The apollo program ran from 1961-1972, 11 years.[1]
The total budget was ~260B in todays dollars.[1]
That's ~24B per year in todays dollars. NASA's current budget is 22B[2], less than .5% of the federal budget. We sent 4 times that amount to Ukraine for the war by an emergency vote. Computing power has increased effectively infinitely, manufacturing automation & precision has increased incredibly. We are vastly richer than we were in 1972: our GDP has increased roughly 25X since then.
The reason we have not gone back to the moon is because we have chosen not to do so. It is not hard, nor particularly expensive.
In my opinion, simple inflation adjustment is not that accurate. In particular, notice that certain costs, like higher education, have increased significantly faster than inflation since the 60s. And since rocket science requires a highly educated workforce, you end up with higher salaries relative to the median. I'd actually like to see an analysis of the number of people working on the program. I bet Apollo had 2x or 3x more people working on it than Artemis.
But I haven't done the math/research, so I could be very wrong.
It's not just your opinion. It's widely known in economics. It's so widely known in fact that statistics agencies state exactly how they come up with inflation figures, which basket of goods they base it on and adjustments.
>The quality of our education has fallen in addition to the rising costs.
Maybe as an average because more people are being educated, but I find it hard to believe that our top students now are any less educated than the top students in the past.
It's not just that we have $25/y now and had ~$24B/y then, to suggest it is practical. Costs are also vastly reduced over those benchmarks. Starship HLS cost the government under $3B. For that same price you could buy 30 Falcon Heavy flights at wholesale rates. New Glenn looks to launch soon and we don't know its price but it should be competitive, and it's a plenty capable ship.
Of course, depending on these as Artemis does now would only improve prices, not timelines, but it's not like commercial options are all a year old. Marginal launch has been approximately free in Artemis terms for a good while now, possibly even back in the pre-SpaceX dark ages when US launch was a monopoly flying on Russian engines with a billion dollar a year protection racket tax.
Ultimately it comes down to most of the money NASA spends on Artemis being spent on rent seeking by large old space companies that know job losses would look politically disastrous, captured in cost-plus contracts with hiring mandates, tech reuse mandates, and financial incentives not to execute. NASA is spending about as much on a mobile launch tower going overbudget on a cost plus contract as they have on Starship HLS. Guess which one had Congresspeople giving empassioned speeches about NASA's unreasonable spending habits!
> 1. Increase conflict between you and a nation with nuclear weapons
How? The nation with nuclear weapons probably understands that it will suffer a lot in a nuclear war, or will likely get hit with nuclear weapons itself, right?
> 2. Make nation with nuclear weapons more desperate
So what? It may be desperate, but can't use nuclear weapons because - see pt. 1. - it may think it will hit itself with nuclear weapons. Ok, maybe not even nuclear weapons - but that nation may also understand that it won't stand long against focused non-nuclear attack.
> 3. Make nation with nuclear weapons more angry
Nations, really, aren't people, saying they are angry is complicated. Maybe leaders will become more angry, but what could they do? Ok, even if everybody will get more angry, so what?
> If the point is to prevent nuclear war you must either prevent nukes or prevent war. This accomplishes neither.
You can't prevent nukes - they exist in the world - and can't even guarantee you can prevent war, but you should carefully estimate what bad and good consequences your actions will have. Is it better to try to stop an aggressor? What may happen if you do? What may happen if you don't?
not sending a man to the moon means people will LIVE actually, I can't imagine what kind of hell that would bring if Boeing tried to make another moonrocket
> Doesn't sending weapons to a country at war ensure more death and destruction?
Well, if you send weapons, instead of killing people you have the aggressor's army just pumping cheeks and pretending to look fierce. No death, no destruction, just maybe threats. No?
The reason we went to the moon was to prove that capitalism could do it better than communism. We've got nothing like that to prove now. Folks are working on making money doing things in space, and that's coming along nicely.
NASA's scientific mission isn't particularly strongly served by having humans in a place. Not that there's no scientific value it's just much more expensive than robots and much riskier.
>Not that there's no scientific value it's just much more expensive than robots and much riskier.
And our ability to accept risk has decreased dramatically. 50 years ago the Boeing capsule would have been given the go ahead to detach without a second thought for instance.
Basically going from 2 9s to 11 9s (or whatever NASA targets internally these days) is comically expensive.
And I'd have to see a paper justifying human presence (besides trying to future proof society) as actually bringing more scientific value than robotic experiments.
I believe NASA is targeting something like 99.5% reliability with Starliner. I agree that ability to accept risk has decreased, but my guess is that Starliner in reality has more like one nine of reliability.
If you look at the first flight test of Starliner, everyone talks about the timing problem that caused them to fail to achieve the proper orbit. What is more rarely discussed is that after this happened, they did a top to bottom code review while the Starliner was in orbit, and found a bug in the crew/service module undocking procedure that would have caused the service module to strike the crew module after undocking, most likely damage the heat shield, and cause the capsule to burn up on reentry. They applied a hot fix in orbit for this.
Had the timer problem not happened, the code review wouldn't have happened and this wouldn't have been caught.
With the number of gremlins that have come up on every Starliner flight, there are certainly many more lower probability defects that will eventually lead to a loss of crew.
My general feeling is that the true reason NASA/Boeing is much less successful than in the 60s is because the NASA of that time attracted the very top talent that was young, energetic, and bright. These days that talent generally doesn't go to those places. IMO the main reason SpaceX has been so successful is that a lot of those people really wanted to work on rockets but didn't want to work for NASA/Boeing.
SpaceX lost several rockets in the beginning, NASA lost an enormous number of rockets in the 60s space era and several people.
>My general feeling is that the true reason NASA/Boeing is much less successful than in the 60s is because the NASA of that time attracted the very top talent that was young, energetic, and bright.
Are they much less successful? Less things are being paid for and things are happening at a slower pace because money.
The cost/benefit analysis was probably seen differently back then. At that point it was a space race against the Big Bad and winning was more important than a certain threshold of safety. Now? I can't see the benefit of risking the life of the Starliner crew. What would it prove now that NASA has had so many crewed launches and returns?
All the evidence you need is that even in the present day, advanced countries have repeatedly tried to send probes to the moon and failed, when we did it with humans in the 1960s. All the software in the world isn't as good as a trained pilot in a novel scenario (i.e. The first moon landing when Neil Armstrong changed the landing site at the last minute, or the events of Apollo 13).
The Soviets managed to send probes to the moon, and succeeded, with the automation and remote control systems of the 60s. Their manned lunar ambitions were hamstrung by the many failures of the N-1 rocket, which could not be made safe enough for human flight. (Or any flight, really.)
The thing with probes is that you should send more than one every 5-10 years, if you do that, you'll learn something from the failures before everyone working on the project dies of old age. It's the moon, you don't need to wait for a once-a-decade transfer window to line up.
The U.S, and the Soviet Union, each landed probes on the moon in the 60s. And the Soviet Union even did a sample return in 1970.
>All the software in the world isn't as good as a trained pilot in a novel scenario
You can likely launch 5 (or more) autonomous missions rather than send humans. And that's assuming good spending, if you go by the $93 billion Artemis Program, likely 20 or more.
> And our ability to accept risk has decreased dramatically.
Yes, recall that Apollo 1 incinerated the capsule crew, that would have canceled the entire program today, back then it was "press on..."
We did continue with the Space Shuttle after its accidents, but that was decades ago now, and I'm sure that played into any discussions there might have been about extending the program.
This is the worst argument and I'm sick of hearing it. Do you seriously, honestly, think that there is nothing left for us to learn on the moon? Or that seeing humans doing things on the moon does not in any way inspire others to push forward in scientific endeavor? Such arguments demonstrate only a lack of curiosity and imagination.
It might sound cynical but it's accurate. There was a big political will to go to the moon because the USSR was beating us at every important space milestone. That galvanized the American government sufficiently to spend massive amounts of capital to win the space race.
After a decade or two, and the loss of any real competition, the US lost the political will to keep pushing boundaries. The primary reason we don't still have the immediate capability to put people onto the moon isn't technical, it's political. We are only now reigniting that desire, and again, it's because of another great power starting to push things in space.
But is there any scientific value? We ran enough missions that we're still looking at everything we brought back last time, what science would we be doing that we either haven't already done, or can do here on earth just fine without going to the moon for it?
We're still doing science on the planet Earth, because there's still plenty to learn, and we actually live here with billions of people.
We've only sent a handful of folks to the Moon so far. We've literally barely scratched the surface, and only a few tiny patches of it as that.
