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Comment by craftyguy | Hacker News Reader

> The Trump administration is also looking to trim the budget of NASA’s earth science directorate

> The nearly $1.8 billion budget for that part of NASA would be about 6.5 percent lower than what was enacted for fiscal year 2017

Donald seems to be stuck in the Cold War. I've not heard of one good reason for him wanting to send Americans back to the Moon other than "prestige." There are much more valuable scientific targets than the Moon that we could be targeting, and it's very upsetting that he seems to be using NASA to enhance his own image (e.g. deep cuts in areas where NASA needs budget increases..)

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I feel in many ways that this is how NASA works. One leader says “My predecessor has no vision for a positive future. We must go beyond low Earth orbit and explore the solar system. I’m announcing renewed funding for programs that will send humans to Mars in 25 years. I’m introducing a bill that adds $2B to the NASA budget.”

And then the subsequent leader says “My predecessor loved spending money even while the people suffered. We cannot be spending billions on space exploration while people need jobs. I have let NASA know they’re going to have to tighten their belts and get to work with less so the people can have jobs. I’m introducing a bull that cuts $2B off the budget.”

Meanwhile, both leaders expand the military budget by $40B.

TBF the military is the only jobs program whose recipients are unimpeachable.

The fact that counties around Northern Virginia are the wealthiest counties in the whole country (and 3rd wealthiest one is in Maryland, also close to DC) supports that statement:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccalerner/2017/07/13/top-10...

That’s under our control. They’re unimpeachable because we support an air of respect for them. We could do the same for those less privileged, but other agendas get in the way.

Yes, that's the point I was trying to make.

There’s a good point to be made about manned missions to the moon. There are so many things we don’t know about the moon. See, for example, ESA’s “moon village” plans. The General Director gave a talk at 33c3 that—among other things—makes the case for prolonged human presence on the moon for scientific purposes: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8406-the_moon_and_european_space...

It makes me happy that someone from the ESA gave a talk at 33c3.

Not just anyone, the Director General! There was another talk by someone from ESA (I don’t remember his name) on the feasibility of a moon elevator (lunar surface to Lagrange point 1 iirc), which would be possible with current materials if we could just figure out how to get them there...

I was in the audience for both and it was absolutely amazing!

1) It is closer and more feasible to practice landing and returning from a planet than Mars

2) The ISS is going to de-orbit in the 2020s, so for low-gravity and habitat research, we can spend billions on another LEO station (which private industry is already tackling) or we can do something a bit more daring: set up shop on another rock.

I think NASA should be allowed, broadly, to choose its own missions and goals, and stick with it for longer than one administration. Their work takes more than 3 year election cycles.

The British-style civil service structure is much more suitable for long-term government investments like NASA, NIH, etc. They are too important and too complicated to be left to politicians.

How does accountability to the public work with career civil servants? I'm not saying it's not possible, but I think for every country like Finland where civil servants hold themselves accountable you can find 2-5 countries where they are inefficient, or worse, corrupt. Would the USA be more like Finland or more like the other countries?

> The ISS is going to de-orbit in the 2020s,

Only because we are going to allow it. We could, you know, keep it in orbit and continue to use it.

> I think NASA should be allowed, broadly, to choose its own missions and goals, and stick with it for longer than one administration. Their work takes more than 3 year election cycles.

I could not agree with this more. Having every administration fuck up their agenda every 4-8 years is not productive.

> Only because we are going to allow it. We could, you know, keep it in orbit and continue to use it.

I'm not sure if it's safe to operate much longer than the 2020's without some major work and the running costs are astronomical. I'd love to see the ISS live longer but with limited resources going to the moon instead seems like a solid plan. At least on the Moon we might be able to get some practice in at harvesting resources off world. That's really going to be the economic key to kicking off a non war related space race.

How about a moon base we could use as a base camp for missions to the outer solar system or mars?

H3 mining is another thought.

Edit: other ideas

* Autonomous vehicles sent ahead of time to build habitats for people.

