As I write this, four astronauts are on their way around the moon for the first time in 50 years. A lot us have asked ourselves just exactly why you’d send people out that far when the environment is so hostile and we have increasingly competent robots that could do the jobs in their place. If anything, that’s even more true now than it was back in the day of the Apollo program, when the remote operations capability was a lot more constrained. But having people, potentially in the near future, on the lunar surface remains qualitatively different.
I was recently re-watching some of the footage from Apollo 16 when the astronauts were driving around in the Lunar Roving Vehicle, and the discussions that they’re having about the lunar geology that they can see for the first time with their own eyes is very convincing. Having people in situ tightens the loop of “hey, that’s interesting”, “let’s take a closer look”, and “I wonder what that means” in a way that minutes or hours of transmission time, and sterile observation of photos on a computer monitor just break. In comparison, our Mars rovers move excruciatingly slowly, the data comes back through a very thin pipe, and it takes months or years to analyze.
Of course, there is danger to human life; it’s a lot more expensive to get people safely to, and importantly back from, the moon than it would be with a disposable robot. Comparison with the Mars rovers is also unfair because travel to Mars is another scale entirely. Even if it does make sense to send humans for exploration on the moon, it may not make sense to do the same on the red planet, in the near future or ever. Given all that, I’m stoked that we can see through the robots eyes, but if all else were equal, I’m sure that we’d learn more from human explorers.
While in a lot of ways the Artemis I and now the Artemis II missions are underwhelming in comparison to the many “firsts” of Apollo, I absolutely appreciate them for what they are: a shakedown trial of a set of technologies and practices that we used to grasp, but which have atrophied over the last five decades. If a new generation of scientists is to put feet onto regolith, we need to learn to walk before they can run, or rover. In that spirit, I’ll be crossing my fingers for the future of manned spaceflight over the next week and a half.
This is where we should have been in 1975.
All politics and money problems aside, we should have been courageous enough as a country to continue to explore the Moon. The ASTP (Apollo-Soyuz) should NEVER have been the final Apollo mission.
the case for humans on the moon is that you can deploy telepresence systems with zero lag with the operator sitting in a shirt sleeve environment rather than crammed into a space suit. and if that robot ever breaks down you either walk it to an airlock, or have another robot walk it to the airlock if it cant walk, and then be able to affect maintenance. sure beats a bunch of people in mission control debating the best way to avoid a rock and then waiting several seconds to see if it worked. if you want to build permanent lunar infrastructure at a useful pace, thats how you do it.
It’s not a race.
Until you realise we are one disaster away from a great filter.
Win the race or lose it, entropy wins in the end. No big deal.
If you have to invent completely new existential threats to rationalize your actions, it’s a hint that maybe you what you are doing is not that reasonable.
What about reusing some of the hardware left on the moon by the “old” missions in the future moon base missions ?
E.g. may be the rovers, fitting them with new batteries, cameras and comm hardware ?
Not thinking in terms of cost but of cargo space and weight in the future missions.
Best regards,
Daniel F. Larrosa
Montevideo – Uruguay
Cosmic rays do amazing in circuit modifications to electronics and you cant really harden them to prevent that mod. Stuff on the moon is probably trash sad to say. But what can i know, i just built sattelites in LEO
Was going to say pretty much similar. Though I would be curious to know what condition the rubber-and-piano-wire tires look like these days, as well as the fenders (especially the one John Young had to field repair after an accident with a survey hammer).
Hi! Radio tubes and relays aren’t much vulnerable to radiation.
Neither are incandescent lamps and mechanical devices.
Stuff meant to be left on moon simply has to be built using the right type of technology, I think.
It doesn’t have to be transistor/diode based technology all day long.
The reasonable place to build a moon base is near the poles, where sun doesn’t set. All the Apollo hardware is near the equator.
Moon dust is like asbestos. It sticks to EVERYTHING due to it being electrostatically charged by the solar wind AND it’s radioactive because of neutron activation. All those visions of astronauts going outside to “build bases” or “do science” is pure copium.
