Ask HN: Why has nobody gone to the Moon since 1972? - audessuscest
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yc1010
I was just reading this today, first part deals with this subject >
[http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-
coloni...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-
mars.html)

I asked the same question of an old engineer at Kennedy Space center who was
talking about the Saturn rockets to a (small) group of people (most just
wanted take photos and cared little for history). He was quite blunt in his
response, "We were doing great but then someone higher up decided that we won
the manhood measuring contest and its better to spend public funds on bombing
some poor souls in paddy fields half a world away..."

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transfire
There is plenty to gain from it. But it is a long term prospect. Unfortunately
today, everyone is after the quick profit (You know like building bombs.)

Some examples:

* A telescope on the moon could be larger due to the reduced gravity, and have a better view without the atmosphere.

* Helium-3 mining, not to mention plenty of other resources that are starting to become somewhat scarce and hard to reach on Earth.

* Since the gravity is a 6th of Earth's, launching space exploration vehicles from the Moon would be much easier and thus cheaper.

* Colonizing the Moon would be first step in getting all man's eggs out of one basket, so to speak.

* If man can setup a sustainable ecosystem on the Moon, then he can do so almost anywhere. It really is a great testbed for expanding into the cosmos.

* The Lunar Olympics will be awesome!

~~~
goykasi
These all seem like very sensible wins -- especially #6.

I think #5 is the most interesting, but my immediate first question, as a
total layman for space travel/survival, is how do we keep breathing up there?
It seems like solving the O2 to Moon transport is a reasonable problem to
tackle -- assuming we get people and gear up there -- albeit a lot of effort.
How about the next outpost? And then the next? Do we continue bunny hopping O2
transports from Moon to Mars to Earth2... etc until there is a continuous
supply of breathable air out from Earth? Or do we have a way to generate as we
go further? Are we at mercy of Earth's O2 supply? That seems like the biggest
problem for leaving this planet.

~~~
jamesfisher
Oxygen doesn't get used up. It comes back out as carbon dioxide. We would just
need a way to extract the oxygen from the carbon dioxide again. One solution
is photosynthesis, i.e. some plants.

~~~
goykasi
> Oxygen doesn't get used up... We would just need a way to extract the
> oxygen...

Is that literally all there is to it -- minus reasonable loss? Does something
like that already exist?

> i.e. some plants

Perfect! Do you think that plants can make up the loss from systems that we
could set up for converting CO2 back to O2? When can fly some cows and
chickens up there? Throwing plants and livestock on the Moon seems too good to
be true.

Also, completely off topic, does anybody know the current value per acre of
Moon?

~~~
Vendan
One useful thing, not currently used due to space, weight, and power issues,
most of which would be minimal issues on the moon, is the Bosch reaction.
Basically, CO2 + H2 => C + H2O. Split the H2O(water), and you get back the H2
to reuse in the Bosch reaction, and breathable O2.

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tdicola
The intense cold war of the 50's and 60's ended and the cost couldn't be
justified. Make no mistake, if there wasn't the constant fear that our enemy
would use space to drop nukes on our head we never would have made it to space
& the moon as fast as we did.

~~~
mbfg
Agreed NASA's funding is directly tied to the concern over war, especially
with super powers. You can assume that NASA's budget will dwindle into the
future, unless this fear re-emerges.

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veddox
Several reasons, some of which are:

1) "Been there, done that - why go back?"

2) The Soviets aren't trying to get there anymore, so the Americans don't see
the point of trying.

3) We couldn't even if we wanted to (Apollo equipment is long-since obsolete
and unusable, a successor program to return to the moon was scrapped by Obama
in 2010).

4) Nobody is keen on spending the billions it would require.

I find it sad that we don't even have the ability to go to the moon anymore,
but there you go, I guess that's the way it works when we let our money-saving
drive control our curiosity.

~~~
informatimago
4) Banksters are keener of keeping the billions for themselves and to wage
wars all over the planets and to any kind of concept, than to put them to work
in the society to some exhilarating project.

Remembers, the millions spent on space exploration are not thrown out of the
planet window to literally space! They are spent right here, given to people
and making them work.

Instead of having PhD working at McDonalds, (and having less qualified people
on unemployment or homeless), you would have PhD working to explore space, and
less qualified people working up the jobs PhD don't resign themselves to do.

But there are two more probable reasons:

5) Aliens said: NO.