* Large underground bases dug into the bedrock positioned at the poles collecting solar energy.

* Long tracks to launch things into space/earth electromagnetically.

* Mining of ice which could get split into H and O for propellant.

* Mining of other materials to be used on site or sent back to earth.

* Attempt to get people to be self sufficient on another world, even if it took a hundred years.

* Depot for deep space asteroid mining ships/drones to drop off their cargo and refuel/repair without having to drop all the way down to Earth.

Unless you can make propellant on the moon, that’s going to be less economical than going directly. There’s nothing to be gained by going down another (albeit not very deep) gravity well. The base camp analogy doesn’t really apply.

You could make propellant on the Moon (from water).

The Moon is also a good place to test Mars-related procedures (couple dozen hours of travel beats couple dozen months in case of an emergency).

Finally, I imagine building a telescope on the "dark side" is astronomers' wet dream.

Hm, hydrolox could indeed be possible. Didn’t think of that.

But you’d still need a very large number of missions to make construction and maintenance of the moon base cheaper than just directly going where you want to go. It’s probably going to be a while before a moon base makes sense for economical reasons.

Also, the moon does not have a dark side. It has a far side that never faces the earth, but the sun shines there just like it does on the other side.

> you’d still need a very large number of missions to make construction and maintenance of the moon base cheaper than just directly going where you want to go.

We can't forever just launch point-to-point missions from Earth's surface. The Moon meshes up well with industrial space activities around Earth, which we'll need anyway, and which'll create plenty of demand around itself for missions and resources.

> It has a far side that never faces the earth, but the sun shines there just like it does on the other side.

Sure, but a) lack of atmosphere while still having stable ground underneath helps, plus b) lack of RF noise from Earth would really help radiotelescopes, which was what I was thinking about when writing my previous comment.

>The Moon meshes up well with industrial space activities around Earth, which we'll need anyway, and which'll create plenty of demand around itself for missions and resources.

This is essentially my argument. Short term it doesn't offer many advantages but without it, it makes the really big and cool industrial space projects more difficult.

Why can't it make sense on economic grounds? I would imagine that once there was a moonbase there would be a number of rather wealthy people who would like to visit.

After all if Blue Planet can cause interest in luxury $4m submarines[0] I don't see why the moon would be an exception.

Who knows, seeing Earth from outside might even trigger some activity to keep it viable for us!

[0] https://www.slashgear.com/aston-martins-next-luxury-vehicle-...

You can't hope to maintain a Moon settlement off the back of ultra-rich peoples' vacation fads. For one, the whole scheme would collapse once the super-rich get bored.

A moon base needs better and more stable funding, and for that it needs a reason. Science will not be enough, but the demands of a cislunar economy (propellant, off-world settlements for workets) just might.

I guess that feels a little like England setting up a base in Greenland as a supply depot to stop at before crossing the Atlantic to the new world. There’s way more stuff at their home base so it’s hard to see how adding a far off stop in a desolate place will help.

Well for one Greenland is outside the massive gravity well of England. So you can save a lot of fuel only shipping things back to Greenland between missions.

Or like England setting up a base at Sealand before crossing the Atlantic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand

I'm thinking more long term. Things I'd like to see:

* Autonomous vehicles sent ahead of time to build habitats for people.

* Large underground bases dug into the bedrock positioned at the poles collecting solar energy.

* Long tracks to launch things into space/earth electromagnetically.

* Mining of ice which could get split into H and O for propellant.

* Mining of other materials to be used on site or sent back to earth.

* Attempt to get people to be self sufficient on another world, even if it took a hundred years.

* Depot for deep space asteroid mining ships/drones to drop off their cargo and refuel/repair without having to drop all the way down to Earth.

The moon’s inclination is 5 degrees to the ecliptic, you’d have to try really hard to find a worse place to put solar panels.

Self-sufficiency would require manufacturing complex organical compounds and is total science fiction stuff, and will likely remain that way for a looong time.