Exploring new places has always lead to all sorts of interesting new discoveries. No reason to think a whole new world mightn't hold a few interesting (and/or potentially lucrative) surprises.
Yeah but the Earth is a geologically active planet hosting life. The moon is neither of those things, it's a ball of rock in orbit that we can explore all of "several square feet at a time", so once you've done that a few times: what's left to do? Realistically?
Sure: if we had the ability to actually send a proper mission that can drive around the entire thing, with a pop up lab (arctic research style) on the moon itself, that's a different matter, but we are nowhere near that level of proficient at space science yet, and going to the moon a few more times won't make a difference to that aspect.
Arctic style base on the moon would be 200 to 500 metric tons of materials to ship. That's 2-5 SpaceX Starship return trips if/when they become operational in a few years time.
There's a number of reservations wrt the practicality of SpaceX Starship of course. That said, it allows us to say there's at least one company projecting a 100 metric ton payload spacecraft in the near future (with prototypes already being tested).
If/when they get it working, remember that SpaceX tends to mass produce their spacecraft, so it wouldn't be just a one off single landing by a one off single lander.
No, it's 5 return trips just to get the materials there. That's like... the least problematic part of assembling and running an arctic style base. Especially given that the Arctic has quite a lot of water and oxygen available. And it takes less than a day to send a rescue mission over. The moon has none of that.
So in the very near future it looks like we'll have the logistics capability to ship 100-150 tons to the moon every 6 months, at a conservative start.
So quick computation: 5 trips is 2 and a half years, and then shipping supplies and then people another year or so. At 100-150 tons per year you can supply (back of envelope[1]) 10-20 'overwinterers'[2] with a fairly comfortable margin for a year, as well as equipment and parts.
There's also no technical reason not to reserve a landing pad for an escape craft that you can rotate every 6-12 months.
So it seems like the technical capability will be there at least. Then it becomes the question of whether that's financially viable already.
Can you elucidate further logistical challenges?
(ps. this post will likely date quickly, since NASA seems to be planning an actual Artemis Base Camp [3])
[1] Back of envelope suggests something like 3 tons of essential supplies needed per person, assuming the modest oxygen and water recycling as available on ISS, and use of nuclear power.
[2] By analogy with the arctic base: 10-20 permanent crew for year-round maintenance, with occasional surges 'on season', bringing their own supplies and equipment.
The latest (series 9) Apple Watch has (up to) 2 GB of RAM and can do billions of instructions per second.
In 1966, the mainframe to use was the CDC 6600,
able to do ~3 million instructions per second (MIPS), with kilobytes, possibly a megabyte of RAM. The US government had a good number of mainframes, of a wide variety, but they wouldn't be able to reach the Apple Watch's computing power.
- We choose high-tech, finessed designs over simpler, heavier designs
- The project is designed and built by international committee
It sounds like a recipe for failure to me. I'm skeptical that the USA will ever again land humans on the moon because the USA seems unable to spend enough to succeed by brute force and the supposedly cheaper finely engineered designs don't seem up to the rigours. For example, putting computer everywhere is common engineering practice these days, but modern computer chips (even the space hardened varieties) cannot be as robust as TTL logic from the 60s. Yet it sounds like a career ending event to suggest that the critical computation be done (and limited to what can be done!) purely in TTL logic.
Ingenuity was powered by bog standard 18650 batteries and mostly commercial off the shelf components. Only the two redundant flight controllers were radiation hardened. The rest was built from things you can order out of digikey.
Somehow that managed to vastly exceed their planned missions, proving the worth of that mode of exploration for future missions.
Why would we ever revert to old expensive, heavy TTL logic systems that virtually nobody alive understands when the better bet is designing systems with hardware you can buy on AliExpress?
For space to be more accessible we should be iterating with regular “stuff” and not crazy one-off designs. Sure some parts of each mission require crazy, like the propellers on ingenuity but that’s the whole point. Spend your budget on the crazy stuff that actually needs to be crazy.
yeah. you can still buy a lot of ttl chips new (actually i think the agc used rtl, but ttl would be fine), there's new old stock of the others, and if that's not enough, teenagers can fabricate 10-micron chips in their garages nowadays
It turns out there isn’t much on the Moon anyway, just rocks and dust, and now a couple flags. The value was the science done along the way to get there.
Now, that science is done.
Using TTLs seems less interesting in general(?). It is nice to be able to send computers into space. NASA should just use computers instead of TTL, if for no other reason than that keeping the infrastructure for those sorts of computers well funded is valuable.
Maybe it was unclear, I meant, tautologically and just for emphasis, that the science that was done for the previous mission was (of course) done.
> Now, that science is done.
That said, building a base on the moon is pretty pointless, and I think we shouldn’t do it. If we’re going to become a spacefaring species, we’re going to have to learn how to live in space. The conditions on each planet, moon, whatever, are all pretty different, so we’ll probably need different bespoke solutions on each one.
We should perfect the art of building self-sustaining orbital habitats, because those aren’t redesigned from scratch every time. Let’s iterate on the space-station.
Energetically going downwell is a big cost. The only reason to go onto a planet is to get resources that aren’t already present in less energetically disadvantageous locations.
There are a lot of great benefits to planets, protection from radiation and meteors being among them, also a free source of gravity which is pretty important to us as a species.
It is a free source of, like, some amount of gravity. But we don’t know how our biology will respond to the wrong amount. Meanwhile an orbital habitat can be spun to get us the right amount.
In order to get to a planet in the first place, you’ll have to have a ship that can fly through space without the occupants getting irradiated. The biggest problem will be convincing them to get off the ship I think.
In the colonial era they were mostly colonizing already populated areas. The land was mostly more hospitable than the ship because
* Humans evolved to live on Earth
* In many cases there were people to trade with or steal already tended land from
We could look at Arctic expeditions I guess. They mostly didn’t colonize for some reason (despite the region being wildly more hospitable than anywhere off Earth).
I think we can both agree that the reality is any sort of off-world colonization is going to be unpleasant and difficult beyond imagine with no simple solutions. I think we are much closer to being able to construct conformable habitats on other celestial bodies than we are to being able to make megastructures in outer space. Long term artificial structures will probably be the way to go, but I think to get there we will need to be able to setup base camps on nearby celestial bodies.
Because when we do science on earth we go to a place once take only a few samples and that's it. And then maybe every 10-20 years we might take another sample or something.
We have less data about the moon then any even half way interesting cave on earth.
We could easily send a bunch of low cost probes to the Moon to collect more data. We can even get samples back robotically - China did that earlier this year.
There's no need to spend billions on spending three or four people there to get scientific returns.
Building a architecture to sustainably send human places will also enable a lot of other things. Having a 100 ton lander allows you to send far more then tiny probes. And we know well that actual humans exploring and looking for samples is better in many ways.
Getting humans to have long term sustainability and mobility on the moon and having tools and robotic support is long term.
The same architecture can then be reused for Mars.
On earth, most caves are explored with humans. Most science is not done by robotics only.
The post I was responding to was arguing for using low-tech systems and lots of power to get to the Moon again.
We know, and they knew at the time, that the achievement of getting to the Moon was just a cherry on top of the technological development required to do it.
Should not redo that work. The current strategy of using higher-tech components and less brute force is more scientifically interesting.
I also think going back to the moon is stupid, but I elaborated on that a bunch the other branch, so I’m not going to bother doing it again. But if we have to go back again, we should follow their spirit rather than their actions and use the most advanced systems available. Not a bunch of TTLs. The value is in testing our ability to manufacture complex devices to work in a hostile environment.
Though it might fall under the umbrella of not spending enough money, I'd add that we haven't been meaningfully iterating on the technology and processes involved. One might even argue that traditional aerospace has been trying its hardest to reduce the amount of iteration/refinement going on to the barest of minimums.
This has kept crewed spaceflight stuck in a rut in terms of cost and risk. It's like if progress on the design of commercial aircraft suddenly slowed to a crawl in the late 1940s, putting us at mid-60s adjacent aircraft design in 2024.
It can be done, it was done, but it doesn't scale.
If you want layers of failsafe and redundancy (as we would do it today), it requires higher level abstractions, e.g. writing in at least C if not C++ or Rust, instead of hand-coded assembler like they did back then.
So yes simple got us there, but it's not useful to repeat the exercise like that again.
I suggest that maybe the key to success is limiting ourselves to simpler TTL logic and make up for it by adding 10% additional material. Immediately somebody responds that TTL logic is the old way and can't be as good as modern C, let alone Rust.
