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India, China, and Japan Are All Planning Moon Missions (upi.com)
schwit1 shares an article from UPI:
India will make its second mission to the moon in 2018, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) announced this week. The Chandrayaan 2 spacecraft consists of an orbiter, lander and rover configuration "to perform mineralogical and elemental studies of the lunar surface," the ISRO said... Several other countries, including China and Japan, are planning lunar expeditions in the coming years -- partly to better understand the moon's environmental conditions for the potential of human settlements...
According to Popular Mechanics, the ISRO is attempting to make the lunar landing on a budget of $93 million, which is about the same cost of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket that's scheduled for launch by the end of this year. The Falcon rocket, though, is only going into orbit -- and a $93 million price tag for a lunar landing could have impact on other countries' space plans.
India landed a spacecraft on the moon in 2008, and plans to complete this second lunar landing by March.
According to Popular Mechanics, the ISRO is attempting to make the lunar landing on a budget of $93 million, which is about the same cost of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket that's scheduled for launch by the end of this year. The Falcon rocket, though, is only going into orbit -- and a $93 million price tag for a lunar landing could have impact on other countries' space plans.
India landed a spacecraft on the moon in 2008, and plans to complete this second lunar landing by March.
"At least we have the electric car fad."
Please print your comment, and put it in a place where you'll find it back in 5-10 years.
Bert
Yes, Mother Nature is flawed. After all, what are hospitals, antibiotics, central heating, surgery, air conditioning, sewers, treated municipal drinking water for? For that matter, clothes?
What about cancer? That's a flaw.
So what are you really trying to say?
Mostly random stuff.
We'll see how they tackle the toilet problem - a technology that they have yet to master here on earth.
...is there really *any* reason to settle on the Moon besides enabling us to go further into the Solar System?
Isn't that enough of a reason? And, if we can learn how to build a self-sustaining colony on the Moon, it will be much easier to build one on Mars. Not only will we know what to do, we won't have to do all of the exterior work in hard vacuum.
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You know what worries me? It's that we are going to have generations of children raised by people who taught them both directly and indirectly to be terrified of anything and everything. And by people who have absolutely no sense of perspective.
You are here, a putative adult, expressing existential fear over the modern equivalent of the boogieman. Your grandfather might have been willing to storm out of a landing craft into a hail of well-planned machine gun and artillery fire, your parents had to live with the very real and immediate possibility that every airplane that passed over might just have dropped a 1 megaton bomb on your your school, and it was very close to happening on at least 3 occasions. Now, you are living in the lap of luxury and security, but are terrified by a computer simulation?
Even if the most absurd climate predictions come true in every detail, you assume it will destroy human civilization? People have dealt with one problem after another, successfully. Human civilization survived The Plague, for Christ's sake, something that they had absolutely no defense for, and just had to sit around, hour after hour, day after day, for decades, not knowing if the next time they coughed it might mean they are dying in the next 48 hours. Now a slow, perhaps mythical, rise in sea level is going to reduce the world to chaos?
Are you at all aware that people have worried about equivalent issues, all far more likely than this gibberish, for the entire span of human history and probably far before? Ever hear of Holland?
Teaching your kids that everything is always on the edge of falling apart and we are helpless to do anything over trivial problems is the WORST POSSIBLE THING you could do for the future of civilizations.
Your post is one of the most pathetic things I have seen in my 56 years. Grow the fuck up and learn to deal with REAL LIFE.
Actually, the reality is that the USA has left space behind.
"From this moment on, it's going to be America First."
"For many decades, we've enriched foreign space industry at the expense of American industry."
"Subsidized the space armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military."
"We've made space rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon."
"I'm gonna build a big-ass honking wall between us and space!"
One Laptop Per Astronaut . . . ?
No space left behind . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Right... because visiting all of the planets of our solar system, orbiting some of them, landing rovers on Mars, sending probes into interstellar space... none of that counts if we don't occasionally drop a lander on the moon.
You go to the moon. We're doing the real high tech work of re-opening coal mines.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It's far from mythical.
It is not, however, an existential threat. It will not cause Western society to collapse (though some more vulnerable nations may not be so lucky).
It will be very expensive to deal with, and I expect that is what the GP is most concerned about (but not "terrified", as you seem to prefer to believe). Maybe look up how much the Netherlands has spent on its dyke system, and consider the cost of that for every coastal city on the planet. Have a look at what New York spent after Sandy's storm surge, and is now spending on new levees.
And that's just sea level. Have a look at all the other negative impacts described in the IPCC WG2 report, maybe read some of the many studies that attempt to count the net cost - and you too may be concerned for the sheer size of the bill any kids of yours will be stuck with.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Thanks for that, it needs to be said every time an article like this comes up, it seems. And, it's not like the US has abandoned the moon; NASA has had the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter operating in orbit around the moon since 2009 where it is still operating and returning scientific observations. And NASA has the two ARTEMIS (Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon's Interaction with the Sun) spacecraft operating in orbits around the Earth-Moon L1 and L2 Lagrangian points (https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/themis/news/artemis-orbit.html)! So that makes three NASA lunar observing satellites currently in operation.
Actually it did not. It collapsed and stagnated for 500 years and more.
The plague was in the 1300s, coinciding with the start of the Renaissance, one of the greatest flowerings of society in history. I'm not sure why you think it collapsed, especially stagnating for 500 years or more (Goethe, Mozart, and Kepler all fall into that time period, for example).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."