[LargeTomato]

We are going to The moon for two reasons. First, we want to set up a more permanent base. Nasa refers to this as "we're here to stay"

The second reason we are going to the moon so that we can put the first person of color and the first woman on the moon. That is explicitly an Artemis mission purpose.

Only time will tell if either of these two missions were actually worth it.

One more point

> Early on, SLS designers made the catastrophic decision to reuse Shuttle hardware, which is like using Fabergé eggs to save money on an omelette.

SLS designers did not make the decision to use shuttle hardware per se. SLS was explicitly designed and funded to use that hardware. One of the original purposes of Artemis, before the other two purposes that we see in the media were even decided upon, was to make use of shuttle hardware.

[shkkmo]

Which is the explanation for some of the paradoxes rasied in the article.

SLS was foisted on NASA by politicians. The design of Artemis seems set to take advantage of that political will to fund the private development of the next stage of space flight by pretending that funding supports a role for SLS instead of making it completely obsolete.

[Yossarrian22]

There’s also the unstated purpose of beating China to setting up a base.

[usrbinbash]

And what if China gets there first? How exactly would that benefit them, in a geopolitical sense?

Sorry, but if I have the choice of wasting that much resources just so I can brag about it a bit sooner than my opponent, or watch my opponent do so, while I use said resources more productively, I know what to do.

[margalabargala]

> And what if China gets there first? How exactly would that benefit them, in a geopolitical sense?

If China gets there first, the enormous amount of international credibility and resulting soft power that they will gain internationally, at the US's expense, will be immense and will be worth the resources they spend several times over.

[usrbinbash]

> the enormous amount of international credibility and resulting soft power

You know what is giving China soft power? Funding projects around all of Africa.

You know what is not giving western countries soft power? Burning Billions on Space Programs that serve zero purpose and could achieve more with much less investments, if we just continued sending robots.

Again, I know where I would allocate my resources if I had a hand in this game.

[hifromwork]

I'm not a geopolitics expert, and I assume you're not either, so I'll just say what I feel. As an European, deep down my unconscious mental picture of the situation here is probably this: USA is a geopolitical and economic power, China is a far away country that assembles parts and devices for western companies. This mental picture is wrong and hilariously oversimplified (I know rationally that it's wrong), but this is the stereotype I've absorbed from my society.

If both counties actively tried to win, and China managed to build a Moon base before the US that would probably make a huge blow to that (subconscious) mental picture.

[vaguba]

you are correct.

that's because the US and the rest of the west pretty much decided after 1990 that history had ended, even as their societies crumbled from the costs of the cold war.

the example of china's rise and eventual dominance disturbs that narrative but doesn't demolish it entirely. sinking a US carrier or building a moon base before white countries do would be concrete examples that they can't explain away.

[usrbinbash]

> that would probably make a huge blow to that (subconscious) mental picture.

And?

Okay, so let's say this happens, and now some people think: "Wow China is more powerful in space than the US!".

What is the real world impact of this? Did Chinas army just get 10x more powerful? Does the CPP now own the moon? Did Chinas [economic challenges][1] suddenly disappear? Did their [demographic issues][2] suddenly improve?

No, of course not.

The only real world impact of this: China would now be faced with the choice between blowing billions upon billions of dollars anually for what is essentially a vanity project with little to no ROI, or find a way to abandon it quitely without too much public fanfare. And of course, the whole thing is constantly only one malfunctioning airlock away, from turning into a pile of dead astronauts and a complete PR desaster.

So please tell me, and you are completely right, I am not a geopolitics expert, in terms I can understand, what the specific and tangible benefits of building a Moon-/Mars-Base/NewMannedSpaceStation/etc. are supposed to be, in terms of geopolitics.

And sure, I can see some change to mental images, and yeah, that might e.g. attract some business that would otherwise be somewhere else, or make the odd contract negotiations go smoother. But at the end of the day, these advantages, such as they are, would still need to offset the pricetag of the whole show, and I don't believe they would.

[1]: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/27/economy/china-economy-cha...