So now instead of a few hundred large, durable transistors and relays which shrug off radiation and heat and voltage spikes and a have few enough states that they can be formally proved correct, we need delicate 30+ MHz microprocessors which need special radiation hardening and which will go up in smoke if their signal lines transiently exceed 10 volts, and runs a couple million lines of code.
The arguments here for Rust aren't even wrong, which is the problem. In theory Rust would be better than TTL logic in every way: easier, cheaper, lighter, more capable, more logging, updatable. Professionally TTL is an argument which can't be won and is therefore career limiting to make, so finesse wins out.
Yet large projects of every type keep 'mysteriously' failing due to "unforeseen difficulties".
And all of these are wrong. NASA budget is bigger then the rest of the world combined.
Low risk tolerance isn't a really problem.
High-tech is actually good and these mythical cheap heavy designs don't actually exist. SpaceX is building Starship and Raptor not SeaDragon. This is just the old 'Soviet tanks are cheaper nonsense repackaged for Space'.
The 4th is a problem, but not actually the biggest problem.
The real issue is that NASA doesn't get a goal and money. Each program is individually controlled by congress, budget is strictly allocated to certain program.
When a former NASA administrator even suggested to do something that would hurt a important program, and make it much cheaper he was instantly threatened with firing and told if he continued to publicly talk about it, he would be removed. He in fact suggested he should just resign.
And this suggested change wasn't even a very hard attack compared to what NASA SHOULD actually have done.
If you spend 30 years and 60 billion $ achieving basically nothing and congress is incredibly happy with the program, you know you have a totally broken system.
Chips are plenty save in space, this isn't that big of a problem and doing all this logic in TTL wouldn't make sense.
We've gone back to the moon many times, just not carrying useless people.
On another note it annoys me a bit that people in power are "fine" with thousands of dead people for wars that aren't needed, but god forbid one or two people dying pursuing true exploration as volunteers.
Even the Soviet space programme, in the decades after losing something like twenty million lives in a war that everyone would rather have avoided, was not reckless with the lives of its astronauts. Because the astronauts and their training are themselves a valuable asset.
There's probably a lot to be written about the precise moral boundary, but Western culture is very against missions which are definitely suicidal while OK with those that merely have a very high chance of getting you killed.
>Because the astronauts and their training are themselves a valuable asset.
Magellan, Hudson, Cook and a litany of others were certainly not cheap cannon fodder. Yet they were allowed to take on immense personal risk and risk to their crews, above and beyond the standards of the time because it was deemed worth it.
There is a fine line between reckless and acceptable risk.
The cost of such endeavors absolutely pales in comparison to the long term potential for wealth creation for the rest of humanity by making the resources of other planets reachable. I think that we as a society should be slightly more willing to let people take upon serious risk of death in the pursuit of societal progress.
Then why cosmonauts wrote a letter to Politburo suggesting sending them to fly around the Moon in Zond capsule even though it didn't have perfect flights? The reasoning was that the spacecraft deficiencies were correctable should a crew be onboard.
Wasn't there the same situation with Soyuz-1, when they thought the man onboard would help correct flight problems?
I hope that when (if?) SpaceX's Starship becomes fully operational we'll get the sort of bold explorers going on their own missions at their own risk. If some wealthy young guys want to go on a mission to Mars in the same spirit as Shackleton or Darwin or Edmund Hillary I think they should be able to. Those explorers and scientists knew the great risks they were taking but chose to do it anyways because they valued furthering human achievement more than they valued their own safety. When an exploration mission's acceptable risk of death is 10% instead of 0.01% we'll see great things being accomplished.
They went to places that, without human exploration, we couldn't know anything about.
That's just not generally true anymore. We know things about other planets in the solar system, and planets and stars elsewhere in the galaxy, and in other galaxies, without any human ever having to go to those places.
The combination of sophisticated probes and more much sensitive sensing technology has really changed the justification for human exploration, possibly so much that the justification is mostly gone.
Except that most explorers didn't go because they cared about geology; they explored because they wanted to colonize/conquer. We evolved in Africa and literally colonized (almost) every continent on Earth before we had invented writing, much less science.
The explorers that will go out into the solar system, like Jared Isaacman, will go for glory, fame, and/or profit, none of which can be gained by probes, no matter how sophisticated.
Good point. But the same applies today--the benefactors like Musk, Isaacman, and Bezos all expect to gain from the exploration, maybe not in terms of money, but at least in fame, or as they put it, "advancing human achievement."
Right. But 60 years ago, putting a human on the moon was universally seen as "advancing human achievement". I would argue that right now, where we are not actually about to build a moon or Mars base, putting people out there is not widely seen as "advancing human achievement".
Sending someone to Mars without them dying (and maybe bringing them back) will be a huge step. There's so much we can do on and around Mars, however, without anyone being out there, and some of them are also likely to be huge advancements.
Similarly for the asteroid belt. Yes, it will probably need humans out there eventually, but there's a massive, massive task of mapping and exploring it that can and almost certainly will be done without launching humans into space.
You're not entirely wrong when extrapolating from historic trends up to-say- 1999. But the price of launching humans into space has gone down dramatically as is this century (to the point where privately funded LEO missions have become viable), and looks to be going down rapidly in the near future. Space flight looks like it might be entering a period akin to Moore's law in IT.
Put a handful of geologists on a Mars base with an ATV, some hammers and chisels and I'm sure they could accomplish the greatest feats of discovery in their field perhaps ever.
Note, I'm not saying that this would be easy or safe or cheap. But I am suggesting that the science achieved by getting some real scientists on Mars would be qualitatively and quantitatively greater than robotic missions.
Given that resources are always going to be limited, absolute improvements matter less than value-per-currency-unit. And the value of putting people there at this stage of the game seems quite likely to be fairly limited.
SpaceX is currently drastically reducing the price per currency unit as is, and their current prototype is intended to smash a few more price barriers; to the point where the number of probes might hit diminishing returns, and actual human scientists become affordable. We'll have to see! At any rate it seems to be becoming commercially viable, even if SpaceX aren't the ones to do it (they do have competition chasing their tails).
This argument is plausible for short range so long as there's no mass produced spacecraft with a payload capacity of 100 tons and with a range to reach Mars (at a launch cost expressed in millions, not billions). I'm cautiously optimistic we'll have that capability in the next decade or so.
At the same time we don't have the ability to reach other solar systems at all, nor projected in the next few decades. So we know relatively little about them in fact. Only as much as can be obtained by remote sensing over light years. (Which is to say: not very much.)
It’s a crucial element for control over your population. You need to instill a high worth of their lives, otherwise the danger of rebellion and refusal is too high.
As soon as we get some. Main metrics of usefulness would be survival rate in hard vacuum, cosmic radiation and absolutely minimal or extreme temperatures - divided by volume, weight, price and energy requirements - and further by the useful work it can do per unit of time.
In conclusion, not any time soon. Humans will return to the Moon only when we accept that our presence there is purely symbolic/for the cool factor, and decide to eat the enormous price tag.
Whenever a roboticist is asked if robots are better than humans for, say, Moon exploration, he pauses. Red Whittaker from Astrobotic was admitting that robots are not nearly as capable as humans, at the time of Google Lunar X Prize competition. Robots have improved since then, but costs to send humans have also lowered. I'd like to have a conversation on this topic before asserting the answer one way or another.
I guess the parent meant that it was comparatively way cheaper and easier to send probes, rather than people. And that we did send probes, even way further than the Moon.
either we develop a death row space program or yield future civilization in our lifetimes to the country who does.
AI driven androids (or more likely cephalopoids) might be able to bootstrap some initial habitat, but the prisoner/android conflict in spacefaring is going to be very real, imo.
Yeah, I feel like the answer seems most likely to be "no one gets excited over going to the moon the nth time". With Apollo, it was something we had never done before, and I imagine a lot of people genuinely didn't know if it could be done, making it a huge achievement for humanity. Nowadays, people grow up learning that we already have done it, and "do the same thing we did in the 1960s in the 2020s" isn't an exciting enough achievement to get the public at large interested (and would make any failures even more embarrassing).
Yeah, I feel like the answer seems most likely to be "no one gets excited over going to the moon the nth time".
All the people asking 'why can't we go to the moon' would definitely get excited. Plenty of people get excited every time SpaceX has a successful launch or achieve some innovation, but somehow you've convinced yourself that 'people on the moon' is fundamentally boring and nobody is interested.
Do you really think there's as many people as excited about SpaceX launches as there were people interested in the space race in the 60s? I'm not sure why you're assuming what my opinion is on this; I'm talking about people in aggregate, which is what matters in terms of the government investing heavily in it like they did before.
