[hammock]

> It's crazy the US could soon have up to 5 different spacecraft/launch systems that can take humans to orbit with 2 more in development

We had a launch system that could take humans to the moon in 1972.. haven't had one since. Maybe we will get another one in our lifetime, if it is even possible.

[JumpCrisscross]

> we had a launch system that could take humans to the moon in 1972

Saturn V was ridiculously expensive [1] and very unsafe.

Apollo was built to get to the Moon fast half a dozen times. We’re building more ambitiously today.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V $1.5bn in 2024 dollars

[WalterBright]

> Saturn V was ridiculously expensive [1] and incomparably unsafe.

Von Braun was asked if the Saturn V was safe to launch. He asked six of his engineering reports, each replied nein. Von Braun replied that the Saturn V had six nines of reliability.

[pxmpxm]

Golf clap for that one

[bunderbunder]

It would probably become a lot more possible if we could get this "SLS/Orion with frickin' Starship as a lunar lander Rube Goldberg machine" monkey off our backs.

[sho_hn]

Interesting and very readable elaboration of this snark: https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm

[picture]

Is there much practical reason that requires sending people to the moon still? Modern robots are cheaper and can perform science more effectively than any human

[fnordpiglet]

I think a long term view is it’s the basis for building heavy industry in space as it has a lot of natural resources that can be exploited industrially and escape orbit velocities are much less from the moon than earth surface. This eventually leads to a general space infrastructure. If you believe the end of humanity is on earth then this probably isn’t convincing. Folks like myself believe we are inexorably driven to spread life as a function of what life is and we have no meaningful choice but to keep going.

But as long as some subset of humanity believes in this humanity will keep investing in it. Not everyone has to be aligned and we can have many priorities at once, not the least of which is robotic science which I only see as mutually exclusive as long as there’s not plentiful private investment, which there is at the moment. I don’t see robotic exploration as suffering in the build out of extremely low cost launch capability and a general space infrastructure including moon infrastructure. I see it benefiting enormously as the costs and risks drop significantly.

[sho_hn]

If we ever get to heavy industrialization of lunar resources, how are we going to deal with the CO2 footprint of rockets?

[throwawaymaths]

A spacex falcon 9 contains ~as much fuel as a 747. Note: fuel, not fuel + oxidizer

Edit: falcon 9, not starship

[MarkusQ]

Source?

I get Starship 34,000,000 kg + 12,000,000 kg vs 747 ~200,000 liters ≅ 150,000 kg, or about 1/300 th of what Starship holds.

[throwawaymaths]

Oh shit I'm sorry I am so wrong. I had calculated falcon 9. Thank you for the correction

[p1mrx]

In theory it's possible to make a carbon-neutral methane rocket based on atmospheric CO2, though that depends on how completely the methane can be burned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_natural_gas

[somenameforme]

There are a million viable (and often quite fun) answers here, but one is really kind of funny. What do you get when you mix oxygen and hydrogen? Water? No, of course not! You get rocket fuel! Seriously. Liquid oxygen + liquid hydrogen is a common, and highly effective, fuel that's been used for various engines such as on the Space Shuttle Main Engine.

Rockets can also be carbon negative in another way. A rocket that uses less than 50% of its fuel getting to orbit would be carbon negative, because it's spending less than 'x/2' fuel to go burn at least 'x/2' fuel away from Earth. Factor in some of the fuel coming from carbon neutral sources, and it quickly becomes quite easy for a rocket to be carbon negative.

[fnordpiglet]

The flow of mass would be the other way around. Lunar regolith has every element embedded in it and there’s little need to bring anything but bootstrapping -to- the moon. Return to earth from the moon wouldn’t be CO2 producing anywhere but the moon.

[dotnet00]

You'd be moving other polluting industries off-Earth, thus offsetting the footprint of things that cannot be done without said footprint.

[imtringued]

I don't remember exactly but a rocket launch has the carbon footprint of ten American citizens produce annually.

[SJC_Hacker]

Mass drivers.

