Why does it seem so challenging now to send a manned crew to the moon, when we were able to accomplish this over 50 years ago?
In: Economics
The math and building process got easier, but the amount of force required to get up there stayed the same. Generating that amount of force is very expensive.
Backing of the people and government for this kind of thing, both from a moral standpoint and a financial standpoint, are not what they once were.
Launching, landing, and re-launching anything with mass is expensive.
The more mass, the more expensive.
A person weighs ~76 Kg.
Then needs water and food.
And pressurized atmosphere.
And if that person’s brain doesn’t get oxygen for ~2 minutes, it catastrophically fails.
Our bodies have evolved for a billion years to live on this planet, and this is where our bodies will stay.
But I am wholeheartedly for space exploration. The Rosetta/Philae mission to comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko was super cool.
I just don’t think a person can do anything in space that a robot can’t do safer, better, and most importantly, less expensive.
imagine going to the moon in a coal-powered car. That was the first mission. Gotta build a fucking sweet-ass car to get us there again.
You crank NASA’s budget back up to 4% of GDP and they’ll be moon bases and Mars bases in a decade or two. It’s not harder to do they just don’t have the funds to do it.
It’s not a challenge to do it. It’s a challenge to get enough money to do it. Give NASA 50 trillion dollars and they could do it in a year or so.
We understand the technologies required but NASA’s budget is only $21.5 billion for 2019 – and due to decrease in 2020. If we wanted to go we could, but no-one in power thinks it’s a priority. We could probably make some scientific advances with human exploration of the solar system, however it’s hard to see what benefit there would be over using robotic vehicles. The real challenges of space exploration aren’t going on sight-seeing trips around the solar system, but are in solving the challenges of traveling between stars in time frames that make human exploration feasible. That would require a step change in technology as significant as moving from the stone age to the nuclear age. Just my opinion, but spending a ton more money on the lab coats down here on earth would be the best step we could make to advance space exploration.
Elon Musk could probably do it tomorrow… but why?
The issue is money. 50 years ago the money was spent because of national security. Today we can’t figure out the business model to make this work. Part of the frustrating part of that is that we know that once we get there we can do some amazingly valuable things. We could construct spaceships that are the stuff of science fiction today. We could prep fuel for ships traveling to other planets and harvest metals and resources that are next to impossible to find on Earth. But you kind of need that whole ecosystem to be in place before any of those things are valuable.
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