I love the idea of spending tax money on R&D, but what would we accomplish on the moon at this point? Seems better to spend on telescopes and space stations until we have firm plans for what to do on the moon.
The US will land astronauts on the moon, probably this decade but maybe early in the 2030s. That's my bet. Compared to previous human spaceflight efforts, Artemis has the support of both major parties and the NASA community (scientists, engineers, and administrators). That was not always the case, which is why the Constellation Program failed.
Moreover, the Artemis program, unlike the "flags and footprints" goal of Apollo, has a plausible path for a sustainable human presence on the moon and an evolutionary path to a human Mars landing. If they can pull that off, with a budget smaller than Apollo, then I think NASA will deserve all the praise they get.
Will China land humans on the moon before us? No, because we already did that in 1969. But they might land humans before Artemis does. In that case, I suspect we'll see a real-live version of "For All Mankind" and we'll dump extra funding on NASA. Maybe. Or maybe we'll do what the Soviets did when we beat them and shift to something else, like Mars.
I'd like for life on earth to go to the moon again. Why should I care if it's bearing a china flag or a usa flag? Nationalism and the "us" mentality is a disease.
In my experience, different people care about different things. There's probably a bunch of things that you care about passionately that completely bore me.
Apollo is not entirely a good model of how it should be done now. We don't do computer services the same way SAGE or SABRE were done in the sixties either. We should try to use off the shelf solutions where appropriate. But at the same time recognize where we need bespoke solutions.
Apollo had to do so much new things because there was no commercial space sector yet. You have now. Apollo developed engines and rockets and entirely new ways of operation. It would be a mistake to expect to develop an entirely new launcher rocket engine for example just for landing people on the moon.
For example, one could use multiple SpaceX Falcon 9 launches to launch and fuel a low earth orbit vehicle that would fly to the moon and send a lander. Most of the mass in LEO would be liquid oxygen.
There were alternative plans to use LEO assembly already in Apollo but it was deemed too risky. They did end up using docking after the translunar injection (turning the CSM around) and then of course famously in lunar orbit.
So you wouldn't need any new launchers to go back to the moon if one started a project today with a short deadline.
My friend and I we are fixing old bikes for fun. And often the only way to figure out how to do certain things is watching YouTube videos about fixing bikes. And bikes are rather simple devices.
I guess NASA had lost all YouTube videos about how to assemble Moon rocket.
it's just that the usa can only do very easy things now, because the people there have forgotten how to work together
the article explains some of the forms this takes, but, for political reasons, frames it differently
see also: bullet trains, homelessness, mass incarceration, hvdc transmission, chip fabrication, the renewable energy transition, electric vehicle manufacturing. the usa is failing to get its act together in almost every conceivable way
that's part of it; marc andreessen's nimby posture in the atherton zoning discussion, for example, was pure rent-seeking: https://archive.fo/MjHa8
(i know that's from the 'david miscavige leads scientology to milestone year' atlantic, but i think in this case their reporting is authentic)
but i don't think that's all, or even a majority, of it. rent-seeking is at least beneficial to the rent-seeker, if successful. but most of the problem is people fighting with each other in ways that aren't profitable even to themselves. a lot of that takes the form of arguing about how to assign blame for problems instead of solving them ;)
Thanks for the article. For a comprehensive review of Artemis, in much detail, and other NASA missions, see this paper (free online and PDF versions available at the link):
NASA at a Crossroads: Maintaining Workforce, Infrastructure, and Technology Preeminence in the Coming Decades (2024)
It's the report of a National Academies committee of experts - organized by their Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board, Space Studies Board, and Division on Engineering and Physical Science - formed to "review the critical facilities, workforce, and technology needed to achieve NASA's long-term strategic goals and mission objectives".
There is a lot of interesting material, both immediately topical and, being HN, of intellectual interest. See especially Appendix G, "NASA 20-Year Critical Missions", a list and overview of all the missions, and especially Appendix J "Technology Survey Papers", which goes into detail about critical technologies NASA needs to invent (many for Artemis) and their R&D.
Because the goal as of now is not to get to the moon. It's a government jobs program. Nothing wrong with that IMO, but in the 1960s the goal was to get to the moon before the Soviets + pour money into ICBM-adjacent tech.
Now the motives are dubious. Gateway to Mars? Cold War 2 with China? I don't think anyone even knows what the goal is other than "spend money".
How does an article about costs in the space industry discuss Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Aerojet Rocketdyne, and Lockheed Martin, but never mention SpaceX?
The US collectively felt that they needed to prove that capitalism was superior to communism. In this case, the contracting system was the competition between private sector entities to produce the parts and expertise, alongside NASA the state run enterprise handling requirements and coordination.
While the Soviet Union relied on more state run enterprises, aiming to prove collective coordination.
With the absence of resources up there, and lack of return, and inability to prove anything about capitalism vs communism to anyone that mattered, the programs atrophied in both unions.
The political justification to spend so much money and more importantly to take as many risks as in the '60s just isn't there anymore.
At the same time NASA probably has many other interesting missions to run today, and to operate from the past, with lower total budget than 5 decades ago.
Because the NASA budget it horrible allocated and not geared towards actually achieving specific things. NASA budget is big enough, its just that it resources are horrible allocated.
I could write a lot about this topic here, I have done before, but anybody that looks at anything other then that fact first, misses the problem. Other things that people mention might play a role, but by far the biggest is politics of NASA and NASA internal politics.
Decline of state capacity after the 1978 abolishment of the Civil Service Commission. There were poor gatekeeping controls in place afterwards and employee quality gradually declined. Now anybody with any sort of intelligence, drive or ambition works in the private sector. Salary is one aspect, but so is the desire to avoid working with people who are dumb and never get fired.
https://archive.is/EF6Sj
The apollo program ran from 1961-1972, 11 years.[1]
The total budget was ~260B in todays dollars.[1]
That's ~24B per year in todays dollars. NASA's current budget is 22B[2], less than .5% of the federal budget. We sent 4 times that amount to Ukraine for the war by an emergency vote. Computing power has increased effectively infinitely, manufacturing automation & precision has increased incredibly. We are vastly richer than we were in 1972: our GDP has increased roughly 25X since then.
The reason we have not gone back to the moon is because we have chosen not to do so. It is not hard, nor particularly expensive.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
In my opinion, simple inflation adjustment is not that accurate. In particular, notice that certain costs, like higher education, have increased significantly faster than inflation since the 60s. And since rocket science requires a highly educated workforce, you end up with higher salaries relative to the median. I'd actually like to see an analysis of the number of people working on the program. I bet Apollo had 2x or 3x more people working on it than Artemis.
But I haven't done the math/research, so I could be very wrong.
I think it's more like 10x. There were 400,000 working on Apollo and I doubt there's more than 40,000 working on Artemis.
It's not just your opinion. It's widely known in economics. It's so widely known in fact that statistics agencies state exactly how they come up with inflation figures, which basket of goods they base it on and adjustments.
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-...
There are other indices if you want to compare historical prices relevant to moon programs
> There are other indices if you want to compare historical prices relevant to moon programs
Could you please expand or give a few pointers on those indices? Or where could I learn more about this.
If there's a budget available analysing that and what the biggest costs would yield the most accurate estimates.
Could be more but the biggest cost is probably labour and there are 2 indexes for that:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/eci.nr0.htm
https://www.bls.gov/productivity/
Wages can be drilled down to the employee groups that would be predominant, such as machinists or engineers.
Productivity can approximate how much more efficient people are now due to technology.
Then major component costs can be compared from other current rockets vs historical costs.
The quality of our education has fallen in addition to the rising costs.
>The quality of our education has fallen in addition to the rising costs.
Maybe as an average because more people are being educated, but I find it hard to believe that our top students now are any less educated than the top students in the past.
It's not just that we have $25/y now and had ~$24B/y then, to suggest it is practical. Costs are also vastly reduced over those benchmarks. Starship HLS cost the government under $3B. For that same price you could buy 30 Falcon Heavy flights at wholesale rates. New Glenn looks to launch soon and we don't know its price but it should be competitive, and it's a plenty capable ship.
Of course, depending on these as Artemis does now would only improve prices, not timelines, but it's not like commercial options are all a year old. Marginal launch has been approximately free in Artemis terms for a good while now, possibly even back in the pre-SpaceX dark ages when US launch was a monopoly flying on Russian engines with a billion dollar a year protection racket tax.
Ultimately it comes down to most of the money NASA spends on Artemis being spent on rent seeking by large old space companies that know job losses would look politically disastrous, captured in cost-plus contracts with hiring mandates, tech reuse mandates, and financial incentives not to execute. NASA is spending about as much on a mobile launch tower going overbudget on a cost plus contract as they have on Starship HLS. Guess which one had Congresspeople giving empassioned speeches about NASA's unreasonable spending habits!