[pretendscholar]

Distributing human populations to ensure survival. With current tech the lunar colony couldn't be self-sustaining but the ideal is that humans would be able to propagate and sustain themselves outside of Earth so that a single event couldn't end human civilization. Also creating a jobs program that will produce the technology necessary for a lunar colony will improve materials science, medical understanding, logistics.

[XorNot]

I don't think distributing within the solar system is going to do much for us. What takes out the Earth will probably take out everything else - we'll be backstopped on Earth for centuries after we have spaceborne civilization.

I think opening up a new frontier however, is valuable - in fact specifically, the transition which would be good would be to move heavy industry out of the biosphere entirely. You can imagine a nearer future where a place like Earth is treated as the paradise it is, and the idea of polluting it when we have all the rest of the uninhabitable space of the solar system to do that in is thought of as ludicrous.

And this isn't really unreasonable - beyond a certain point, the resource and energy availability of space is far greater then the places we can reach despite the advantages of the biosphere - whether we do it by robots or with manned exploration.

There's a zeitgeist change that I think would accompany having enough people working frequently in space: where its a couple of degrees of separation from someone who's looked at the pale blue dot and gone "you have no idea how valuable this is" (I do think we should have a program which sponsors any world leader who wants to on a trip around the moon: send the people making the big decisions out past the dark side, where the thing bubble of air, steel and alloy is the only thing keeping them alive - might not always work but at least then we can know they've had the opportunity for that perspective).

[ivan_gammel]

Self-sustaining human colonies in space or on other celestial bodies are very distant dream, probably it will take several centuries or millennia to happen. The main reason is human body: we haven’t figured out reproduction in low gravity yet. Unless some fascist state will do it, we will never experiment with it until full confidence in safety for the mother and the child.

[dotnet00]

It's a very distant dream that will always remain distant if we don't work on it. We have a lot of things to test before we get to testing the gravitational requirements of human reproduction. As it stands, we don't even know our basic gravitational needs. All we know is that 0g is too low. It's entirely possible that it turns out we can function relatively fine at something low but non-zero, like 0.1g.

[gamacodre]

I expect we'll experiment with that as soon as we get a man and a woman imperfectly supervised in a low-gravity environment for 9+ months.

[philwelch]

It’s easier than you think to get 1g of gravity in space.

[JKCalhoun]

Instead, launch sealed, frozen embryos into orbits of various bodies in our Solar System — bury a few on the Moon.

[hosh]

We could also learn to live within the means of our ecology.

[pretendscholar]

That wouldn't prevent one off extinction type events like asteroids. We can improve our understanding of ecology by trying to design such systems for lunar colony artificial biospheres.

I do agree that we should better manage our impact on the only system that we know works.

[jcranmer]

> That wouldn't prevent one off extinction type events like asteroids. We can improve our understanding of ecology by trying to design such systems for lunar colony artificial biospheres.

To be kind of blunt, even an extinction-level asteroid hit with near-total biosphere destruction is probably still more conducive to human life than any other planet or satellite in the solar system, as evidenced by the continued existence of at least a few forms of life past the extinction event. And many of the events people worry about are far less destructive than even that (nuclear winter, for example, would probably roll Earth's climate back to pre-industrial temperatures, maybe as far as Little Ice Age, which is, uh, nowhere near extinction-level threat to humanity).

It's also worth pointing out that it's possible to do closed ecological studies without the expense of running it in space (e.g., Biosphere 2). The only thing you need space for studying in that regard is "what is the effect of non-1g environments on biological forms?" (to which existing studies suggest the answer is somewhere between "bad" and "horrible").

[pretendscholar]

They are in 0g environments presumably having 1-6th isn't as bad and there might be ways to prevent/mitigate those issues.

[jonathankoren]

This is the lamest of all excuses.

It's a very unlikely for one, we haven't had an extinction asteroid in 65 million years. Detection and mapping is very good today, and they're relatively simple to deflect given even with current technology, and a long enough lead time. Obsessing about asteroid impact is just an excuse to engage in fantasy.