I don’t really understand what’s the point of sending people there just so that they can sit locked in a tin can for months. They already do it on ISS and what are the measurable scientific gains from that?
Why do people climb a mountain? Because it’s there.
There is a lot of what you say that I agree with. I’d also add that actively killing the one undeniably habitable planet we know of in our solar system while going out to explore one that is absolutely uninhabitable is a very strange expression of intelligence.
I also have to laugh at one of NASA’s justifications for Artemis ll. I quote;
Human eyes and brains are highly sensitive to subtle changes in color, texture, and other surface characteristics.
To the human eye the moon is black, white and grey. There are no colors visible from orbit.
They are really desperate to try and justify this mission scientifically. It just isn’t a scientific mission. It’s just an amazing engineering exercise.
The point never was to replace Earth as our home planet.
It was about growing up as a species and society and leaving the cradle.
Going to the Moon made us look back, made us admire Earth even more.
By understanding to solve colonization of other planets, moons and things we might discover a cure a long the way to our own ecological problems down here on Earth.
Things like better water and air filtering, recycling methods, new types of food or other new things related to environmental protection.
It will also give new insights about how low gravity affects human body.
And the Moon simply is the next baby step after Earth orbit.
Going straight to Mars without visiting the Moon first isn’t reasonable in my eyes, it’s just another form of actionism.
We must learn how to walk before we can run.
Joshua,
We know how to fix our ecological problems. We just collectively refuse to do this.
It’s the whole weird misapplied intellegence thing. I see the human race as creatures with the emotional intelligence of a bunch of chimps that wield the power of gods.
And I don’t exclude myself from this judgement. I may just be a little more aware of it in myself than the average Jane or Joe.
As far as discovering solutions to our ecological problems by traveling to the moon I see that as wish full thinking. As I said above, why hope for unknown solutions when known solutions exist?
Artemis will add zero new information to how microgravity effects the human body. The ISS is doing that job. The whole “how does lack of gravity effect the human body” is a funny circular engagement ie we need to send humans into space to see how space effects human beings. We have been doing this since manned spaceflight first happened and the answer is, human bodies don’t do well in space.
Cheers.
Wrong again—it is a draw. The SLS core came about due to human spaceflight—and it can place probes in orbit of Ice Giants.
Falcon is too weak.
If they were bold enough they could, you know, do it anyways. I’d take a short life of moon exploration over a long life at an office job any day.
On the surface, but how deep does it go?
I do imagine the moon has craters that could be used as hideouts for underground moon bases, maybe.
In your opinion. You forgot to add that bit of detail.
There might scientists/researchers more experienced than us, maybe, that beg to differ.
People who spent years or decades making it a reality.
Fourth attempt at a comment.
“A lot us have asked ourselves just exactly why you’d send people out”.
50 years ago they were going to and from the moon with nonchalance, with elegance, singing and jumping and doing autocross, today’s problems arising from the immeasurable technological difference require much more audacity.
much like certain people have been said to be a “poor person’s idea of what a rich person is” — sending humans to the moon is a pseudoscientist’s idea of what science is
I would rather do, than gripe at people for not doing. In that spirit this is the first step towards a moon base for American, European and Chinese people, and I applaud it in its shonky, over-expensive glory.
Rule #1.
Never kill a Moon-rocket that actually performs in favor of a tiled monstrosity that’s supposed to be cheaper-this and re-usable that.
We made that mistake once America.
Let’s not repeat that mistake.
Not that Starship can’t be useful…hauling toilet contents back from Orion capsules, say.
But the rocket didn’t have the same use as the shuttle?
The main reasons the shuttle wasn’t cheaper in the long run was the US military, look it up.
A few years back I heard that NASA has several tons of moon rock that nobody ever looked at.
So perhaps we can send a probe to NASA storage facilities? How much would that cost?