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Comment by areoform

4 days ago

Yes, and more!

    > Apollo was over three orders of magnitude more efficient in producing scientific papers per day of fieldwork than are the MERs. This is essentially the same as Squyres’ (2005) intuitive estimate given above, and is consistent with the more quantitative analogue fieldwork tests reported by Snook et al. (2007).

Scientific papers are a pretty poor measure of productivity so here's another one. We know about the existence of He-3 thanks to samples brought back from astronauts on the moon. Astronauts setup fiddly UV telescope experiments on the moon, trying to set up a gravimeter to measure gravitational waves, digging into the soil to put explosive charges at different ranges for seismic measurement of the moon's subsurface... They were extremely productive. Most of what we know about the moon happened thanks to the 12 days spent on the lunar surface.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Ultraviolet_Camera/Spectro...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Surface_Gravimeter

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areoform

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physicles  4 days ago

I’ve wondered for years if this could be quantified. Three orders of magnitude totally justifies the cost, if you care about science.

gammarator  4 days ago

You’ve got to normalize by dollars spent, though.

  • dotancohen  4 days ago

    If your goal is to save money, just ignore the moon. This is not the west indies to be exploited, at least not yet. These are scientific missions, not economic missions.

    The philosopher Randall Munroe once wrote:

      > The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.