
The Next Moon Landing Is Near, Thanks to Pioneering Engineers - mcone
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/08/space-race-moon-google-lunar-xprize/
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WalterBright
The foreseeable future for man in space is the moon, not Mars. The moon is
close - orders of magnitude easier to get there and back again. Its gravity
well isn't a prison. You can probably launch stuff from there to earth with a
linear accelerator. It's full of natural resources that can be used to build
colonies and space ships. There's no environment to degrade.

Mars doesn't make any sense. The moon does.

And besides, once we learn how to build bases on the moon, which will take
trial and error, it will make it a LOT easier to build one on Mars where
mistakes are not recoverable. What are you gonna do on Mars when you find out
you forgot the soldering iron? Die. Moon bases can be resupplied.

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gozur88
No, the moon doesn't make any sense. It's a big, dusty, radiation-blasted
rock. Sure, we could build bases there, but why _would_ we? That's the
question Apollo managers could never answer and why the program was ultimately
shut down.

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WalterBright
> It's a big, dusty, radiation-blasted rock.

So is Mars. I do think we should be seeking out extremophiles on Earth and
seeding Mars with them to see if anything takes hold, but I seem to be in a
minority of one on that notion. :-)

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hutzlibu
Ah ... I doubt it would work and be worth the effort and I doubt we should do
that, before we explored mars for indiginous life first!

("probably terran!" ... reference to the the mars chronicle from K.S.Robinson)

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WalterBright
> before we explored mars for indiginous life first!

We already have. It's a liveless rock. How much more do we keep moving the
goal posts and beating that dead horse?

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hutzlibu
Maybe until we explored a bit more, than a few areas on the surface? Mars is
HUGE.

Potential areas for life might be in vulcanic areas underground.

Might not be a high chance, granted. But the chances that anything from your
project survives are far lower - but it would definitely damage research on
current or historic life on mars a lot.

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tomrod
Eventually our microbial biomes will merge with any ecosystem or planet we
visit. It's virtually guaranteed. This shouldn't stand in the way of our
visiting, we should simply be prepared for intermixture.

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swatkat
I have great hopes on Team Indus. Hoping they'll pull of this mission. They've
signed a PSLV-XL launch contract with ISRO, and they seem to be on track with
spacecraft and rover development[0]. Japan's X-prize entrant HAKUTO will also
be ride-sharing on this mission[1].

It'll be an exciting 2018 for us, we have two moon rover missions from India -
Chandrayaan 2 from ISRO[2], and Team Indus.

[0] [https://medium.com/teamindus/teamindus-missionlog-
august-67e...](https://medium.com/teamindus/teamindus-missionlog-
august-67ececc8e4e5)

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/20/14023336/google-
lunar-x-...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/20/14023336/google-lunar-x-
prize-teams-moon-pslv-rocket-hakuto-indus)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-2)

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isostatic
"we have two moon rover missions from India"

How can India justify a moon mission when you can barely walk round Delhi with
tripping over homeless _children_?

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iUsedToCode
I'm guessing that's the reason they are doing a moon mission. Have to give
them hope, have to jump start the economy. Can't saw trousers for eternity,
can they?

Educated people will continue fleeing if nothing is done to keep them in. You
cannot solve homelessness by giving out houses, jobs are the biggest help.

~~~
isostatic
_You cannot solve homelessness by giving out houses_

[https://medium.com/homes-for-the-homeless/solving-
homelessne...](https://medium.com/homes-for-the-homeless/solving-homelessness-
in-san-francisco-65d13ce12a9)

"If you take one thing away from this post, remember that the very best way to
help the homeless, and how we can turn things around, is to provide them
housing in safe areas surrounded by supportive services."

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valuearb
The Lunar X prize competition is really neat, and I'll follow raptly. But it's
unlikely to do much for actually space exploration, just as the original
X-Prize did little to advance access to space.

If SpaceX sends a manned Dragon around the moon, that's only going to be a
thousand times more important than landing tiny rovers on the moon.

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meric
Are you talking about spaceshipone?

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Retric
I have often heard it refereed to as, Not A Space Ship One.

Even 160 kilometers has quite a bit of atmospheric drag, and Spaceshipone only
just broke 100 kilometers.

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aphextron
These prizes really confuse me. Wouldn't it cost more than $20 million just to
get something into LEO with existing technology? How can mounting a robotic
lunar mission possibly be done for less than that?

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jk4930
I work with PTScientists.com/ (a GLXP team until end of 2016). You keep launch
costs low by ride-sharing (secondary payload). One revenue source is to sell
payload space to third parties (what we did). Additional funding can come from
sponsors (in our case Audi and Vodafone).

The intention of the prize is not to cover the costs but to kickstart an
ambitious private space movement. One needs to be very lean, inventive, and
somewhat risk-taking under those conditions. It forces one to think of
business models that make the whole thing independent from a possible prize
money (and government funding, which under GLXP rules is limited to 10%).

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jcslzr
what do you mean, if guys did it in 1969, why is now so hard? or you are
saying that it was fake almost 50 years ago?

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alsadi
Or possibly first /s