[2]: https://www.cfr.org/blog/chinas-population-decline-continues

[margalabargala]

> You know what is giving China soft power? Funding projects around all of Africa.

I don't disagree.

Are you suggesting that China will be satisfied with merely the amount of soft power that they are gaining from funding infrastructure projects in Africa and will not seek additional soft power through other routes?

I would assert that between the amount of soft power gained, and more, the amount of soft power lost by their rivals (the US), if China had the capability to create a moon base it would be entirely worthwhile for them to do so.

Thus, if the US wishes to prevent that loss of its own soft power, then it needs to beat China to the moon base.

[usrbinbash]

> Are you suggesting that China will be satisfied with merely the amount of soft power that they are gaining from funding infrastructure projects in Africa and will not seek additional soft power through other routes?

No, I am not.

I am, however, suggesting that the amount of soft power gained through bragging rights along the lines of "We did it! We did it! We managed to to the same thing the US did in the 60s! And we only had to light a huge pile of money on fire to do it!!!" is kinda negligible when compared to, say, having direct financial influence in many developing countries, or having a couple additional aircraft carriers.

And sure, they could do both, but resources are finite. Every dollar pumped into a, technically unnecessary, moon base is a dollar less they can invest elsewhere.

[coderenegade]

Maybe weapons? Certainly you could hit speeds that would nullify any kind of missile defense, though MIRVs already accomplish that anyway.

Depending on where you established infrastructure on the moon, it might be pretty easy to conceal the things you're doing in space. You won't see anything launched from the other side, and anything leaving the moon is going to fall towards Earth, so may be difficult to detect (e.g. no heat signature).

The moon is also a pretty decent staging ground for the rest of the solar system, so getting there late means ceding any potential resource or technological advantages that being first might have attained.

There's also a slim possibility that there are things that can only be manufactured in low or zero gravity.

I think the last two reasons aren't a great justification, but anything that materially impacts geopolitics on Earth, as weapons systems and spying do, probably are if you think there's a credible threat that your adversary is capable of them. And that's probably a big part of why the US stopped going to the moon. The cost and risks didn't stack up when the US already had a pretty compelling technological lead, better intel, and the USSR never signalled that it was serious about going there.

China are serious, though, and the way they've vertically integrated the world's manufacturing base means they actually have a lead on the US in a number of areas. That's probably why there's suddenly a lot more urgency and credibility about claims of wanting to go back.

[usrbinbash]

> Depending on where you established infrastructure on the moon, it might be pretty easy to conceal the things you're doing in space.

No it wouldn't be, because there is zero chance in hell of everyone else on Earth not realizing whats going on, if someone were suddenly busy launching all that machinery, building materials and weapons towards the Moon, not to mention hundreds of personnel with all their space suits, provisions, water, shelters, space poop collectors, etc.

Hiding something is pretty pointless, if the process of getting whatever it is to wherever it is hidden, is announced to the entire planet by shooting it into the sky on roaring pillars of fire.

> The moon is also a pretty decent staging ground for the rest of the solar system

The rest of what now?

There is Earth. There is the Moon. There is Mars. This is all the places in the solar system a human could, in theory, visit without immediately dying horribly. Maybe Phobos. Maybe.

The other planets are off limits: Mercury is worse than literal Hell. Venus is a hypercorrosive hothouse. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune would instantly crush everything in their deep gravity envelopes, and most of their moons are highly radioactive hellholes. Not to mention that everything beyond Mars is not even theoretically reachable with a manned spacecraft as of right now.

So, that leaves Mars. A freeze-dried, irradiated, airless, toxic rock desert covered in microabrasive regolith, with too low gravity, no magnetic field to speak off, no available Nitrogen, and no resources that aren't found in abundance on Earth. And before anyone says "Land": May I present the [Gobi Desert][1], a 1.295 Million square kilometers large rock desert, smack in the middle of Asia. And while it is largely a cold, barren rock desert, it is still a paradise compared to Mars.