> We sent 4 times that amount to Ukraine for the war by an emergency vote.
Not sending money to Ukraine means people die. Not sending a man to the Moon? People would just wonder why.
> Not sending money to Ukraine means people die.
Yes, and lose their freedom, and it greatly increases the risk that many more will die and lose their freedom.
Sending money also increases the risk of nuclear war in which even more people will die and lose their freedom.
> Sending money also increases the risk of nuclear war
In which way?
1. Increase conflict between you and a nation with nuclear weapons
2. Make nation with nuclear weapons more desperate
3. Make nation with nuclear weapons more angry
If the point is to prevent nuclear war you must either prevent nukes or prevent war. This accomplishes neither.
> 1. Increase conflict between you and a nation with nuclear weapons
How? The nation with nuclear weapons probably understands that it will suffer a lot in a nuclear war, or will likely get hit with nuclear weapons itself, right?
> 2. Make nation with nuclear weapons more desperate
So what? It may be desperate, but can't use nuclear weapons because - see pt. 1. - it may think it will hit itself with nuclear weapons. Ok, maybe not even nuclear weapons - but that nation may also understand that it won't stand long against focused non-nuclear attack.
> 3. Make nation with nuclear weapons more angry
Nations, really, aren't people, saying they are angry is complicated. Maybe leaders will become more angry, but what could they do? Ok, even if everybody will get more angry, so what?
> If the point is to prevent nuclear war you must either prevent nukes or prevent war. This accomplishes neither.
You can't prevent nukes - they exist in the world - and can't even guarantee you can prevent war, but you should carefully estimate what bad and good consequences your actions will have. Is it better to try to stop an aggressor? What may happen if you do? What may happen if you don't?
not sending a man to the moon means people will LIVE actually, I can't imagine what kind of hell that would bring if Boeing tried to make another moonrocket
hardly, they would have folded and had a puppet government installed. many young men on both sides would be alive.
Chamberlain would be proud of you.
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Minor nitpick, but Ukraine does not have many young man fighting for it, the average age of the combatant is over fourty.
Doesn't sending weapons to a country at war ensure more death and destruction? isn't that the point?
> Doesn't sending weapons to a country at war ensure more death and destruction?
Well, if you send weapons, instead of killing people you have the aggressor's army just pumping cheeks and pretending to look fierce. No death, no destruction, just maybe threats. No?
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
The reason we went to the moon was to prove that capitalism could do it better than communism. We've got nothing like that to prove now. Folks are working on making money doing things in space, and that's coming along nicely.
NASA's scientific mission isn't particularly strongly served by having humans in a place. Not that there's no scientific value it's just much more expensive than robots and much riskier.
>Not that there's no scientific value it's just much more expensive than robots and much riskier.
And our ability to accept risk has decreased dramatically. 50 years ago the Boeing capsule would have been given the go ahead to detach without a second thought for instance.
Basically going from 2 9s to 11 9s (or whatever NASA targets internally these days) is comically expensive.
And I'd have to see a paper justifying human presence (besides trying to future proof society) as actually bringing more scientific value than robotic experiments.
I believe NASA is targeting something like 99.5% reliability with Starliner. I agree that ability to accept risk has decreased, but my guess is that Starliner in reality has more like one nine of reliability.
If you look at the first flight test of Starliner, everyone talks about the timing problem that caused them to fail to achieve the proper orbit. What is more rarely discussed is that after this happened, they did a top to bottom code review while the Starliner was in orbit, and found a bug in the crew/service module undocking procedure that would have caused the service module to strike the crew module after undocking, most likely damage the heat shield, and cause the capsule to burn up on reentry. They applied a hot fix in orbit for this.
Had the timer problem not happened, the code review wouldn't have happened and this wouldn't have been caught.
With the number of gremlins that have come up on every Starliner flight, there are certainly many more lower probability defects that will eventually lead to a loss of crew.
My general feeling is that the true reason NASA/Boeing is much less successful than in the 60s is because the NASA of that time attracted the very top talent that was young, energetic, and bright. These days that talent generally doesn't go to those places. IMO the main reason SpaceX has been so successful is that a lot of those people really wanted to work on rockets but didn't want to work for NASA/Boeing.
SpaceX lost several rockets in the beginning, NASA lost an enormous number of rockets in the 60s space era and several people.
>My general feeling is that the true reason NASA/Boeing is much less successful than in the 60s is because the NASA of that time attracted the very top talent that was young, energetic, and bright.
Are they much less successful? Less things are being paid for and things are happening at a slower pace because money.
The cost/benefit analysis was probably seen differently back then. At that point it was a space race against the Big Bad and winning was more important than a certain threshold of safety. Now? I can't see the benefit of risking the life of the Starliner crew. What would it prove now that NASA has had so many crewed launches and returns?
All the evidence you need is that even in the present day, advanced countries have repeatedly tried to send probes to the moon and failed, when we did it with humans in the 1960s. All the software in the world isn't as good as a trained pilot in a novel scenario (i.e. The first moon landing when Neil Armstrong changed the landing site at the last minute, or the events of Apollo 13).
The Soviets managed to send probes to the moon, and succeeded, with the automation and remote control systems of the 60s. Their manned lunar ambitions were hamstrung by the many failures of the N-1 rocket, which could not be made safe enough for human flight. (Or any flight, really.)
The thing with probes is that you should send more than one every 5-10 years, if you do that, you'll learn something from the failures before everyone working on the project dies of old age. It's the moon, you don't need to wait for a once-a-decade transfer window to line up.
The U.S, and the Soviet Union, each landed probes on the moon in the 60s. And the Soviet Union even did a sample return in 1970.
>All the software in the world isn't as good as a trained pilot in a novel scenario
You can likely launch 5 (or more) autonomous missions rather than send humans. And that's assuming good spending, if you go by the $93 billion Artemis Program, likely 20 or more.
> And our ability to accept risk has decreased dramatically.
Yes, recall that Apollo 1 incinerated the capsule crew, that would have canceled the entire program today, back then it was "press on..."
We did continue with the Space Shuttle after its accidents, but that was decades ago now, and I'm sure that played into any discussions there might have been about extending the program.
> that would have canceled the entire program today
The US government just delayed the next Starship launch by 2 months because of incorrectly filed paperwork.
It's not that SpaceX didn't file the paperwork... they just used the wrong form.
This is why our feet are firmly nailed to the ground.
If anyone actually cared to go to the Moon or Mars, then obstructionist bureaucrats like that wouldn't be in their jobs for very long.
Somewhere there was a space that said “do not write in this space” and the person who filled it out wrote “okay”… the FAA got ‘em now, SpaceX.
This is the worst argument and I'm sick of hearing it. Do you seriously, honestly, think that there is nothing left for us to learn on the moon? Or that seeing humans doing things on the moon does not in any way inspire others to push forward in scientific endeavor? Such arguments demonstrate only a lack of curiosity and imagination.
It might sound cynical but it's accurate. There was a big political will to go to the moon because the USSR was beating us at every important space milestone. That galvanized the American government sufficiently to spend massive amounts of capital to win the space race.
After a decade or two, and the loss of any real competition, the US lost the political will to keep pushing boundaries. The primary reason we don't still have the immediate capability to put people onto the moon isn't technical, it's political. We are only now reigniting that desire, and again, it's because of another great power starting to push things in space.
It was CCCP pushing us then, it's the CCP now.
I personally can't really imagine anything less inspiring than repeating a feat we managed over 50 years ago.
How about: not even bothering to do that?
I'd offer better: not even being able to do that?
But is there any scientific value? We ran enough missions that we're still looking at everything we brought back last time, what science would we be doing that we either haven't already done, or can do here on earth just fine without going to the moon for it?
Well, the Moon is an entire world.
We're still doing science on the planet Earth, because there's still plenty to learn, and we actually live here with billions of people.
We've only sent a handful of folks to the Moon so far. We've literally barely scratched the surface, and only a few tiny patches of it as that.
Exploring new places has always lead to all sorts of interesting new discoveries. No reason to think a whole new world mightn't hold a few interesting (and/or potentially lucrative) surprises.
Yeah but the Earth is a geologically active planet hosting life. The moon is neither of those things, it's a ball of rock in orbit that we can explore all of "several square feet at a time", so once you've done that a few times: what's left to do? Realistically?
