[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?