots of money. There aren't really other ways of obtaining so much money, which is why if you see someone that has that amount, they should be viewed with suspicion.
Among non-programmers, you always hear about some fool that fell in love with an AI girlfriend or whatever, but you never hear about the people who open chatgpt up once, tried some things with it, said to themselves "huh, that's kind of neat" and then lost interest a day or two later, having conceived of no further items to which AI could provide assistance.
> having conceived of no further items to which AI could provide assistance
For me, the issue isn't that I can't conceive of work AI could help with. It's that most of the work I currently need to be doing involves things AI is useless for.
I look forward to using it when I have an appropriate task. However, I don't actually have a lot of those, especially in my personal life. I suspect this is a fairly common experience.
I actually hear about this fairly often. In quite a few of my college classes, there's a large focus on AI (even outside the computer science department). I find it surprising the amount of non-technical people who don't even think to use it, or otherwise haven't interacted with it except when required.
I find it surprising how many non-technical friends and family constantly anthropomorphize LLMs, regularly bringing up instances where they "asked AI" about this or that and it "told them" whatever. I'm tired of trying to explain that they are merely statistical sequence generators, don't have a mind, are occasionally completely out to lunch, and ultimately cannot be trusted. This is usually a losing battle. The sheer bullshit that "AI tells them" is often astonishing or ridiculous, but a lot of the time it's given undue weight and trusted anyway. The future is bleak.
I agree. There's also something to be said in it being another level of abstraction, only linguistic instead of technical, but failing to understand that they are "random" is a recipe for disaster.
There is a reputation going on around I hear in real life conversation that it just doesn’t work, gives incorrect info, gets in the way. Multiple people saying they are forced to use it for work and wish they didn’t, or even worse, coworkers blindly follow it when it is wrong and then they need to be explained that they are misinformed and the llm is wrong. I think the google ai preview really poisoned the well; people cite that one specifically often.
To what end is business moving today? The incentives of business are already divorced from the incentives of our species. Climate change is a direct result of this.
Guns, swords, and bombs are weapons. The same, attached to fancy computers that can use them autonomously are weapon systems. At least that's how I've always hears the terms used.
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