Sure: if we had the ability to actually send a proper mission that can drive around the entire thing, with a pop up lab (arctic research style) on the moon itself, that's a different matter, but we are nowhere near that level of proficient at space science yet, and going to the moon a few more times won't make a difference to that aspect.
Arctic style base on the moon would be 200 to 500 metric tons of materials to ship. That's 2-5 SpaceX Starship return trips if/when they become operational in a few years time.
There's a number of reservations wrt the practicality of SpaceX Starship of course. That said, it allows us to say there's at least one company projecting a 100 metric ton payload spacecraft in the near future (with prototypes already being tested).
If/when they get it working, remember that SpaceX tends to mass produce their spacecraft, so it wouldn't be just a one off single landing by a one off single lander.
No, it's 5 return trips just to get the materials there. That's like... the least problematic part of assembling and running an arctic style base. Especially given that the Arctic has quite a lot of water and oxygen available. And it takes less than a day to send a rescue mission over. The moon has none of that.
So in the very near future it looks like we'll have the logistics capability to ship 100-150 tons to the moon every 6 months, at a conservative start.
So quick computation: 5 trips is 2 and a half years, and then shipping supplies and then people another year or so. At 100-150 tons per year you can supply (back of envelope[1]) 10-20 'overwinterers'[2] with a fairly comfortable margin for a year, as well as equipment and parts.
There's also no technical reason not to reserve a landing pad for an escape craft that you can rotate every 6-12 months.
So it seems like the technical capability will be there at least. Then it becomes the question of whether that's financially viable already.
Can you elucidate further logistical challenges?
(ps. this post will likely date quickly, since NASA seems to be planning an actual Artemis Base Camp [3])
[1] Back of envelope suggests something like 3 tons of essential supplies needed per person, assuming the modest oxygen and water recycling as available on ISS, and use of nuclear power.
[2] By analogy with the arctic base: 10-20 permanent crew for year-round maintenance, with occasional surges 'on season', bringing their own supplies and equipment.
[3] https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/nasas-artemis-base-camp...
> We've got nothing like that to prove now.
Just wait til China announces an effort to put humans on Mars.
How much would it cost to do it again in the same exact way though ?
It basically amounted to a trash can with an apple watch on top of a V2 rocket
i would bet money that an apple watch has more computing power than was available to all of NASA, and maybe the entire US government, at the time
The latest (series 9) Apple Watch has (up to) 2 GB of RAM and can do billions of instructions per second.
In 1966, the mainframe to use was the CDC 6600, able to do ~3 million instructions per second (MIPS), with kilobytes, possibly a megabyte of RAM. The US government had a good number of mainframes, of a wide variety, but they wouldn't be able to reach the Apple Watch's computing power.
Faster than a Cray 2.
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From the article in no particular order:
- We don't spend enough money
- We have a low tolerance for risk
- We choose high-tech, finessed designs over simpler, heavier designs
- The project is designed and built by international committee
It sounds like a recipe for failure to me. I'm skeptical that the USA will ever again land humans on the moon because the USA seems unable to spend enough to succeed by brute force and the supposedly cheaper finely engineered designs don't seem up to the rigours. For example, putting computer everywhere is common engineering practice these days, but modern computer chips (even the space hardened varieties) cannot be as robust as TTL logic from the 60s. Yet it sounds like a career ending event to suggest that the critical computation be done (and limited to what can be done!) purely in TTL logic.
Ingenuity was powered by bog standard 18650 batteries and mostly commercial off the shelf components. Only the two redundant flight controllers were radiation hardened. The rest was built from things you can order out of digikey.
Somehow that managed to vastly exceed their planned missions, proving the worth of that mode of exploration for future missions.
Why would we ever revert to old expensive, heavy TTL logic systems that virtually nobody alive understands when the better bet is designing systems with hardware you can buy on AliExpress?
For space to be more accessible we should be iterating with regular “stuff” and not crazy one-off designs. Sure some parts of each mission require crazy, like the propellers on ingenuity but that’s the whole point. Spend your budget on the crazy stuff that actually needs to be crazy.
> but modern computer chips (even the space hardened varieties) cannot be as robust as TTL logic
I don't really get this argument. If this is a blocker I'd assume Nasa to be smart enough to understand it and propose an adequate solution...
yeah. you can still buy a lot of ttl chips new (actually i think the agc used rtl, but ttl would be fine), there's new old stock of the others, and if that's not enough, teenagers can fabricate 10-micron chips in their garages nowadays
this is not the problem
It turns out there isn’t much on the Moon anyway, just rocks and dust, and now a couple flags. The value was the science done along the way to get there.
Now, that science is done.
Using TTLs seems less interesting in general(?). It is nice to be able to send computers into space. NASA should just use computers instead of TTL, if for no other reason than that keeping the infrastructure for those sorts of computers well funded is valuable.
I'm interested in learning more about your perspective that there's no science left to be done on the moon.
Do you think establishing a human base on the moon has value?
Maybe it was unclear, I meant, tautologically and just for emphasis, that the science that was done for the previous mission was (of course) done.
> Now, that science is done.
That said, building a base on the moon is pretty pointless, and I think we shouldn’t do it. If we’re going to become a spacefaring species, we’re going to have to learn how to live in space. The conditions on each planet, moon, whatever, are all pretty different, so we’ll probably need different bespoke solutions on each one.
We should perfect the art of building self-sustaining orbital habitats, because those aren’t redesigned from scratch every time. Let’s iterate on the space-station.
Energetically going downwell is a big cost. The only reason to go onto a planet is to get resources that aren’t already present in less energetically disadvantageous locations.
There are a lot of great benefits to planets, protection from radiation and meteors being among them, also a free source of gravity which is pretty important to us as a species.
It is a free source of, like, some amount of gravity. But we don’t know how our biology will respond to the wrong amount. Meanwhile an orbital habitat can be spun to get us the right amount.
In order to get to a planet in the first place, you’ll have to have a ship that can fly through space without the occupants getting irradiated. The biggest problem will be convincing them to get off the ship I think.
You're right, we may have to find out how the British, French, and Spanish convinced people to get off the ships during the colonial eras.
In the colonial era they were mostly colonizing already populated areas. The land was mostly more hospitable than the ship because
* Humans evolved to live on Earth
* In many cases there were people to trade with or steal already tended land from
We could look at Arctic expeditions I guess. They mostly didn’t colonize for some reason (despite the region being wildly more hospitable than anywhere off Earth).
I think we can both agree that the reality is any sort of off-world colonization is going to be unpleasant and difficult beyond imagine with no simple solutions. I think we are much closer to being able to construct conformable habitats on other celestial bodies than we are to being able to make megastructures in outer space. Long term artificial structures will probably be the way to go, but I think to get there we will need to be able to setup base camps on nearby celestial bodies.
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I went for a brief swim in the ocean once and having not seen any fish I concluded that the ocean must be devoid of life.
Elaborated here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41570028
Colonizing the moon makes as much sense as swimming out to a rock a bunch of times, to prepare for piloting a cargo ship.
Because when we do science on earth we go to a place once take only a few samples and that's it. And then maybe every 10-20 years we might take another sample or something.
We have less data about the moon then any even half way interesting cave on earth.
We could easily send a bunch of low cost probes to the Moon to collect more data. We can even get samples back robotically - China did that earlier this year.
There's no need to spend billions on spending three or four people there to get scientific returns.
Building a architecture to sustainably send human places will also enable a lot of other things. Having a 100 ton lander allows you to send far more then tiny probes. And we know well that actual humans exploring and looking for samples is better in many ways.
Getting humans to have long term sustainability and mobility on the moon and having tools and robotic support is long term.
The same architecture can then be reused for Mars.
On earth, most caves are explored with humans. Most science is not done by robotics only.
The post I was responding to was arguing for using low-tech systems and lots of power to get to the Moon again.
We know, and they knew at the time, that the achievement of getting to the Moon was just a cherry on top of the technological development required to do it.
Should not redo that work. The current strategy of using higher-tech components and less brute force is more scientifically interesting.
I also think going back to the moon is stupid, but I elaborated on that a bunch the other branch, so I’m not going to bother doing it again. But if we have to go back again, we should follow their spirit rather than their actions and use the most advanced systems available. Not a bunch of TTLs. The value is in testing our ability to manufacture complex devices to work in a hostile environment.
Though it might fall under the umbrella of not spending enough money, I'd add that we haven't been meaningfully iterating on the technology and processes involved. One might even argue that traditional aerospace has been trying its hardest to reduce the amount of iteration/refinement going on to the barest of minimums.