But saying "We can improve our understanding of ecology by [designing] artificial biosphere", is just the chef's kiss of bullshittery. It's like saying, that we can understand the ocean by getting a fish bowl. Not exactly, and it certainly won't teach us anything about the actual biosphere. Instead, all you'd learn about is atmosphere scrubbers and water reclamation.

[protomolecule]

>Detection and mapping is very good today

No. We can't detect asteroids coming from the direction of Sun. Just ask people of Chelyabinsk, Russia. [0]

[0] https://www.livescience.com/space/asteroids/the-sun-is-blind...

[samatman]

This was a bit more than a hundred years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

I'd say that such an event happening over a populated region of the Earth would be pretty bad. It's worth a bit of investment.

Here's what would happen if Tunguska happened over Paris, using a mid-range estimate of its magnitude: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=30000&lat=48.8583&ln...

[nordsieck]

>> That wouldn't prevent one off extinction type events like asteroids.

> This is the lamest of all excuses.

> It's a very unlikely for one, we haven't had an extinction asteroid in 65 million years.

He said "like astroids". Quite frankly we don't know how frequent extinction events happen. We've had nuclear weapons for less than 100 years, and have a couple of close calls[1] already.

---

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...

[KoftaBob]

> they're relatively simple to deflect given even with current technology, and a long enough lead time.

and what is this simple method to deflect a large asteroid headed for Earth?

[sho_hn]

This sounds like the harder problem.

[tialaramex]

No, it's merely incredibly difficult. Sustainable living off Earth is far beyond that.

Humans definitely can't leave. Humans are even less well suited to interstellar travel than they are to living at the bottom of the ocean, something they also don't do and have no idea how they could ever do.

So, with tremendous effort humans could visit one of their neighbouring planets. All of these planets are terrible. Mars is by far more hostile to life than anywhere humans have even visited, let alone had a permanent settlement. But we could do it. To what end?

Live here, or die here, those are your options and you should get used to it.

[hosh]

> No, it's merely incredibly difficult.

It's difficult, but I don't think it is _that_ difficult. Ecologies, like any living systems, can self-heal and regenerate. There are practices that allows us to tap into that regenerative power as societies. They may not happen fast relative to our individual human lifespan, but 50 years is more than enough time to restore wastelands or reverse desertification.

I don't have a good answer to how sustain an economy based upon mining, refining, and manufacturing things out of mineral resources. Many of us have gotten used to modern conveniences (at its own cost related to mental and emotional health, and social cohesiveness). I think what most people balk on are on the perception of having to go back to barely surviving off the land, or having to alter lifestyle. Lifestyle may have to change, but the same regenerative power of ecologies also gives us significantly more resiliency.

[tonynator]

>To what end?

To have the species survive if anything ends all life on Earth - apparently not a priority for you but it is for those that enjoy humanity existing.

Also to explore and learn more about the universe we live in. Do you truly not see value in that? Have you never left the city/state/country you were born in?

[dotnet00]

>But we could do it. To what end?

Why do anything at all? Who are you to dictate to others what their options are?

[mr_toad]

> We could also learn to live within the means of our ecology.

That would be easier if we could move polluting industries off Earth.

[hosh]

Maybe we can find alternatives besides those industries.

As far as cleaning up pollutants themselves, there are some amazing work by Dr John Todd for cleaning up pollution. Two examples of his work — a system capable of breaking down DDT within 40 days. Another where he cleaned up a superfund site that had all ten of EPA’s top toxic pollutant list.

[SJC_Hacker]

Establishing a permanent presence on the moon would be a stepping stone to further exploration of other planets. (Mars in particular.)

Since its only a 3-4 day trip, with transfer windows every month (and non-optimal ones essentially constantly). resupply missions and rotating astronauts/personnel are going to be much easier. Much less of a gravity well to deal with.

The plan would be for in situ resource extraction and manufacturing. With enough of a human presence, projects like local construction of spacecraft become feasible. And something like a mass driver would be much more feasible on the moon. A big enough one and you're even considering interstellar probes ...

