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NASA Funded Study States People Could Be On the Moon By 2021 For $10 Billion
MarkWhittington writes: The Houston Chronicle reported that NextGen Space LLC has released the results of a study that suggests that if the United States were to choose to do space in some new and creative ways, American moon boots could be on the lunar surface by 2021. The cost from the authorization to the first crewed lunar landing would be just $10 billion. The study was partly funded by NASA and was reviewed by the space agency and commercial space experts.
That's a lane widening of a major Interstate passing through a couple of large cities. It's peanuts. I'd rather do Mars, but if we can get back to the moon on that kind of budget...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The proposal is to put a small base near a pole, mine water, turn it into fuel, and ship it up to a Langrange point. Outbound ships can refuel on their way to Mars (manned) or elsewhere (robotic). It sounds like a reasonable reason to go to the moon.
There's also some interesting things you could do with science experiments on the moon. Lots of hard vacuum, low gravity and radio silence on the far side.
Thus, it would really cost $30Bn.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
The Moon is actually a harder test of habitat recycling. Mars has good amounts of CO2 which may be used for oxygen extraction (see the MOXIE experiment). Mars does have a minimal atmosphere (not a complete vacuum) and possibly easily accessible water ice resources.
If we can figure out how to live in orbit or on the Moon for long term, without resupply, then Mars should be a snap.
Note that they ARE working on a lot of self-sufficiency initiatives on the ISS - water recycling and such. Long term this is stuff that needs to be figured out cold for mankind to go anyplace in space. Similar initiatives on the Moon would allow use of the regolith and perhaps water ices for material needs.
We should not go to the moon every generation or so just for the glory of putting more prints in the lunar dust; we should use it as a boot camp to train to go to other, less hostile places in space.
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In today's dollars, a single Saturn V launch was about $20 billion. So now we are saying we can do it for half of that, including all of the research and development? The entire Apollo project was estimated in 2005 dollars as $170 Billion.
I would bet it will cost more like $100 billion including research. A single shot could probably be done for $15 billion.
NASA today doesn't have the budget for this sort of endeavor. In 1966, NASAs budget was $5.2 billion, or in today's dollars, $38.2 billion. Today's actual NASA budget is only $18.3 billion.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Define, "defensible". Because I think you're full of it.
Living on the surface of an alien planet under hostile conditions is a pretty tricky affair. Maintaining a presence on the 'dark' side of the moon so you can have even better astronomy is pretty cool. A staging area to look at working towards more of space is something we don't have now. Because we fucking well can has always been a marvelous idea.
The problems we need to solve for Mars? We can wok on those problems before having to solve a 2 year travel time with no escape plan.
So when you say "no defensible reason" I say bullshit. There's plenty we could do on the moon which actually is of value, and is entirely defensible. And which actually helps us learn about what we'd do on the surface of Mars. Or any other planetary surface.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
sure, and we didnt have the tech to send us to the moon in the 60s...but we did it
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The average lifetime productivity of an American is about $2 million. Why should we spend 5000 lifetimes worth of productivity to go to the moon?
Well if we can spend 500,000 lifetimes worth of productivity creating the biggest fuckup in the Middle East then why not?
"It gets pennies compared to orgs who want to ensure that some mole that no one has ever heard of remains protected."
The EPA has less than half the budget of NASA. "Beggar thy neighbor" is a sucker's game.
sure, and we didnt have the tech to send us to the moon in the 60s...but we did it
So what are you trying to say here? He3 is only useful in a fusion reactor and we don't have a working design. People have been working on one ever since they invented the H-bomb and come up short, we have enough He3 here on earth to experiment/test with. Maybe we should see if we're able to do something useful with it before we spend billions trying to build a moon mining operation?
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What good does going back to the moon do?
Other than inspire a generation's interest in math, science and engineering? Other than the dual use of much of the technology that will be developed for the space program?
Both of these things were major benefits of the original space race and you are materially benefitting from both at this very moment.
How are you going to get those spinoff benefits and discoveries without actually doing work in space, and just sitting around here and funding social programs? You're not. The Apollo program yielded enormous economic benefits for the US due to the new technologies created; those would not have happened if we just increased teacher pay.
I'm not saying social programs and teacher pay increases shouldn't be done, but if you want actual advancement in technology, you have to actually do things which require that advancement. You can't just wait until all social problems are cured. That isn't going to happen for generations.
I appreciate it's not a zero sum one-or-the-other game, but there are limited resources we've got,and while $10b may be a drop in the bucket and there is plenty of condemnable waste-- as a parent post notes, it does represent many thousands of lifetimes of american labor and value. So... we've got billions of people on this planet and immeasurable mysteries to be answered and places to be explored and problems to be solved here. I ask not as a bad-faith challenge but as an opportunity to explain to me... why send people to the moon so we can send people to mars so we can send people to (undiscovered?) less hostile places?
The short answer is this...
We have all our eggs in one basket, Earth. Should anything happen to Earth, either from stupid humans or a very large rock hitting us, our whole race could be doomed and thus all that we have done and all that we could be is pointless...
It is spreading out the risk.