How else would you power a moon base without getting stuck sending up material forever?

Pretty much everything on your list is not possible with our current technology. More importantly, it's feasible to develop this technology on Earth.

The problem with going to the moon (or anywhere else in the solar system) is that the only thing we can do right now is science experiments. And there's a lot more impactful science that can be done for far cheaper than sending people outside of our gravity well. If you want to do anything else, then you have to develop a lot of technology to get to the point. But the space bugs want to see humans go to space, and they generally don't want to see effort being expended on the research to let humans do anything useful because it's not space research.

Aside from H3 I'd argue everything on that list is within our grasp if we tried to do so.

If you define it as "building infrastructure on the Moon to do so," no, it is not available with current technology. Where are you going to get your acids for refining, for example, if you can't scavenge from old piles of organic goop?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refining_(metallurgy)

>The repeated application of such fire-refining processes was capable of producing copper that was 99.25% pure.

Copper and iron can be refined reasonably enough using heat. Maybe it's possible to "pitch" metallic ore into very close and highly a eccentric orbit around the sun to help melt it down before "catching" it on the other side.

Perhaps acids could be brought up and recycled?

https://www.space.com/13247-moon-map-lunar-titanium.html

Titanium might be more difficult.

https://titaniumprocessingcenter.com/titanium-extraction-and...

Seems like asteroid mining would be pretty straight forward on the surface of the moon. The lack of erosion is capable of showing us exactly where they are.

Like I said it might take a hundred years before we can be totally self sufficient on the moon, but I think it's possible long term.

Here's a pretty cool research paper:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228918710_Design_an...

another:

http://www.chicagospace.org/strategies.html

Greenland is also a nice parallel for an entirely different reason. The land is at the extreme margin of habitability, definitely for the Vikings who settled there. And when the traders of the North Sea stopped visiting Greenland, the colony disappeared within a few generations. (Most historians now believe that the loss of trade is what killed Norse Greenland, not the Little Ice Age)

Practical applications for He3 have been 30 years away for the past 50 years.

SF author Charles Stross has a couple of damning criticisms of He3 mining on the moon, found here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/08/moonshin...

In short:

Nobody's built any useful (for power generation) fusion reactor yet, much less one running He3.

There isn't actually much He3 on the moon, just more than here on Earth. It's doubtful that mining on the moon would be cheaper than just making it here.

Some lunar base advocates push the "exploration base camp" narrative. But I find it disengenuius. It's too far away in terms of energy cost, and too close in terms of travel time.

> I've not heard of one good reason for him wanting to send Americans back to the Moon other than "prestige."

Not even for the inspiration? I mean look at how everyone reacted to SpaceX's recent launching of a Tesla into space. Everyone thought it was super cool and inspiring - and it was. Now imagine how much cooler it would be to send people to the moon again in the modern age. Yeah it happened before but that was a long, long time ago, and may as well have never happened for probably 3/4 of the people in America.

How is repeating something, which has been done already 50 years ago, inspirational? That sounds more like admission of defeat.

It's not defeat to fall down, it's only defeat when you stay down.

Getting to the Moon, especially with something more serious than samples pickup mission, would signal that we're back on our feet again.

Maybe it's a smokescreen to divert resources away from potentially damaging climate research?

It'd be hard for additional climate research to do anything (politically) that the existing climate research hasn't done already. Although, I understand how there might be some element of "Hah! Got'em!" among some groups.

Overall, I see this as a move towards globally inspiring national pride projects and away from the more subtle and less-expensive "only PhDs understand how this is really important," tasks. It really fits the personality and promises of the current president.

The fundamental issue is that it's relatively hard for us to reasonably account for future costs against present costs. I also think it's interesting that in more social equitable countries (like the Scandis) the public and politicians tend to take climate change more seriously. Is Maslow's hierarchy actually coming into play?

Another explanation might be that some countries have much stronger governments than others. In the US, the "man with a plan," pattern almost never plays out successfully.

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