Yes, a robot car that drives on its own will be a better driver than most humans who text and drive, or have 400ms reaction times.
But making a machine that can beat a 110ms reaction time human with 2SD+ IQ, and the ability to override the ground controllers with human curiosity is much harder. Humans have high dexterity, are extremely capable of switching roles fast, are surprisingly efficient, and force us to return back home.
So in terms of total science return, one Apollo mission did more for lunar science and discovery than 53 years of robots on the surface and in orbit.
Because many small steps are required before every giant leap.
I would like to point out that the current misadventure in the ME has cost at least $38,035,856,006 in 32 days. And that won't receive half of the "this is a waste of money" critiques this mission will. And there are a ton of people who are against that excursion.
Most people who will come across this will react with either extreme negativity or indifference. Very few people will react positively. This thread itself is evidence of that. This is a nerdy community filled with people who are deeply positive about space exploration and excluding my comments, the straw poll was,
When I see numbers like that ($38 billion) thrown around I always wonder: Where did that money go? In the best case, it stayed in the economy in the form of salaries and such. In the worst case, it goes directly into an offshore pile of mega-wealth where it won't benefit the economy and likely won't even be taxed. Is there any way to determine where on this continuum this program stands? I'm guessing the 1960s space program, while incredibly expensive, was firmly on the "money stays in the economy" side.
That kind of money, even if it goes to a single person, doesn't get taken out of the economy. No one puts it under the mattress. It's invested, so it's basically given to other people in exchange for a promise of equity / future returns.
It might not be the allocation of capital we like, but it doesn't disappear.
Well, there is a financial 'sink' - stockpiles and ammunition or other non-reusable military gear are basically the definition of money 'destroyed'. Their political value is almost non-existent actual money. If any, at all.
> stockpiles and ammunition or other non-reusable military gear are basically the definition of money 'destroyed'
Goods like longer-lasting food, medical supplies or a strategic oil reserve are not wasted. The money that went into supplying them has gone back into the economy, and they serve a more strategic purpose than the market participants could have borne (i.e. societal insurance policies). The same could also be said of military stockpiles, and continuing to buy them sustains a capability that is hard to get back once lost.
Those stockpiles weren’t created by putting money into a shredder and getting ammunition out. They were created by paying for the materials and labor. At that point the government’s money is frozen and stockpiled, but the economy still has the money that was spent.
> No one puts it under the mattress. It's invested, so it's basically given to other people in exchange for a promise of equity / future returns.
You make wealth concentration sound like a good thing somehow. This was publicly collected tax money, that will go on to enrich some already rich douchebag.
Only in the last few minutes, the livestream actually covered various goals this mission - explicitly a test mission - is meant to achieve. For example, one they just mentioned is they're going to be doing some docking maneuvers practice.
This is not just training the current flight crew and ground crews, but is also generally testing the entire system - including operations and hardware too, with feedback important to logistics and component manufacturers, etc. With possible exception of Falcon 9 launches, space missions are still infrequent enough that each of them is providing knowledge and experience meaningfully relevant to all work in and adjacent to space exploration and space industry.
Not just yet. Give it a few more years for AI (haha, another thing yielding stupid amount of value to everyone, that people are totally oblivious of - your antibiotics comparison in another subthread kinda applies too) - but for now, having actual people with full sensory capabilities, able to look at stuff on-site (and hear, and smell), is something we can't fully cover with computers and sensors. We can recover that and more data later, but it's a delayed, after-the-fact analysis. There's value in immediate feedback and immediate decisions.
> for now, having actual people with full sensory capabilities, able to look at stuff on-site (and hear, and smell), is something we can't fully cover with computers and sensors
Is this really helpful for a tech validation flight? We can put those sensors onboard.
> We can recover that and more data later, but it's a delayed, after-the-fact analysis. There's value in immediate feedback and immediate decisions
To a degree. We’ve validated vehicles remotely for LEO enough times that I’m sceptical we need humans for that. (Again, we do for ground-crew interaction training.)
> Apollo was over three orders of magnitude more efficient in producing scientific papers per day of fieldwork than are the MERs. This is essentially the same as Squyres’ (2005) intuitive estimate given above, and is consistent with the more quantitative analogue fieldwork tests reported by Snook et al. (2007).
Scientific papers are a pretty poor measure of productivity so here's another one. We know about the existence of He-3 thanks to samples brought back from astronauts on the moon. Astronauts setup fiddly UV telescope experiments on the moon, trying to set up a gravimeter to measure gravitational waves, digging into the soil to put explosive charges at different ranges for seismic measurement of the moon's subsurface... They were extremely productive. Most of what we know about the moon happened thanks to the 12 days spent on the lunar surface.
If your goal is to save money, just ignore the moon. This is not the west indies to be exploited, at least not yet. These are scientific missions, not economic missions.
The philosopher Randall Munroe once wrote:
> The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.