And even so, the Moon offers ZERO advantage as a "staging ground" for Missions to Mars, because, there is nothing on the Moon to be staged. Every kg of stuff that would be "staged" there, has to be first launched from Earth, so all a Moon Base does, is add another launch to an already costly equation.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobi_Desert

[coderenegade]

> No it wouldn't be, because there is zero chance in hell of everyone else on Earth not realizing whats going on, if someone were suddenly busy launching all that machinery, building materials and weapons towards the Moon, not to mention hundreds of personnel with all their space suits, provisions, water, shelters, space poop collectors, etc.

We're talking about a permanent manned presence on the moon. If I have that and you don't, you can watch me launch from Earth all you like. I can build a launch facility on the side of the moon that you can't see without circumnavigating it, and I can conduct launches from it that you don't know about. To go to the extreme, I could launch nukes on ballistic trajectories that you would be blind to.

> And even so, the Moon offers ZERO advantage as a "staging ground" for Missions to Mars, because, there is nothing on the Moon to be staged. Every kg of stuff that would be "staged" there, has to be first launched from Earth, so all a Moon Base does, is add another launch to an already costly equation.

This is the kind of confidently ignorant response that is thankfully not too common on hackernews.

The moon has zero atmosphere, a trivial escape velocity, and is a huge mass that can be built on, within Earth's gravity well. Using a mass driver to launch from the moon around the Earth means you would need to carry less propellant on board your spacecraft, because in the best case scenario, you only need to carry the fuel to slow you down. Launching from Earth, you need X + Y fuel, where X gets you the delta-V to get to your destination from Earth, and Y is the fuel required to slow you down and land. Launching from the moon you need U + V, where U is the fuel that gets you to the moon, and V is the fuel you need to slow you down, because you don't need to launch from the moon using propellant. If X > U, launching from the moon is better. The faster you want to go, the more things tip in favor of launching from the moon, because you can keep adding stages and front-loading energy into your launch in a way that is impossible on Earth. Shit, if you launch around the Earth you can even regain some of the energy you put towards getting to the moon in the first place, because the Earth's gravity field accelerates you, and your propellant has potential energy as well as chemical energy (i.e. do an Oberth maneuver).

I'm well aware of the realities of the other bodies in the solar system. That doesn't mean we'll never want to go to any of them. If we do, going to the moon first makes a lot of sense.

[adolph]

If China gets there first, they will accomplish half of the above stated number two reason, reproduced below.

> The second reason we are going to the moon so that we can put the first person of color and the first woman on the moon. That is explicitly an Artemis mission purpose.

[RobotToaster]

It seems crazy to me they've managed to use shuttle parts to make a design that seems older and worse than the shuttle.

People called the shuttle a truck, but they've used parts from it to make something that looks like a Ford model-T in comparison.

[pookha]

The moon has trillions of dollars in water, helium, and metals (rare earth, titanium, etc). It's an f'ing goldmine and controlling said resource will be something hostile authoritarian regimes (China) would seek out. There's simply no excuse that the US should be this bad at making a system to reach the moon. The Chinese have committed insane sins and dropped massive amounts of space hardware on the earth (luckily it landed in the ocean). We should be dunking on them but instead we've got this buffoonery?

[NikolaNovak]

I have never found any math that made trip to the moon for materials even remotely wortwhile, by like orders of magnitude, not just today with today's technology, but for any foreseeable future we can meaningfully discuss. Water in particular is an unfortunate one to start with, given its abundance and ease of extraction on earth, vs absolutely positively ridiculous efforts to obtain them from the moon. But everything else from metals to obscurely valuable versions of Helium, seems to fall apart as soon as we go from "Look! Up there in the sky! Minerals!!!1", to "let's do a back-of-the-napkin math along any of the materials, science, energy, or money axis"

I enjoy using traditional cold-war bogey-men to scare ignorant politicians into accidentally sponsoring real science as much as any other person, I do, but... as long as we're not actually buying into that sillyness, right?.... right?

[SCM-Enthusiast]

you should read the book delta v. The only time lunar mining makes sense is when there is a cislunar orbit economy. The delta v required to put things in orbit from the moon is a fraction of that of earth. So, if you have a vibrant manufacturing enviroment in space (Semi conductors, and other deposition methods) which space is more suited for, then the moon becomes a better place to source your materials from.

