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Comment by bayindirh

6 days ago

I have a hunch that space race is not for "peaceful technological progress of human race at large", or "let's see how this behaves in 0G, it might be useful for some global problems" anymore.

5 comments

bayindirh

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adrianN  6 days ago

It is my understanding that it always was about „rockets are good for dropping bombs on people“.

  • GTP  6 days ago

    Well, I highly doubt that the kind of rockets they are developing for Lunar and Mars missions will be mich better, if any better at all, than current ballistic missiles armies around the world already have. Those space rockets are huge and meant to more or less safely carry people over a long distance in space. Warheads are meant to carry explosives while also being hard to detect or stop. I'm no rocket scientist, but I believe that huge space rockets would defeat the purpose, as they would consume a lot of fuel for nothing, while also being much easier to spot and stopped by shooting something at them.

    So I think the opposite: we are way past the point of space exploration being directly useful for weapons.

    • willy_k  5 days ago

      The point now isn’t having better rockets for (ballistic) missiles, since satellites became a thing the game has been infrastructure. Future (hypothetical) missions to the moon and mars might not be for military research purposes directly, but the infrastructure that both needs to be and now can be set up to support those missions will absolutely be co-opted for military purposes.

      The race is now to bootstrap your nation’s permanent presence in space, because at the moment there is a first mover opportunity for what is slowly but surely becoming just another frontier for economics, geopolitics, etc. to play out over (granted this is already happening, I suppose I’m talking about a step change in scale).