It would require a consistent, sustained effort. But not astronomical in US budget terms. Maybe $20-$30 billion/year (about of 3-4% the defense budget)

[Zigurd]

Anything beyond Earth orbit requires either multi-stage expendable rockets, which isn't economical for supporting a moon base, or in-orbit refueling that has better economics than expendable rockets, which depends on cheap rapid reusability. If you can't land, refuel, and fly without refurbishing the launch system, rocket engines, etc. you can't ship fuel to orbit cheaply enough to justify in-orbit refueling.

Starship is a vastly better attempt at more of these goals than STS. But if it misses cost, or payload, or reliability goals it won't solve this problem. It is even possible that it will take too many attempts in which a ship and 39 engines are expended to even get close.

[philwelch]

Or we can get the fuel from the moon. The moon has water ice, which means it has hydrogen and oxygen, which you can use as rocket propellant.

[Teever]

Why does someone always do this in a thread about space stuff?

Without fail there's always some negative Nelly who already knows the answer to their downer question.

We get it. You don't care about space shit, most people don't. But why go derail a thread about a space accomplishment with negativity?

Is there much practical reason for that?

[colechristensen]

Yes, humans living on other celestial bodies is a goal in itself, expanding us beyond Earth and a few people in LEO.

Cities on the moon and Mars are a reasonable and achievable goal. There are resources which can much more easily be exploited with real people on premise, some people will want to live in different environments, there are opportunities for sport, entertainment, tourism, and plenty of industries which will be much more effective with skilled labor on site instead of meticulously planned missions which often fail and if they don't spend a whole bunch of effort overcomming the basics of operating.

[JumpCrisscross]

> practical reason that requires sending people to the moon still?

The big one that robots can’t do is studying human biology in space.

How do we fare long term on a foreign body? What does trauma medicine look like? How do we accommodate the diseases and disabilities that frequent our non-astronaut grade population? Is gestation, birth and development possible in low gravity? Et cetera.

Then Moon provides the easiest place to do this at scale by virtu of being the closest place to Earth with in situ resources.

[somenameforme]

This is a common misconception. Modern robots are very limited in their capabilities, out of necessity. Mars is a great example. Perseverance has the most capable drill of any rover, and it can drill up to 2.4 inches deep. [1] And these drills are used extremely sparingly because they tend to break rapidly, like any sort of moving part. Perseverance's top theoretic speed is around 0.07mph, and it's a speed demon compared to prior rovers. [2] Same reasons - the more you move the more things break, and the nearest repair shop is pretty far away. The first humans on Mars will almost certainly learn vastly more in a week than we've learned in 60+ years of probes and rovers!

Beyond this though (and also the survival aspect as others have hit on), I'd simply mention the inspirational aspect. Many who lived through the Moon landings (as well as those who did not) see this as humanity's greatest achievement. And I think this sort of stuff helps to create a better future for a people. When asked what they want to be when they grow up, the most popular choice for American children today is a vlogger/YouTuber, the least popular is astronaut [3]. In China, the answers are completely reversed. Who's going to have the better generational outcome in 30 years?

But of course this isn't just for children. So many people just seem completely devoid of hope and optimism for the future. And that's completely understandable the way things have been going for many decades now. But show literally anybody this video of the Falcon Heavy landing [4] and the first question you will always get is, "Is that real?" People just can't even believe what we're achieving, and I think doing even more of this, on a much larger scale, and making it all the more visible would really improve so many lives, and likely the entire country itself. Just read the comments to that video, to see how it impacts people, and those are friggin YouTube comments!

[1] - https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/qa-perseverance-rovers-...

[2] - https://www.space.com/perseverance-rover-self-driving-on-mar...

[3] - https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/american-kids-would-...

[4] - https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=1704

[hi-v-rocknroll]

Humans won't survive long-term without colonizing other planets and/or star systems. There are existential threats already in motion besides climate change; Earth won't have any surface liquid water in about a billion years. While there is several times more water underground than on the surface, that may also not be locked away well enough for when the Sun becomes a red giant 4 billion years later.

[twothreeone]

I would imagine (a) keep watch over the lunar atomics and (b) fend off PLA officers stationed there permanently after Chang'e-42.