There's enough for medical equipment and it isn't hard to make more (irradiate water to make tritium and let it decay). As for using it for fusion, it is much harder to fuse he3 then what they're currently experimenting with and they can't do it in an energy positive way with deuterium yet. Once we have working fusion reactors, then we can think about getting more he3.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
why not say "Wow, we have achieved something of real practical benefit, A, which directly impacts billions of people and saves our planet.
Simple, because it's never worked that way before. You can't just invent things without a need for them; it rarely happens. Have you never heard of "necessity is the mother of invention"?
And conversely, it has worked the way I say before, namely with the Apollo program.
No one is going to invent great new technologies while working on social programs.
And finally, why do you think going to the Moon wouldn't have huge benefits at home? If it turns out we can mine resources there, that would be a huge economic boom. Or would you rather that we eliminate the EPA and destroy our environment in the pursuit of mineral resources? You don't think that would have huge economic consequences?
You're not an engineer, are you?
Of course the money goes to corporations. Individuals that have the capacity, and capital, to pay for the design of a rocket ship capable of traveling round trip to the moon.would do so under a corporate umbrella anyway. Also, most of the money goes to infrastructure and employees. This isn't corporate welfare like giving money to oil companies that don't need it.
[[Citation Needed]]
Seriously - this is a claim that keeps being made, but doesn't stand up to any scrutiny. Sure, robots excel at the mind numbingly boring shit (like recording temperature every thirty seconds) that robots normally excel at... but they suck at pretty much everything else. The amount of ground covered by the three rovers in years of operation was covered by the LRV in mere hours. There's an account in Steven W. Squyres book of them spending two weeks backing and filling to photograph a rock formation the size of a basketball - a task which would have taken an astronaut mere minutes. If you read the transcripts of the Apollo moonwalks, you find again and again where significant finds were made because there were trained human eyes on the spot.
Or, to put it much simpler; robots excel at recording, they're not nearly so good at finding. Humans work faster and are far more flexible.
Current US industrial consumption of helium-3 is approximately 60,000 liters (approximately 8 kg) per year;[28] cost at auction has typically been approximately $100/liter although increasing demand has raised prices to as much as $2,000/liter in recent years.
It's been asked time and again. Why? I mean, we've been there already. We learned that the moon ain't made of cheese and there's also none of that moon-gold lying about that some were hoping for. It's not made of silver as so many alchemists dreamed and it's barely sensible as a staging area for further exploration of the solar system, which would again raise the "why bother" question.
And I have to agree, there is really little, if anything, to be gained directly from going there. Or even establishing a more or less permanent residency on it. Pretty much anything we could probably do there we can already do on the ISS, some of it better (due to microgravity instead of the lower-than-earth gravity of the moon) some worse (since the moon is less affected by Earth's magnetosphere and hence some solar readings could be done better), but in general there are only a few things we can't already do on the ISS.
So why?
The benefits are actually outside the "mundane" fact of us going there. The moon is more a means to an end. One, more tangible, benefit that was already mentioned is that we have seen in the 60s how necessity is the mother of inventions, and how the US wanting to go to the moon caused a lot of rapid development in areas affected by that goal. Rocketry, propulsion, metallurgy, computing, electrical engineering. The list is long and diverse. The US remained on the pinnacle of the world's technology for nearly two decades, mostly due to the advantage it had from this program.
Another, often overlooked but in my opinion at the very least as important, if not even more important, effect was intangible and hard to grasp. It gave the US a huge boost in cohesion internally and status internationally. You may remember that this time of the moonshot was a rather tumultuous time for the US, and the world in general. The 1960s were certainly a decade that could have shook the nation apart. Kennedy assassinated. The civil rights movement fighting for the rights of the black population, with MLK shot as well. And let's not forget about the Vietnam war. Yet when you ask people, no matter the creed, color or origin, they will think back of the 1960s not as a decade of strife and turmoil, but as a great decade where everyone was thinking of great things, where anything was considered possible and where everyone thought that they can make it. After all, hey, if they can land a man on the moon, I can (insert goal in life here).
And we sorely lack this today.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Just because you have not heard of the animals some groups are attempting to save does not mean you shouldn't care about it. That is pathetic reasoning, and assumes one's knowledge is perfect. Ecosystems are important to us, as we rely on them for pretty much everything, even if it's not immediately obvious. Ecosystems are made up of relationships between sometimes-fragile populations of animals, and an imbalance in one can cause massive repercussions in others, leading to all sorts of problems you should already be aware of if you want to criticize this field. You might be upset in funding a few million here and there to protect various biotopes or species, but I'm sure you'd be even more upset to spend much more on managing the ecology because the animals that did it for free were not known to ganjadude, and so were eradicated by apathy.
"It's wrong" - no, it's well understood and financially sound.
The famous Chase study estimated that every $1 spent on the Apollo-era space program returned $7 to the economy. Manned space-flight has historically had decent returns, especially if it is in order to achieve something. Floating around the Earth, not so much, but still pretty good.
The Moon is a great place to practice going to Mars, as it has no atmosphere, is close, offers great scientific benefits, and can help further space programs (including to Mars).
You might not know as much about this as you seem to think you do... I don't know much about this at all, and even I can see you're out of your depth!