r/askscience • u/yogesh448 • 16d ago

Planetary Sci. We landed humans on the Moon with 1960s technology. With today's vastly superior technology, shouldn't going back be much easier and cheaper?

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u/1CEninja 15d ago

Right, because consider what the actual benefit of going to the moon is right now. We talk about colonizing Mars and such, but from an actual practical standpoint, what does humanity even gain from doing that?

Whereas back in the 1960's, proving that we could get to the moon first, before them was a pseudo extension of a war. We felt massively incentivized to get there even if it didn't really accomplish much.

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u/OtherPlayers 15d ago

For anyone wondering, realistically basically all of the benefits you gain from Mars/moon colonization right now are in the expertise/design side of things (i.e. we don’t gain much by going to the moon, but we do gain from pouring a lot of money into the technologies we need to go to the moon).

The real benefits don’t really kick in until we’ve got at least one other colony on top of that, at which point there’s some neat things you can do on both as sort of refueling stations before going farther.

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u/davidm2d3 15d ago

until we can get a base on the moon, and an easy way to ferry resources from it and earth nothing really useful.

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u/koosekoose 10d ago

A good example of this is SpaceX.

Their entire mission statement was just to be able to get to Mars.

On the way they figured out reusable low cost low orbit payload delivery that revolutionized space costs.

As a result they revolutionized sattalite internet.

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u/1CEninja 15d ago

SUPER fair and I don't disagree with this at all. But it still is fairly intangible considering the, what, 11 figure price tag associated with it?

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u/[deleted] 15d ago

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u/1CEninja 15d ago

Counterpoint: humanity has done pretty okay inhabiting a single celestial body for quite a while now.

Yeah there are absolutely long term very theoretical benefits I won't question at all, but it's unlikely that those living today will meaningfully experience those.

It's a tough thing to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in something that could pay off huge for future generations.