Why is there suddenly a great interest in a new moon landing after more than 50 years?
In: Planetary Science
The big goal now is to put the first human being on Mars. Given that the trip to Mars is ~~3~~ 7mo each way, it only makes sense to go to Mars if we stay there for a little while and do research – no couple-day trips like we did for the original Apollo moon landings, but rather weeks or even months on planet.
This requires us to do something we’ve never done before – build a (semi) permanent base on a non-Earth object. There are going to be some significant challenges in building something like that, and it is better to experience those challenges somewhere that _isn’t_ 7mo away, just in case something goes wrong. The moon is the logical place to test – build a base there, iron out the kinks, and then use what we learn to put the base on Mars.
Of course, for us to build a base on the moon, we need to start heading back there again. Hence the interest.
Dey vant to land wessels on the moon to bring back HE3 to make high-yield nuclear fusion warheads with.
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Back in the 60’s, with the tech at the time, it was possible to send people to the moon by spending a huge amount of resources and being willing to deal with a fair amount of risk to the astronauts. And the political situation at the time made the US government willing to spend that money and face that risk of failure. But although it was possible to send some humans there for a couple days, the technology wasn’t really good enough to do much more there than look around and collect rocks. And so outside of political posturing it was hard to justify all of the expense and risk. So once the US got the political payoffs of being the first to accomplish it, they lost interest and decided to stop spending so much money. Basically the US was able to send people on a trip to the moon, but nothing about the Apollo project was really fiscally sustainable over the long term.
Now it’s over 50 years later, and there’s a couple things at play. First off there’s once again starting to be some political incentives to space exploration, but also we’ve got more than 5 decades worth of general technological progress that allows us to make much more capable spacecraft and also accomplish a lot of tasks for significantly cheaper than was possible in the 60’s.
The $1500 PC that I’m typing this comment on is capable of powering 3D design software and/or running simulations that are orders of magnitude more complicated than anything that all of NASA had available to them back in the 60’s. These advancements in tech have gotten the point where we’re approaching some thresholds where launching stuff into space is getting cheap and routine enough that it’s starting to look possible to potential do things like build outposts on the moon and maybe Mars, and do so in something approaching an economically sustainable way.
The biggest reason is China. They’ve been steadily ramping up their space operations for decades now. They have a space station roughly a third the size of the ISS in orbit. They’ve put up their own version of GPS. They’ve landed uncrewed landers on the far side of the moon. They’re preparing a sample return mission for launch soon. They’re planning for a crewed base at the lunar south pole to harvest water ice. The US doesn’t want the Chinese to have any advantage, so they’re going to try to do similar projects to stay on the same footing.
Why? Because in space possession is 99.9% of the law. If the Chinese establish a base at a strategic location on the south pole of the moon, they could easily break the outer space treaty and declare ownership of as much of the moon as they desire. If the US can’t match with a base of their own, the Chinese get a massive leg up in future space exploration and exploitation while the US struggles to play catch-up. Remember, all space exploration stems from military demand. A base on the moon extracting water for rocket fuel is a huge advantage compared to the current strategy of launching all our fuel up on top of a rocket.
Make America Great Again, right?
What they are looking to do is harvest the water on the Moon from the water you can create hydrogen and oxygen, which is basically rocket fuel. Due to the Moon having a lot less gravity than Earth it takes a lot less fuel to leave the Moon than it does the Earth so potentially you can leave the Moon with a substantial amount of fuel onboard making a deep space mission easier. 50 years ago they didn’t think the Moon had any water.
Mars. So now you’re asking… but why the moon again?
Fair question. Because we forgot how to land on celestial bodies and must re-learn that skill. Yes really. You see… We can’t use any of the same systems or processes we used in the 1960s and nobody has done it with modern avionics or methods. We have to learn how to do it all over again, essentially from scratch.
The initial moon landing was a major unifying moment for the west. It was a clear victory over the Russian space program. A lot of Americans have nostalgia for that moment, being the country to do something no one else has done, before anyone else on a new frontier.
The moon landing is sort of the downgraded mission. George W Bush started this process with the goal of getting a man on the moon by 2020 only to be used as a launching point for missions to Mars. But now it appears to be 2027 with no launching point being setup any time soon.
So NASA is trying really hard to sell the merits of this $90B mission.
A lot of people hoped that this process would lead to the technological boom that the first moon landing lead to. A lot of technologies were developed during this time period. The problem now is that the private industry invests so much in R&D ($700B/year) that there’s no way that NASA’s $22B/year budget would ever be able to keep up. It’s now the other way that NASA relies on the private industry to invent the technologies it needs.
its like when they reboot old franchises / movies because they might be able to squeeze a bit of money out of it again
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