This has kept crewed spaceflight stuck in a rut in terms of cost and risk. It's like if progress on the design of commercial aircraft suddenly slowed to a crawl in the late 1940s, putting us at mid-60s adjacent aircraft design in 2024.
It can be done, it was done, but it doesn't scale.
If you want layers of failsafe and redundancy (as we would do it today), it requires higher level abstractions, e.g. writing in at least C if not C++ or Rust, instead of hand-coded assembler like they did back then.
So yes simple got us there, but it's not useful to repeat the exercise like that again.
This really proves my point.
I suggest that maybe the key to success is limiting ourselves to simpler TTL logic and make up for it by adding 10% additional material. Immediately somebody responds that TTL logic is the old way and can't be as good as modern C, let alone Rust.
So now instead of a few hundred large, durable transistors and relays which shrug off radiation and heat and voltage spikes and a have few enough states that they can be formally proved correct, we need delicate 30+ MHz microprocessors which need special radiation hardening and which will go up in smoke if their signal lines transiently exceed 10 volts, and runs a couple million lines of code.
The arguments here for Rust aren't even wrong, which is the problem. In theory Rust would be better than TTL logic in every way: easier, cheaper, lighter, more capable, more logging, updatable. Professionally TTL is an argument which can't be won and is therefore career limiting to make, so finesse wins out.
Yet large projects of every type keep 'mysteriously' failing due to "unforeseen difficulties".
And all of these are wrong. NASA budget is bigger then the rest of the world combined.
Low risk tolerance isn't a really problem.
High-tech is actually good and these mythical cheap heavy designs don't actually exist. SpaceX is building Starship and Raptor not SeaDragon. This is just the old 'Soviet tanks are cheaper nonsense repackaged for Space'.
The 4th is a problem, but not actually the biggest problem.
The real issue is that NASA doesn't get a goal and money. Each program is individually controlled by congress, budget is strictly allocated to certain program.
When a former NASA administrator even suggested to do something that would hurt a important program, and make it much cheaper he was instantly threatened with firing and told if he continued to publicly talk about it, he would be removed. He in fact suggested he should just resign.
And this suggested change wasn't even a very hard attack compared to what NASA SHOULD actually have done.
If you spend 30 years and 60 billion $ achieving basically nothing and congress is incredibly happy with the program, you know you have a totally broken system.
Chips are plenty save in space, this isn't that big of a problem and doing all this logic in TTL wouldn't make sense.
You said a whole lot of nothing and no conclusion... What is your point?
Try reading it again.
We've gone back to the moon many times, just not carrying useless people.
On another note it annoys me a bit that people in power are "fine" with thousands of dead people for wars that aren't needed, but god forbid one or two people dying pursuing true exploration as volunteers.
Even the Soviet space programme, in the decades after losing something like twenty million lives in a war that everyone would rather have avoided, was not reckless with the lives of its astronauts. Because the astronauts and their training are themselves a valuable asset.
There's probably a lot to be written about the precise moral boundary, but Western culture is very against missions which are definitely suicidal while OK with those that merely have a very high chance of getting you killed.
>Because the astronauts and their training are themselves a valuable asset.
Magellan, Hudson, Cook and a litany of others were certainly not cheap cannon fodder. Yet they were allowed to take on immense personal risk and risk to their crews, above and beyond the standards of the time because it was deemed worth it.
There is a fine line between reckless and acceptable risk. The cost of such endeavors absolutely pales in comparison to the long term potential for wealth creation for the rest of humanity by making the resources of other planets reachable. I think that we as a society should be slightly more willing to let people take upon serious risk of death in the pursuit of societal progress.
Vladimir Komarov would argue against your theory
Then why cosmonauts wrote a letter to Politburo suggesting sending them to fly around the Moon in Zond capsule even though it didn't have perfect flights? The reasoning was that the spacecraft deficiencies were correctable should a crew be onboard.
Wasn't there the same situation with Soyuz-1, when they thought the man onboard would help correct flight problems?
I hope that when (if?) SpaceX's Starship becomes fully operational we'll get the sort of bold explorers going on their own missions at their own risk. If some wealthy young guys want to go on a mission to Mars in the same spirit as Shackleton or Darwin or Edmund Hillary I think they should be able to. Those explorers and scientists knew the great risks they were taking but chose to do it anyways because they valued furthering human achievement more than they valued their own safety. When an exploration mission's acceptable risk of death is 10% instead of 0.01% we'll see great things being accomplished.
They went to places that, without human exploration, we couldn't know anything about.
That's just not generally true anymore. We know things about other planets in the solar system, and planets and stars elsewhere in the galaxy, and in other galaxies, without any human ever having to go to those places.
The combination of sophisticated probes and more much sensitive sensing technology has really changed the justification for human exploration, possibly so much that the justification is mostly gone.
Except that most explorers didn't go because they cared about geology; they explored because they wanted to colonize/conquer. We evolved in Africa and literally colonized (almost) every continent on Earth before we had invented writing, much less science.
The explorers that will go out into the solar system, like Jared Isaacman, will go for glory, fame, and/or profit, none of which can be gained by probes, no matter how sophisticated.
Their trips were paid for by people who expected discoveries of various kinds to yield a net win (land, minerals, food, whatever).
The explorers' dreams are of less importance than their benefactors' expectations.
Good point. But the same applies today--the benefactors like Musk, Isaacman, and Bezos all expect to gain from the exploration, maybe not in terms of money, but at least in fame, or as they put it, "advancing human achievement."
Right. But 60 years ago, putting a human on the moon was universally seen as "advancing human achievement". I would argue that right now, where we are not actually about to build a moon or Mars base, putting people out there is not widely seen as "advancing human achievement".
Sending someone to Mars without them dying (and maybe bringing them back) will be a huge step. There's so much we can do on and around Mars, however, without anyone being out there, and some of them are also likely to be huge advancements.
Similarly for the asteroid belt. Yes, it will probably need humans out there eventually, but there's a massive, massive task of mapping and exploring it that can and almost certainly will be done without launching humans into space.
You're not entirely wrong when extrapolating from historic trends up to-say- 1999. But the price of launching humans into space has gone down dramatically as is this century (to the point where privately funded LEO missions have become viable), and looks to be going down rapidly in the near future. Space flight looks like it might be entering a period akin to Moore's law in IT.
Put a handful of geologists on a Mars base with an ATV, some hammers and chisels and I'm sure they could accomplish the greatest feats of discovery in their field perhaps ever.
Note, I'm not saying that this would be easy or safe or cheap. But I am suggesting that the science achieved by getting some real scientists on Mars would be qualitatively and quantitatively greater than robotic missions.
Given that resources are always going to be limited, absolute improvements matter less than value-per-currency-unit. And the value of putting people there at this stage of the game seems quite likely to be fairly limited.
SpaceX is currently drastically reducing the price per currency unit as is, and their current prototype is intended to smash a few more price barriers; to the point where the number of probes might hit diminishing returns, and actual human scientists become affordable. We'll have to see! At any rate it seems to be becoming commercially viable, even if SpaceX aren't the ones to do it (they do have competition chasing their tails).
AFAICT, science with actual human scientists requires every piece of equipment and then some that would be on a probe.
So the cost with actual human scientists is never going to be below a probe and will realistically be significantly higher.
That means that the actual human scientists need to bring significant value to the endeavour for it to make sense.
This argument is plausible for short range so long as there's no mass produced spacecraft with a payload capacity of 100 tons and with a range to reach Mars (at a launch cost expressed in millions, not billions). I'm cautiously optimistic we'll have that capability in the next decade or so.
At the same time we don't have the ability to reach other solar systems at all, nor projected in the next few decades. So we know relatively little about them in fact. Only as much as can be obtained by remote sensing over light years. (Which is to say: not very much.)
It's always amazed me how much we can discover just by measuring the dances of distant stars.
I love this perspective! Exploration has probably never "made sense", has it?
It’s a crucial element for control over your population. You need to instill a high worth of their lives, otherwise the danger of rebellion and refusal is too high.
Can we carry the not-useless people instead?
As soon as we get some. Main metrics of usefulness would be survival rate in hard vacuum, cosmic radiation and absolutely minimal or extreme temperatures - divided by volume, weight, price and energy requirements - and further by the useful work it can do per unit of time.
In conclusion, not any time soon. Humans will return to the Moon only when we accept that our presence there is purely symbolic/for the cool factor, and decide to eat the enormous price tag.
Yes, I can't help but think of astronauts as goldfish in bowls. There, but somehow not there.