[adastra22]

All of the science returns of the robotic missions to mars in the past three decades could have been done by a geologist in a space suit with a rock hammer in 15 minutes, and probably done better. Robots really, really suck.

Also many people see the whole point to be expanding people out into the cosmos, not the science.

[Phrodo_00]

> can perform science more effectively than any human

I wouldn't go that far, but we already had humans on the moon so we can get away with robots doing the science now. I still think sending astronauts to mars would speed up research, for example.

[mytailorisrich]

It makes more sense to have a permanent human presence on the Moon than to aim for Mars.

The Moon is both very near and very easy to communicate with so it is the perfect first place to learn about building a "colony" before moving on to Mars.

[lupusreal]

Not much point sending robots to go look at Moon rocks if there's no pretext of sending people there. I mean, you could make some PhDs out of it I'm sure, but would that be worth the public expense? I don't think so.

[wolfendin]

Robots aren’t performing science, they’re doing one half of one step of the scientific method: collecting data in an experiment. It’s humans doing all the rest.

[mrmuagi]

It looks like the RTT is 6 minutes (more or less depending on orbit) for packets send to mars, but despite that it does seem like the easier option yeah.

[shkkmo]

Not really accurate at all.

The lowest the RTT gets is six minutes but that is a brief period every couple of years. The longest RTT is 45 minutes.

Even 6 minutes makes any kind of tele-operation infeasible and require system to function autonomously. This restricts the kinds of science that are currently possible.

[striking]

Bragging rights (ostensibly "practical" in a geopolitical, soft power projection sense)

[picture]

Didn't we get to brag about it already? The value of continuing to have the capability seems to be outweighed by the costs of maintaining the facilities and equipment

[zardo]

You don't get much bragging rights for being first to plant a flag on the Moon once China has a continuously manned outpost there.

[cratermoon]

"can perform science more effectively than any human" is very disputable.

If they are so much better, why does anyone get up off their couch and do field research? Just let the robots do it.

Besides, it's human nature to explore, in person. As George Mallory said, "Because it's there."

[eichin]

For off planet research: because ( https://xkcd.com/695/ aside ) we don't care if the robots "die". Human space exploration has an enormous amount of overhead to keeping the humans alive at all; even the sensors humans bring with them are compromised by having to be operable in a spacesuit.

Not saying that there isn't value to sending humans into space - it's just that that value isn't in gathering data for science, other than on the astronaut-subjects themselves.

[troyvit]

Penal colonies of course!

[jonathankoren]

That's literally the SLS.

[adastra22]

SLS is too underpowered to send Orion into lunar orbit, let alone Orion + a lander.

[Zigurd]

This comment is an invitation to an uninformative comparison. Apollo was just barely able to take a crew to the moon and back, with many expendable stages, using 5% of US GDP to do it. Almost all the value in Apollo is indirect value in the form of technologies developed for Apollo.

Why replicate that? Indeed we should ask: Is there a goal to value, other than the obvious "the Chinese would get there first if we don't?"

A lunar "base" would just be a vastly more expensive ISS. We will discover that lunar regolith is a bigger nuisance than floating boogers in the ISS.

[wolfendin]

The mission goal was to land a man on the moon and return him to earth safely.

Where’s the barely? What would you have done better?

[lukan]

I would think barely here means, that there were quite a lot of incidents and with some bad luck, none of the astronauts would have come home.

It was still a great accomplishment, so I would not use barely, but technically it is correct I think. They spend great effort, to just make it to the moon, which was the goal, to beat the sowjets. And that succeeded. No great safety margins, not much room for error - barely.

[Zigurd]

What I meant is that the multi-stage Moon rocket, the capsule and command module, and the lander and ascent module, were just barely within the realm of the possible as dictated by the rocket equation. And, as you mention, the risks were just barely acceptable.

[JumpCrisscross]

> lunar "base" would just be a vastly more expensive ISS

Source?

We can design—and are designing—automation into a lunar base in a way we couldn’t with the ISS.

[lambdaone]

That sounds really interesting, but web searching mostly brings up very old research. Do you have a link for any of the up-to-date work on automating the base?