I see Munroe's work as filling the same role in society as did Socrates in his time. Not only in commentary about current events, government, society, etc but also in expressing his viewpoints in a fashion accessible to society. Socrates paved the way to bring philosophy to the masses. Munroe uses a popular medium and comedy to the same effect.
Because the goal of the program is to return humans to the moon. Artemis I was the unmanned test. This is the first manned test, and what they learn will support the subsequent missions that eventually land humans on the moon.
This is the same way that all manned spaceflight programs are conducted. You iterate and learn a little bit at a time. "Move fast and break things" doesn't work here. :)
If you can fly people around the moon, then landing people on the moon is a more reasonable next step.
I agree that it may not be entirely logical, but keeping public and funding opinion positive & invested _is_ important.
edit: I thought RocketLab flew their elecron rocket around the moon a few years ago? So it's definitely doable... so again I think it's about the optics.
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
Money being fungible and all, the rest can pretend their tax money is going exclusively to their favorite programs, whether that's healthcare or environment or building roads or starting wars or funding more startups or whatever.
> That we probably could have developed without the space program for a fraction of the cost, if we're being honest
I don't think so. Some people are good at small tasks and stewardship. Some people want to ambitiouslyl build. If there isn't a space program, the engineers who were inspired to join NASA cannot be assumed to have gone into semiconductors or material science. They probably wound up, in the alternate timeline, bureaucrats or financiers.
> If there isn't a space program, the engineers who were inspired to join NASA [...] probably wound up, in the alternate timeline, bureaucrats or financiers.
I guess this is why in this timeline, all engineers in the world are at NASA working on sending humans to space, and everybody else in the world is a bureaucrat.
Do you actually know any kind of engineering that is not happening at NASA? Because it may explain your bias here.
They did say "or financiers". There's an old quote:
Finance literally bids rocket scientists away from the satellite industry. The result is that erstwhile scientists, people who in another age dreamt of curing cancer or flying to Mars, today dream of becoming hedge fund managers.
> guess this is why in this timeline, all engineers in the world are at NASA
How does this follow? Are you arguing the Moon programs didn’t increase American engagement in STEM?
The point is the people who worked on a partial solution to a terrestrial problem because they were working on space may not be inspired—or incentivized—to work on that problem directly. We’re willing, as a society, to spend big on the Moon. Spending big on creek maintenance and desal, comparatively, is boring. Yet both benefit from the first.
> you actually know any kind of engineering that is not happening at NASA?
Yes. Have you done any heavy engineering?
> it may explain your bias here
Do tell me, someone who has never worked at or particularly close to NASA, what my bias is here.
> Are you arguing the Moon programs didn’t increase American engagement in STEM?
Nope. You are arguing that without a space program, people don't go into STEM and instead become "bureaucrats or financiers". I am saying that this is preposterous.
> We’re willing, as a society, to spend big on the Moon.
No. Society doesn't have a say in how that money is being spent, that's my original point.
> You are arguing that without a space program, people don't go into STEM and instead become "bureaucrats or financiers"
I never used such hyperbole. I’m arguing fewer people go into STEM. And the people who do cannot be assumed to work on the projects that matter to you.
> Society doesn't have a say in how that money is being spent
Of course we do. Space programmes are popular. That’s why they get funded.
> And the people who do cannot be assumed to work on the projects that matter to you.
That's the case with or without a space program that sends humans to space for the sake of sending humans to space.
> Space programmes are popular. That’s why they get funded.
Space programs are popular because they are cool. The people don't get to vote the budgets, though. Because DOGE did not cut the budget of the space programs does not mean that "society is willing to spend big on the Moon". At all.
> Because DOGE did not cut the budget of the space programs
DOGE absolutely tried to gut Artemis [1]. The popularity is part of what saved it. (Weirdly myopic metric for what is and isn’t popular? Since when did DOGE become arbiters of anything.)
I will guess that farm subsidies go to... well, farming. Doesn't sound completely ridiculous at first sight.
> you're mad about space exploration?
Exploration? It's not exploration at all: it's sending 4 humans for a 10 days trip around the Moon. I wish they used the money for actual space exploration, though.
Independent of how scientifically awesome this is, this is probably the most cost effective long term propaganda. Why waste money on posters when you can orbit the moon.
The amount of my taxes that went toward people flying on this trip is so small to be not worth considering.
I'm much more concerned about my tax dollars going toward the US military, especially with Trump wanting another $200B so he can murder more people in Iran while making the world and the US measurably less safe.
It is a test of the spacecraft. They need people onboard to test all the human systems. But yes, if this was a purely scientific flyby and not part of a larger manned program, machines would do it fine.
Yeah. Doesn't really make sense. The entire mission could be done remotely.
Even with a goal of eventually putting humans on the moon, it'd be better to do an automated run, measure everything in the cockpit, and put in sandbags and/or something to consume O2 to make sure the CO2 scrubbers are working correctly. It's maybe cruel, but a few dogs would work fine for that sort of thing. A flame would be better, but it's pretty dangerous.
The first mission in decades doesn't need to have humans in it.
