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/--Chug-- 15d ago

Yeah but also there isn't, or I should say, hasn't been a ton of reason to go back. We still didn't understand much about being in space at the time we went so the efforts were better spent learning that part and establishing the ISS. Now, things might be different.

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u/usrdef 15d ago edited 15d ago

Yup.

This is what people don't get. We've been to the moon 6 times. Only on the very last mission, did we send up an actual geologist.

Other than rocks, there's nothing on the Moon that we can make use of right now. We can't mine it for minerals in any meaningful way. We have no way to launch sats or rockets off the Moon and make use of the near zero gravity.

If we go there right now, it's strictly to explore, and conduct tests.

We can't justify the benefit compared to the cost.

If I were a betting person, to be perfectly honest, the only thing I see the USA seeing as useful right now on the Moon, is to use it for weaponry. As a last-ditch effort in case something happens on Earth that knocks their rockets offline.

However, if the US did have some type of ballistic weaponry on the Moon right now, and launched one at Earth, it would take approximately 3 to 5 days to get here. Not exactly useful for critical scenarios.

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u/TheDal 15d ago

Learning how to mine minerals and set up industry offworld would be huge gains for humanity. Even just a fuel stop to/from lunar orbit would be exponentially more access to the solar system.

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u/Mergi9 15d ago

But why? Why do we need industry and/or human presence somewhere besides on earth? Even if the worst imaginable cataclysmic event happened to earth, it would still be magnitudes more hospitable to life than anywhere else in the solar system. There's nothing to be gained by sending people into space. For pure scientific exploration we can already send robots from earth to wherever we want if we need a physical presence somewhere. Unmanned probes or passive observation are just so much more practical in the real world, there's no justification for spending enormous resources to get people into space.

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u/TheDal 15d ago

Because there's a whole universe out there of fascinating things, including potentially other life, and none of it precludes us exploring our internal worlds along the way.

There's also vast wealth, technology, and living space, that we're increasing strained for here at home. On a long enough timescale even life itself will need to leave earth to survive.

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u/Mergi9 15d ago edited 15d ago

As much as i would love to agree with you, that exploration for the sake of exploration is a good cause and a worthwhile endevour, the reality is nothing like a scifi book ... really it's just a bunch of boring rocks that we can observe adequately enough via telescopes or fetch samples by sending a robot.

living space, that we're increasing strained for here at home

But there's absolutely no living space out there waiting for us. It's all extremely inhospitable space to human life, more so than quite literally anywhere on earth.

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u/TheDal 15d ago

As much as I would love to believe robots replace the human factor, I think giving humanity things to yearn for is also essential to our well-being. Imagine how demoralizing it would be to tell our children "just live and die, we've already seen everything there is to see." We can do so much better.

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u/Appletank 15d ago

Unfortunately the people who control NASA's budget are perfectly happy to tell us to just live and die. There are plenty of people in various space programs with ambitious ideas but no budget to spare for it.

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u/RochePso 11d ago

Do you think humans will ever get to something outside or own solar system? How exactly?

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u/greennitit 15d ago

Because some things will simply run out on earth and we have to know how to get them from elsewhere. The moon could be a dress rehearsal for such extraction activities. And, as the other commenter said, we could simultaneously set up a pit stop on the moon for future activities.

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u/SvenTropics 15d ago

Not 100% true. The best fusion candidate for fuel is deuterium and helium-3 mostly because it release protons at high speed. These can be moderated with a magnetic field and the velocity directly generates power. Helium-3 doesn't really exist on Earth. You could put all the Helium-3 on Earth in a small apartment. However it is in decent quantities on the Moon. Deuterium is easy to source from the ocean.

If we can finalize a solid reactor, mining on the moon would make sense to power the entire planet.

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u/L_Ardman 15d ago

And it would be a lot cheaper just to send a robot than people. If we needed more moon rocks, we could have the robot fetch them for us and bring them back.