[usrbinbash]

> So, if you have a vibrant manufacturing enviroment in space

And how does this "vibrant manufacturing environment" get into space? How is it supplied with personnel, food, water, spare parts, etc.?

Let's just focus on one component, shall we? The Moon only has 1/6th of Earths gravity, but to get stuff away from the Moon still requires a launch. That launch requires fuel. There is no fuel source on the Moon, so even if we had production facilities there, there are no high energy raw materials for them to process.

So where does the fuel come from? How about the only place in the solar system we know where we can make rocket fuel: EARTH!

So every liter of rocket fuel used to power launches to supply raw materials to a "cislunar orbit economy", first has to be transported to the moon by launching it from Earths gravity well.

So, where is the gain in efficiency exactly?

Also, where would this "cislunar orbit economy" find a market? The vast majority of people are here, on Earth. So even if there was a way to supply such an economy with raw materials (and energy, and personnel, and so on), the products would still need to be transported to Earth, adding a huge additional cost to everything manufactured. How is this supposed to compete with products made on earth exactly?

[SCM-Enthusiast]

>fuel

Hydrogen and oxygen can be made from water, and methane can be made from regolith and water.

>where would this "cislunar orbit economy" find a market?

The uniform distribution of microgravity lends itself to advanced manufacturing methods that cost hundreds if not billions of dollars to replicate here on earth. soooo many of earths manufacturing methods use very expensive means of creating the vacuum that is required, that is provided free in space.

Semiconductors. Turns out here on earth the machines costs hundreds of millions of dollars to etch a wafer because of the use of various technologies to create vacums, control for foreign material, and ensure the micro etches "Stay" and the material "goes". There is a wide discussion, and multiple tests conducted on the ISS that has confirmed this. So, space may be the only way to build next-gen semi conductor tech to get us below 2nm, and a much higher yield, with much cheaper equipment. With the cost of a launch at ~100m on a falcon, the launch would be cheaper than the equipment they are sending up.

ZBLAN fiber optics, growing protein crystals, Electron Beam Physical Vapor Deposition, Regolith refining,

are all done better in space. And they will be cheaper in space, and on the moon and mars. They will be more expensive on earth due to the large gravity well.

[jandrese]

The only way mining and refining on the moon makes any sense is if you're building stuff to be used on the moon in your lunar colonies, and that's a long way off.

[jandrese]

This sounds completely insane to me. Are people worried that China is going to mine out the moon before the US gets there? You're talking about trillions of tons of material, it won't be the limiting factor in your lifetime. And this assumes that lunar mining/refining is even practical.

[RobotToaster]

Same, but if that kind of paranoia gets us back into space I don't mind it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[bryanlarsen]

None of the material on the moon is worth more than the cost of shipping it back to Earth.

[GolfPopper]

>First, we want to set up a more permanent base. Nasa refers to this as "we're here to stay"

Perhaps I've not been following Artemis closely enough, but it doesn't seem to have anything actually in progress that would directly connect to the "permanent base" idea, beyond "Well, we need to go to the moon if we want a permanent base there". But that's sort-of like saying, "Well, I need to enroll in a university if I want a PhD".

[usrbinbash]

> Only time will tell if either of these two missions were actually worth it.

No time required, we already know the answer: neither of these two goals is worth the enormeous pile of resources burned to achive it.

1. A permanent human presence on the moon serves what purpose exactly that Robots cannot do? If we want to set up shop there: Why not send robots and an automatic laboratory-repair-bay? It's the moon, we can even remote control the damn things with only 2 seconds latency! What excatly are humans supposed to do there, that robots cannot?

2. Go ask women in underpaid care work and people of color in underserved communities, what they think would benefit them, and the general sense of equality, more: Hundreds of billions of dollars poured into improving social services like adequate pensions for carework, childcare, better supervision programs against discrimination in the workplace, better educational systems, etc. OR hundreds of billions of dollars burned by space-billionaires to let some old politician say "We did it!" at a press conference?