Whenever a roboticist is asked if robots are better than humans for, say, Moon exploration, he pauses. Red Whittaker from Astrobotic was admitting that robots are not nearly as capable as humans, at the time of Google Lunar X Prize competition. Robots have improved since then, but costs to send humans have also lowered. I'd like to have a conversation on this topic before asserting the answer one way or another.
I guess the parent meant that it was comparatively way cheaper and easier to send probes, rather than people. And that we did send probes, even way further than the Moon.
> but god forbid one or two people dying pursuing true exploration as volunteers.
Given what happened to first dog sent to the space - they might not know what they’re signing up for.
either we develop a death row space program or yield future civilization in our lifetimes to the country who does.
AI driven androids (or more likely cephalopoids) might be able to bootstrap some initial habitat, but the prisoner/android conflict in spacefaring is going to be very real, imo.
Isn’t it simple economics? There’s no incentives
Perhaps entertainment might fund it? Like a reality show on the moon? Still doubt it will finance billions
Yeah, I feel like the answer seems most likely to be "no one gets excited over going to the moon the nth time". With Apollo, it was something we had never done before, and I imagine a lot of people genuinely didn't know if it could be done, making it a huge achievement for humanity. Nowadays, people grow up learning that we already have done it, and "do the same thing we did in the 1960s in the 2020s" isn't an exciting enough achievement to get the public at large interested (and would make any failures even more embarrassing).
Yeah, I feel like the answer seems most likely to be "no one gets excited over going to the moon the nth time".
All the people asking 'why can't we go to the moon' would definitely get excited. Plenty of people get excited every time SpaceX has a successful launch or achieve some innovation, but somehow you've convinced yourself that 'people on the moon' is fundamentally boring and nobody is interested.
Do you really think there's as many people as excited about SpaceX launches as there were people interested in the space race in the 60s? I'm not sure why you're assuming what my opinion is on this; I'm talking about people in aggregate, which is what matters in terms of the government investing heavily in it like they did before.
I feel like that's a big part of it.
I love the idea of spending tax money on R&D, but what would we accomplish on the moon at this point? Seems better to spend on telescopes and space stations until we have firm plans for what to do on the moon.
NASA has plenty of budget and is not driven by demand.
The US will land astronauts on the moon, probably this decade but maybe early in the 2030s. That's my bet. Compared to previous human spaceflight efforts, Artemis has the support of both major parties and the NASA community (scientists, engineers, and administrators). That was not always the case, which is why the Constellation Program failed.
Moreover, the Artemis program, unlike the "flags and footprints" goal of Apollo, has a plausible path for a sustainable human presence on the moon and an evolutionary path to a human Mars landing. If they can pull that off, with a budget smaller than Apollo, then I think NASA will deserve all the praise they get.
Will China land humans on the moon before us? No, because we already did that in 1969. But they might land humans before Artemis does. In that case, I suspect we'll see a real-live version of "For All Mankind" and we'll dump extra funding on NASA. Maybe. Or maybe we'll do what the Soviets did when we beat them and shift to something else, like Mars.
I'd like for life on earth to go to the moon again. Why should I care if it's bearing a china flag or a usa flag? Nationalism and the "us" mentality is a disease.
In my experience, different people care about different things. There's probably a bunch of things that you care about passionately that completely bore me.
I wouldn't worry about it. I definitely won't.
Globalism is the disease and it's killing Western nations.
Apollo is not entirely a good model of how it should be done now. We don't do computer services the same way SAGE or SABRE were done in the sixties either. We should try to use off the shelf solutions where appropriate. But at the same time recognize where we need bespoke solutions.
Apollo had to do so much new things because there was no commercial space sector yet. You have now. Apollo developed engines and rockets and entirely new ways of operation. It would be a mistake to expect to develop an entirely new launcher rocket engine for example just for landing people on the moon.
For example, one could use multiple SpaceX Falcon 9 launches to launch and fuel a low earth orbit vehicle that would fly to the moon and send a lander. Most of the mass in LEO would be liquid oxygen.
There were alternative plans to use LEO assembly already in Apollo but it was deemed too risky. They did end up using docking after the translunar injection (turning the CSM around) and then of course famously in lunar orbit.
So you wouldn't need any new launchers to go back to the moon if one started a project today with a short deadline.
The secret of the Apollo program was that they weren't all that safety concious; even after Apollo 1. Beating the soviets was more important.
They were very lucky they only had 2 mission failures and 3 lives lost.
My friend and I we are fixing old bikes for fun. And often the only way to figure out how to do certain things is watching YouTube videos about fixing bikes. And bikes are rather simple devices.
I guess NASA had lost all YouTube videos about how to assemble Moon rocket.
it's not that hard
it's just that the usa can only do very easy things now, because the people there have forgotten how to work together
the article explains some of the forms this takes, but, for political reasons, frames it differently
see also: bullet trains, homelessness, mass incarceration, hvdc transmission, chip fabrication, the renewable energy transition, electric vehicle manufacturing. the usa is failing to get its act together in almost every conceivable way
Yes, it is called "enshitification" - caused by the Financialization of the economy, and rent-seeking rather than innovating technologically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
that's part of it; marc andreessen's nimby posture in the atherton zoning discussion, for example, was pure rent-seeking: https://archive.fo/MjHa8
(i know that's from the 'david miscavige leads scientology to milestone year' atlantic, but i think in this case their reporting is authentic)
but i don't think that's all, or even a majority, of it. rent-seeking is at least beneficial to the rent-seeker, if successful. but most of the problem is people fighting with each other in ways that aren't profitable even to themselves. a lot of that takes the form of arguing about how to assign blame for problems instead of solving them ;)
Thanks for the article. For a comprehensive review of Artemis, in much detail, and other NASA missions, see this paper (free online and PDF versions available at the link):
NASA at a Crossroads: Maintaining Workforce, Infrastructure, and Technology Preeminence in the Coming Decades (2024)
http://nap.nationalacademies.org/27519
It's the report of a National Academies committee of experts - organized by their Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board, Space Studies Board, and Division on Engineering and Physical Science - formed to "review the critical facilities, workforce, and technology needed to achieve NASA's long-term strategic goals and mission objectives".
There is a lot of interesting material, both immediately topical and, being HN, of intellectual interest. See especially Appendix G, "NASA 20-Year Critical Missions", a list and overview of all the missions, and especially Appendix J "Technology Survey Papers", which goes into detail about critical technologies NASA needs to invent (many for Artemis) and their R&D.
Because the goal as of now is not to get to the moon. It's a government jobs program. Nothing wrong with that IMO, but in the 1960s the goal was to get to the moon before the Soviets + pour money into ICBM-adjacent tech.
Now the motives are dubious. Gateway to Mars? Cold War 2 with China? I don't think anyone even knows what the goal is other than "spend money".
Many people know what the goal is, congress is just not interested in any of them.
How does an article about costs in the space industry discuss Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Aerojet Rocketdyne, and Lockheed Martin, but never mention SpaceX?
Because that group of companies runs/maintains the ULA
A lack of competing forces
The US collectively felt that they needed to prove that capitalism was superior to communism. In this case, the contracting system was the competition between private sector entities to produce the parts and expertise, alongside NASA the state run enterprise handling requirements and coordination.
While the Soviet Union relied on more state run enterprises, aiming to prove collective coordination.
With the absence of resources up there, and lack of return, and inability to prove anything about capitalism vs communism to anyone that mattered, the programs atrophied in both unions.
The political justification to spend so much money and more importantly to take as many risks as in the '60s just isn't there anymore.
At the same time NASA probably has many other interesting missions to run today, and to operate from the past, with lower total budget than 5 decades ago.
For our next project we decided to bring venus home.
Because the NASA budget it horrible allocated and not geared towards actually achieving specific things. NASA budget is big enough, its just that it resources are horrible allocated.
I could write a lot about this topic here, I have done before, but anybody that looks at anything other then that fact first, misses the problem. Other things that people mention might play a role, but by far the biggest is politics of NASA and NASA internal politics.
Love Buzz Aldrin's response to a similar question from an 8 year old.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSuN4p8OPZA
Decline of state capacity after the 1978 abolishment of the Civil Service Commission. There were poor gatekeeping controls in place afterwards and employee quality gradually declined. Now anybody with any sort of intelligence, drive or ambition works in the private sector. Salary is one aspect, but so is the desire to avoid working with people who are dumb and never get fired.
Tell Americans that the Communist Chinese are planning to build a gender transition ray on the moon and just watch the money flow.
Thank you! I've just doubled my order of Reynolds Wrap!
There are two simple reasons.
1. You never went in the first place.
2. The moon is occupied by Nazis, aliens or both who have warned you never to return.
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This isn't really relevant to the discussion is it?