Back on the moon | PASOTI
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Back on the moon

May 16, 2016
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Back in the Apollo days, when the year 2021 was soooo far i the future we all thought we'd be living on the moon by then.

Here we are in 2024 still clearing up WW2 bombs !
 

BDW

Apr 15, 2023
243
114
A whole generation of manned space exploration has been missed. NASA has lost a lot of funding.
To think that man landed on the moon in 1969.
Here we are 55 years later experimenting/testing again is stilted progress.
 

IJN

🇳🇬🇳🇬🇳🇬🇳🇬
Nov 29, 2012
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28,698
There are those that say we didn't. ;)
 
Feb 17, 2004
11,065
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cheshire
With the ambitions of China and India to exploit the potential of space, both the lunar possibilities and beyond, I wonder if this will focus NASA and political minds over the pond.

Having said that the Presidental candidates are so old they may have little interest in such adventures.
 

BDW

Apr 15, 2023
243
114
With the ambitions of China and India to exploit the potential of space, both the lunar possibilities and beyond, I wonder if this will focus NASA and political minds over the pond.

Having said that the Presidental candidates are so old they may have little interest in such adventures.
They are of the age when the space race was at its peak!
 

MickyD

✨Pasoti Donor✨
Dec 30, 2004
4,021
1,020
Brighton
A whole generation of manned space exploration has been missed. NASA has lost a lot of funding.
To think that man landed on the moon in 1969.
Here we are 55 years later experimenting/testing again is stilted progress.
Two generations, really, aside from the ISS, Tiangong and a few earlier, more basic efforts, none of which quite count as exploration.

Nevertheless, even with its drastically reduced funding over many years, NASA can boast a very long list of truly remarkable achievements over those decades with unmanned probes whizzing around all over the solar system and now even beyond thanks to the Voyagers. In more recent years there've also been many fantastically successful missions by ESA, JAXA, China and others. (Plenty of failures too, but space is hard - the hardest thing of all.)

I was an Apollo child myself - two of the great defining moments of my early life were 30th July 1966 and 20th July 1969 (and it's my birthday on the 19th, so very well timed!) - and I've been sad to see such an unexpected hiatus in human exploration. The fact is, though, in terms of launch payload and even the most basic living requirements we meatbags are an appallingly inefficient drain on resources in space - and all the Elon Musk hyperbole about Moon and Mars colonies happening any day now is complete garbage, as he well knows.

What with modern computing, instrumentation, propulsion systems, power generation and storage, AI and robotics, unmanned missions can achieve almost everything a human mission could, and actually an awful lot more besides, being capable of lasting years and years, travelling vast distances and just quietly getting on with multiple jobs 24 hours a day with no need for oxygen, warmth, food, drink, living space, sleep, toilet facilities, emotional support, and all those other things that needy humans require. About the only thing an unmanned mission can't provide these days is the boost to the insatiable human ego that only comes with someone planting a flag somewhere - and that's always worked out well, hasn't it?
 
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Feb 17, 2004
11,065
1,957
cheshire
Thing is the way the climate appears to be changing, we might need to have another place to inhabit although not in my lifetime.

Certainly we seem to be capable of wrecking this planet and, at some point in the future, I think, the clamour to colonise some other celestial body will grow. Then the fun will begin.

Fully accept that unmanned missions have a huge potential as well as providing great opportunities though.
 

MickyD

✨Pasoti Donor✨
Dec 30, 2004
4,021
1,020
Brighton
Thing is the way the climate appears to be changing, we might need to have another place to inhabit although not in my lifetime.

Certainly we seem to be capable of wrecking this planet and, at some point in the future, I think, the clamour to colonise some other celestial body will grow. Then the fun will begin.

Fully accept that unmanned missions have a huge potential as well as providing great opportunities though.
The idea of colonising even the Moon in any meaningful numbers is, I believe, a complete fantasy even in the medium term, and probably will be for a very long time, by which time it will most likely be far too late for humanity.

Anyway, when the world is burning and human society is collapsing in some (probably not too distant) future time, who will have the wherewithal to accelerate technological advancement and build thousands of rockets, using vast resources that still have to be mined and processed and put together in ultra-sophisticated ways, that would still take only a vanishingly tiny percentage of the population to some unimaginably inhospitable place like the Moon or Mars? Maybe the ultra-ultra-elites, but certainly nobody else.

And the Moon and Mars are by far the 'best', 'easiest' options! Forget the utter hellscapes that are the inner planets Mercury and Venus; and beyond Mars are the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. Good luck landing there. (I'm not even going to bother with the ice giants Uranus and Neptune, further out again.)

And none of that even takes into account the vast amounts of time required to get anywhere more distant than the Moon - at best months, even to Mars when it's in the right part of its orbit relative to Earth. Nor does it account for the significant resources that just one human requires to survive in space for even a short period of time.

In fuel terms alone, to propel any serious amounts of mass out of Earth's gravity well and get it up to a decent speed would probably require us to crack not just nuclear fusion (which, infamously, is always 'decades away' and still is), but the technology to build very small fusion reactors that would fit inside a rocket. Until that day comes, if it ever does, the overwhelming percentage of the weight of any rocket achieving escape velocity and leaving Earth's gravitational influence will always be the fuel. Think of the size of the Saturn V with three tiny people right at the top. Nearly all of that monstrous volume was fuel, and we're still using basically the same stuff today.

Then there's acceleration and deceleration - we can't take too many G's for any length of time before our brains turn to mush, so everything has to be done painfully slowly (relatively speaking) in terms of speeding up to leave Earth then slowing down again at the other end. That can add months or years to even a 'short' journey through space.

And then there's radiation and cosmic ray exposure over long periods, and only so many ways to mitigate the problem... the list goes on and on.

Sad to say, we're stuck here, probably for ever because I think we'll cease to exist as a technologically advanced species before we get off the planet in any significant way. Generation ships, O'Neill cylinders and their like will, I suspect, always remain firmly within the realms of science fiction and futurology. Unless things work out far better than I imagine they will, I can't see more than a few hundred humans ever living permanently off Earth. I'd love to be wrong, but I won't be here to know one way or the other!

I've loved all things space since I was a kid but that means that I've learned a lot about it over the decades, and in terms of hoping to fulfil Dan Dare/Futurama/Star Trek-type fantasies I'm afraid it turns out that it's pretty much all bad news for us squishy, short-lived mammals.
 
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Nov 18, 2011
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I understood the reason that NASA stopped sending missions to the moon was that they didn't really learn much new from them and they were insanely expensive. They'd already proven they could do it.

Of course it's still a big deal for an emerging state or for a private company to send something there, I bet North Korea would love to send willing/unwilling astronauts into space!
 
Jul 15, 2006
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Kenton, Devon
I understood the reason that NASA stopped sending missions to the moon was that they didn't really learn much new from them and they were insanely expensive. They'd already proven they could do it.

Of course it's still a big deal for an emerging state or for a private company to send something there, I bet North Korea would love to send willing/unwilling astronauts into space!

Yep, it was insanely expensive. I remember reading that the Shuttle launches cost something close to two billion dollars a time, which was stupidly expensive for a reusable craft trying to get into low-Earth orbit - something like $30,000 per pound of payload. SpaceX can launch into space for "just" around $70million, or $1,200 per pound of payload. And I think that was always the model everyone hoped would take place: that world governments would prove it was possible to get into space (or to the Moon, Mars, etc), but it would be private enterprise who would drive the costs down to make it affordable.