6) You don't really believe those billions of dollars were wasted on the F-35
program do you? (And all those other waste military development programs, of
which we will never know anything about given the ACCOUNTING files have been
destroyed in the 911 attack on the Pentagon and WTC-fucking- _7_ ). No, all
this money has been used in secret space travel and weapon development
programs, and they already have interstellar space ships and people going out
there.

~~~
c0nducktr
It's not at all hard for me to believe billions of dollars were spent on the
F-35 program. Certainly less hard to believe than us already having
interstellar spaceships.

------
eps
Oh, common [1]

There are several satellites on the Moon's orbit right now, including US and
Chinese ones. Japan had an orbiter, and so did (and will have) India.

PS. Indian Chandrayaan was stuffed to the brim with HD imaging equipment, and
yet the only orbit photos of Apollo landing sites are from NASA ... Say all
you want, but that's remarkably odd. Who would've passed a chance to grab an
image of one of very few monumentally important Moon sites if they were fully
equipped to do that and were in immediate vicinity of it.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_the_Moon#Timeli...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_the_Moon#Timeline_of_Moon_exploration)

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harryf
It's expensive and the potential for scientific discovery is too low?

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Shivetya
No one to race against is likely the primary reason. After all it is pretty
simple to get to and has been extensively studied. From an exploitation stand
point the moon doesn't offer anything at a cost comparable to what can be done
on Earth, yet.

So until the technology exist that makes the planets more accessible I doubt
there is a true need to have a base there. Science could benefit by simply
being out of atmosphere but money is sucked up in military and social budgets.

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Lanari
A lot of records didn't got broken for a long time, humanity back then was
like a kid just discovered a toy, we were surprised by what can technology do
and we tried to do it just because it's cool and not because it's practical.
Anything that didn't solve people's problems isn't worth taxpayers' money.

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usrusr
Because few places on earth are worse than living in a bunker on the moon.

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williamle8300
If you like hilarious, sardonic, but also sincere writing, you should read,
"Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?" by
Dave Eggers. He founded McSweeny's.

It's a fictional story read as a dialogue (Socratic method). It's not stuffy
post-modern fiction. Very readable.

[http://www.amazon.com/Your-Fathers-Where-Prophets-
Forever/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Your-Fathers-Where-Prophets-
Forever/dp/030794753X)

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Gravityloss
Short:

Too much people were needed.

Long:

The Apollo program was built to land a man on the moon as quickly as possible,
with a high budget and immature technology.

It was very well designed for its requirements. However it is not the right
way to sustain humans in space long term. It cost far too much, in fixed costs
and per launch.

Longer:

If you look at old films on how piston powered airlines worked, the amount of
staff needed was much larger than the amount of passengers and the trips were
short. Hence by definition only few could afford long trips. It's just
mathematics. Everybody can't be a lord with servants. Only with modern
jetliners the amount of work needed per seat mile dropped drastically, and
travel became possible for the masses. Something similar has to happen for
space launch. We can't have a significant portion of the population working in
rocket factories / refurbishment shops / launch control, so it must be
developed and streamlined a lot. In practice this means reusable rockets with
high flight rates and low maintenance. Further out, we need to extract
resources from space to drastically drop the needed amount to launch from
Earth's deep gravity well.

The whole Apollo architecture was a result of immature technology, short time
table and large budgets. NASA should not try to repeat it, as the budget and
the political drive are not there, and it didn't result in anything long
lasting the last time either. Instead, focus should be on lowering cost of
more modest missions at first. The Space Shuttle attempted this, but it was
too ambitious and inflexible. After they built the mammoth, all the money went
into feeding it, and there was no money for developing new things.

"“NASA is an organization that is dominated by fixed costs. In business terms
everything is in the overhead,” he said. The committee found, with some
effort, that the fixed cost of NASA’s human spaceflight program is $6–7
billion a year. “The bottom line is that they can’t afford to keep the doors
open with they money they’ve got, let alone do anything with it.”"

-Jeff Greason, more at: [http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1483/1](http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1483/1)

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cft
Hypothetical question: say gold or platinum was found on the surface of the
moon (no mining required). Would it be profitable to go there with the current
technology?

~~~
informatimago
No: it's easier to crash the gold market, by selling paper right here on
Earth. And see how well it works! Gold should be 10 or 20 times more expensive
than it is thanks to the virtual gold running in the virtual markets.

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grandalf
All it takes is one rogue actor in space and suddenly all satellites need to
be armored.

Even a moderately powered ground-based laser could take out billions of
dollars in satellites.

The moon offers a useful strategic location because part of it is always
facing away from Earth, making it difficult to attack from Earth-based lasers.

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6d0debc071
Because there's nothing up there you can make enough money on to justify the
expense. Not yet anyway.

~~~
lazyjones
> Because there's nothing up there you can make enough money on to justify the
> expense.

How do we know? Did anyone ever attempt to dig even a few meters below the
surface?

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lololomg
Nothing you could possibly find on the moon would be worth the cost of
retrieving it from there. Even if there was bars of pure gold just lying on
the moon it would be more expensive than just mining it on earth.

~~~
Vendan
Well, gold isn't a very valuable thing, aside from it's use as a basis of
currency and "look at this gold, isn't it pretty, I'm so rich!".

But there are other things that are more valuable. On thing is He-3, which
would make an ideal fusion fuel. Another is pretty much any raw material, and
the industrial base to use it. I'd much rather have industrial machinery
churning out tons of pollution on the moon then on the earth.

~~~
6d0debc071
Even assuming 10 ppb of He-3 in the lunar regolith, you'd need to process 150
tons of the stuff to get one gram of fuel.

[http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/pdf/wcsar9311-2.pdf](http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/pdf/wcsar9311-2.pdf)

Mind you, if we eventually automate extraction industries the economics for a
lot of things change.

> I'd much rather have industrial machinery churning out tons of pollution on
> the moon then on the earth.

Would you pay twenty times as much for your computer in order to make that
happen? And would most people do likewise? It's the answer to that sort of
question that determines whether something gets done.

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davidgerard
The Space Race was funded out of the military budget, not the science budget.
"We can put a man on the moon" is a phrase meaning "we can put a nuke in your
capital." Once that point was established, NASA went down to science funding
levels.

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mohsinr
Because we are planning to go to Mars now.

~~~
aikah
Wouldn't it make more sense to create a permanent base on the moon first? I
mean it would be the best training to prepare a manned mission on mars.

~~~
patkai
It does, and it will probably happen.

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lololomg
There is no money in it

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mproud
Lack of political motivation.

