Comment by colechristensen 2 months ago
The reason we went to the moon was to prove that capitalism could do it better than communism. We've got nothing like that to prove now. Folks are working on making money doing things in space, and that's coming along nicely.
NASA's scientific mission isn't particularly strongly served by having humans in a place. Not that there's no scientific value it's just much more expensive than robots and much riskier.
I believe NASA is targeting something like 99.5% reliability with Starliner. I agree that ability to accept risk has decreased, but my guess is that Starliner in reality has more like one nine of reliability.
If you look at the first flight test of Starliner, everyone talks about the timing problem that caused them to fail to achieve the proper orbit. What is more rarely discussed is that after this happened, they did a top to bottom code review while the Starliner was in orbit, and found a bug in the crew/service module undocking procedure that would have caused the service module to strike the crew module after undocking, most likely damage the heat shield, and cause the capsule to burn up on reentry. They applied a hot fix in orbit for this.
Had the timer problem not happened, the code review wouldn't have happened and this wouldn't have been caught.
With the number of gremlins that have come up on every Starliner flight, there are certainly many more lower probability defects that will eventually lead to a loss of crew.
My general feeling is that the true reason NASA/Boeing is much less successful than in the 60s is because the NASA of that time attracted the very top talent that was young, energetic, and bright. These days that talent generally doesn't go to those places. IMO the main reason SpaceX has been so successful is that a lot of those people really wanted to work on rockets but didn't want to work for NASA/Boeing.
SpaceX lost several rockets in the beginning, NASA lost an enormous number of rockets in the 60s space era and several people.
>My general feeling is that the true reason NASA/Boeing is much less successful than in the 60s is because the NASA of that time attracted the very top talent that was young, energetic, and bright.
Are they much less successful? Less things are being paid for and things are happening at a slower pace because money.
The cost/benefit analysis was probably seen differently back then. At that point it was a space race against the Big Bad and winning was more important than a certain threshold of safety. Now? I can't see the benefit of risking the life of the Starliner crew. What would it prove now that NASA has had so many crewed launches and returns?
All the evidence you need is that even in the present day, advanced countries have repeatedly tried to send probes to the moon and failed, when we did it with humans in the 1960s. All the software in the world isn't as good as a trained pilot in a novel scenario (i.e. The first moon landing when Neil Armstrong changed the landing site at the last minute, or the events of Apollo 13).
The Soviets managed to send probes to the moon, and succeeded, with the automation and remote control systems of the 60s. Their manned lunar ambitions were hamstrung by the many failures of the N-1 rocket, which could not be made safe enough for human flight. (Or any flight, really.)
The thing with probes is that you should send more than one every 5-10 years, if you do that, you'll learn something from the failures before everyone working on the project dies of old age. It's the moon, you don't need to wait for a once-a-decade transfer window to line up.
The U.S, and the Soviet Union, each landed probes on the moon in the 60s. And the Soviet Union even did a sample return in 1970.
>All the software in the world isn't as good as a trained pilot in a novel scenario
You can likely launch 5 (or more) autonomous missions rather than send humans. And that's assuming good spending, if you go by the $93 billion Artemis Program, likely 20 or more.
> And our ability to accept risk has decreased dramatically.
Yes, recall that Apollo 1 incinerated the capsule crew, that would have canceled the entire program today, back then it was "press on..."
We did continue with the Space Shuttle after its accidents, but that was decades ago now, and I'm sure that played into any discussions there might have been about extending the program.
> that would have canceled the entire program today
The US government just delayed the next Starship launch by 2 months because of incorrectly filed paperwork.
It's not that SpaceX didn't file the paperwork... they just used the wrong form.
This is why our feet are firmly nailed to the ground.
If anyone actually cared to go to the Moon or Mars, then obstructionist bureaucrats like that wouldn't be in their jobs for very long.
Somewhere there was a space that said “do not write in this space” and the person who filled it out wrote “okay”… the FAA got ‘em now, SpaceX.
This is the worst argument and I'm sick of hearing it. Do you seriously, honestly, think that there is nothing left for us to learn on the moon? Or that seeing humans doing things on the moon does not in any way inspire others to push forward in scientific endeavor? Such arguments demonstrate only a lack of curiosity and imagination.
It might sound cynical but it's accurate. There was a big political will to go to the moon because the USSR was beating us at every important space milestone. That galvanized the American government sufficiently to spend massive amounts of capital to win the space race.
After a decade or two, and the loss of any real competition, the US lost the political will to keep pushing boundaries. The primary reason we don't still have the immediate capability to put people onto the moon isn't technical, it's political. We are only now reigniting that desire, and again, it's because of another great power starting to push things in space.
It was CCCP pushing us then, it's the CCP now.
I personally can't really imagine anything less inspiring than repeating a feat we managed over 50 years ago.
But is there any scientific value? We ran enough missions that we're still looking at everything we brought back last time, what science would we be doing that we either haven't already done, or can do here on earth just fine without going to the moon for it?
Well, the Moon is an entire world.
We're still doing science on the planet Earth, because there's still plenty to learn, and we actually live here with billions of people.
We've only sent a handful of folks to the Moon so far. We've literally barely scratched the surface, and only a few tiny patches of it as that.
Exploring new places has always lead to all sorts of interesting new discoveries. No reason to think a whole new world mightn't hold a few interesting (and/or potentially lucrative) surprises.
Yeah but the Earth is a geologically active planet hosting life. The moon is neither of those things, it's a ball of rock in orbit that we can explore all of "several square feet at a time", so once you've done that a few times: what's left to do? Realistically?
Sure: if we had the ability to actually send a proper mission that can drive around the entire thing, with a pop up lab (arctic research style) on the moon itself, that's a different matter, but we are nowhere near that level of proficient at space science yet, and going to the moon a few more times won't make a difference to that aspect.
Arctic style base on the moon would be 200 to 500 metric tons of materials to ship. That's 2-5 SpaceX Starship return trips if/when they become operational in a few years time.
There's a number of reservations wrt the practicality of SpaceX Starship of course. That said, it allows us to say there's at least one company projecting a 100 metric ton payload spacecraft in the near future (with prototypes already being tested).
If/when they get it working, remember that SpaceX tends to mass produce their spacecraft, so it wouldn't be just a one off single landing by a one off single lander.
We have no idea what's under the surface of the moon. We literally know nothing. It could be that the moon is secretly a gold mine of rocket propellant 5 meters under the surface, but we simply never looked deep enough.
We built the first railways on earth 200 years ago. We could build railways on the moon this century. Think about this. The time between the beginning of industrialization and a space civilization could be just 300 years.
Your grand kids would experience the space age, but only if you start working on it today.
>Not that there's no scientific value it's just much more expensive than robots and much riskier.
And our ability to accept risk has decreased dramatically. 50 years ago the Boeing capsule would have been given the go ahead to detach without a second thought for instance.
Basically going from 2 9s to 11 9s (or whatever NASA targets internally these days) is comically expensive.
And I'd have to see a paper justifying human presence (besides trying to future proof society) as actually bringing more scientific value than robotic experiments.