Comment by nancyminusone
5 days ago
Do you watch sports, football, the Olympics? If not I'm sure you know someone who does. Same category as this. Each of the 32 NFL team is worth about the cost of 1-2 Artemis launches. The entire league could fund the whole Artemis program nearly twice. Hosting the Olympics is worth about 3-10 launches.
Like sports, the objective is ultimately useless except as a showcase of what humanity has to offer, and people like to see that.
I think in general space exploration is a great use of taxpayer money, but the artemis program doesn't seem great from either a "science per dollar" or "novel accomplishment per dollar" standpoint.
If the goal was just to flex on the rest of the world I would've much rather we focused on going somewhere new or returning to the moon in a more sustainable way
"returning to the moon in a more sustainable way"
Isn't this the point of this mission? If your point is "it shouldn't take this much money", then I agree. But also point to almost everything else.
Each Artemis launch costs something like $4b (that's the incremental cost of a new rocket, it's much higher if you amortize the design costs).
IMO the program is not optimized for cost or sustainability, it's optimized for creating jobs in various congressional districts. Of course that provides a certain amount of political sustainability to the so-called Senate Launch System.
I just don't see a future where NASA can afford multiple SLS launches per year to maintain a continuous Lunar presence
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I think that is the point, but whether this mission will actually do that is rather unconvincing.
After (and if) Artemis III lands on the moon and brings home the astronauts there seems to be very little planned on how we actually get to the moon base which NASA is claiming this will lead to, let alone the manned Mars mission that is also supposed to follow.
In other words, I think NASA is greatly exaggerating, and possibly lying, about the utility of this mission.
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I feel like these missions are just paving the way for billionaires to have a new vacation spot.
Even if you think Space travel is worth the money (which I personally do), adding humans to the mix makes projects incredibly more expensive. Even in the realm of space travel and research, sending humans is a questionable use of the money.
Sports would also be much cheaper without humans.
The most important (if not entertaining) things you can do in space don't involve humans. Telescopes, communications, earth observation, sending probes to distant bodies, etc.
It's nice that we can send humans to space and it's good to keep that capability going so that the knowledge doesn't die. But the unmanned missions tend to pull the weight of actually accomplishing useful things. Humans just get in the way.
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Turns out I don't understand the point sports either.
People are going to have to die in order for us to increase our space knowledge. It sucks but thats just how it be, it requires humans for most of it.
The difference being that sports are not exclusively paid by taxes, I guess?
> difference being that sports are not exclusively paid by taxes
Space isn’t financed “exclusively” by taxes, either.
In the USA tax payers pay for most stadiums/arenas.
But I'm guessing the people benefit from those, too.
I think there is a major difference though. Sports events are not pretending to be anything else. The Artemis mission claims to be advancing science and claims to be a stepping stone for an eventual moon base and a manned mission to Mars. I personally have serious questions about all of these.
Do you really disagree that it’s advancing science? Surely actually testing hardware, building knowledge on how to run this type of mission, learning to use lunar resources, figuring out how to keep people alive, etc. will teach us things we couldn’t learn any other way.
Fwiw do share your concerns about the methods (sending humans on this specific mission is questionable, SLS is questionable compared to SpaceX approach).
Do you think we will learn more from Artemis or the Asteroid Redirect Mission? Because that's a concrete example of how funding this mission caused other experiments to be cancelled.
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It's not science, it's engineering. I don't think it's advancing science in a way that wouldn't be possible with a fraction of the cost without sending humans there.
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The fact that we hope to get some new tech with this whereas sports aims for nothing is just icing on the cake. I think big space missions are worth it every now and then on a humanitarian level; even if no new discoveries are made, a new generation of engineers will become fluent in what we have already discovered. Humanity's education is not "done" when the last fact is written in a book, it needs to be constantly refreshed or it will disappear.
Even in sports you do not get "nothing", it has certainty helped advance the field of medicine.
> a new generation of engineers will become fluent in what we have already discovered.
We seem to have lost the technology of going to the moon we gained from Apollo. So without an actual follow-up and a tangible long term plan I suspect the exact same will happen this time around.
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I don’t have any questions about a mission to Mars, it is a stupid and pointless trip that I don’t want to ask any questions about.
The Moon, I dunno, it’s at least in Earth’s gravity well so it isn’t like we’re going totally the wrong direction when we go there, right?
At best it could be a gas station on the trip to somewhere interesting like the Asteroid belt, though.
Whether a moon base is needed or even beneficial is a question I have not heard a convincing answer in favor. And even if moon base is indeed needed and/or beneficial to future space exploration / resource extraction why robots cannot more efficiently build (or assemble) such a moon base is another question I need an answer to.
We are sending humans to (or around) the moon now, but it may just turn out to be a wasted effort, done solely for the opulence (or more cynically bragging rights / nationalist propaganda).
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Mars pushes the frontier (even if no one might survive the trip due to human body deteriorating), going around the Moon is meh - we were there ~57 years ago multiple times so what's the point?
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