[nathan_compton]

People who get miffed at putting women and poc in space also don't want to spend more on social services, though, so its kind of a false dichotomy. It's not like if we could somehow convince the powers that be to cancel the space program they would put it all into education, jobs programs and basic income.

[jodrellblank]

Money isn't burned when spent on space programs. resources, e.g. fuels are, but money is spent, it stays down here on Earth, employing people, boosting corporate profits (and therefore pension funds and other things which invest in them), employing people (who maybe women and people of colour).

[rurp]

You could make the same argument about any government spending program, no matter how wasteful it is. The money always goes into the economy. The question is how to get the most useful output from that spending.

[jodrellblank]

> "about any government spending program"

"hundreds of billions of dollars burned by space-billionaires" is what I was replying to. It would be more serious if the "burning resources" in the original comment's first paragraph meant fossil fuels, for example. Non-renewable things. Their second paragraph clarifies that they mean money (and not even taxpayer's money in their comment), which isn't burned.

> "The question is how to get the most useful output from that spending."

That is a question, not the thing I was replying to.

[idlewords]

Note that the first reason you give is tautological.

[dotancohen]

Possibly, but it's not unique to SLS. People were jesting twenty years ago about the purpose of the Space Shuttle being just a vehicle to get to and from the ISS. And the purpose of the ISS? So that the Space Shuttle would have somewhere to go.

[iamthirsty]

> And the purpose of the ISS? So that the Space Shuttle would have somewhere to go.

I don’t think this is accurate. ISS was conceived almost 10 years after the Shuttle started launching, and the U.S. obviously had space station ambitions even before the Shuttle was on the drawing board (Skylab).

Additionally the Soviets did the exact same, with Mir being launched prior to the Buran’s first test flight — heck Salyut 1 was launched in 1971.

[Dalewyn]

ISS stems from Space Station Freedom[1], which itself has its roots in the the Space Transportation System's space station component[2]. The Space Shuttle was a part of the Space Transportation System and the only part to receive funding and see development.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Station_Freedom

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Transportation_System

[idlewords]

It's true for the post-Challenger Shuttle, which really didn't have a credible job to perform except for ISS assembly.

[iamthirsty]

Again, the Challenger disaster was 12 years prior to the launch of the first ISS module. ISS missions only flew 37 times, out of 135 total missions for the Shuttle.

The Shuttle had many other uses outside the ISS.

[dotancohen]

I first heard the saying I think sometime around the loss of Colombia. Maybe before, maybe after. By the return to flight, it was most certainly more true than false. By that time the shuttles performed very few non-ISS flights. I think that Atlantis flew a service mission to Hubble, other than that I can't think of any other shuttle flights that didn't go to the space station.

Columbia was heavier than the other orbiters, so she was flying the non-ISS missions from about '98 until her demise. After that US satellites were launched on disposable, unmanned rockets like the Deltas and Atlas.

[dudeinjapan]

Also, the purpose of Earth is so the Space Shuttle has somewhere to launch from and the ISS has something to orbit.

[dudeinjapan]

I'd like to see us put the first ventriloquist on the moon, with a miniature spacesuit for their little buddy. "That's one small step for dummy-kind--", "Who ya callin' small ya big dummy!" This is why we go to space.

[thombat]

So long as they do a gag where the dummy's suit is depressurised and he continues to protest but now silently, then I'm all for it. If Man is truly to live along the stars then vaudeville humour shall be part of it

[dudeinjapan]

A good name for the dummy would be “Houston”. The potential for gags is limitless.

[wolverine876]

Afiak, the purposes are to begin to setup the infrastructure for permanent habitation, and to prepare for a crewed flight to Mars.

> That is explicitly an Artemis mission purpose.

Where does it say that?

[mathgeek]

> Where does it say that?

First line of the official page at https://www.nasa.gov/feature/artemis/

"With the Artemis campaign, NASA will land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before."

[foobarian]

That seems like a side effect more than an explicit purpose. Down below is more to the point:

> WHY WE’RE GOING TO THE MOON

> We’re going back to the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and inspiration for a new generation of explorers: the Artemis Generation. While maintaining American leadership in exploration, we will build a global alliance and explore deep space for the benefit of all.