In 2026, with all the benefits of a tech industry that has become ever more powerful, with endless money poured into innovation, our 'rough guide back to the moon' is an AI model that maps it. It's powerful and impressive, of course, and doubtless very useful to researchers, and space exploration is not a priority--all of that is true, sure.

But to have the fruits of 50+ years of technological progress result not in going back to the moon, or onto other challenges, but just a refinement in looking at the moon. Is this the best giant leap we can muster now? So much innovation and yet we lack a capability we used to have.

I know there are all sorts of ways to explain this away, but it still makes me sad.

And this time, both countries are planning ambitious missions--not just flags-and-footprints, but bases and resource extraction (ice from the lunar south pole).

SpaceX Starship, the vehicle that will return to the moon, can carry 100 tons to the lunar surface--compared to less than 10 tons for Apollo. Moreover, whereas a single Saturn V launch cost almost a billion dollars to launch, Starship should cost a third the price. Effectively, we'll be able to deliver cargo to the moon for 1/30th the price of Apollo. That's real progress.

I've been following the space program since the 1970s and I have never been more excited about it.

Be realistic. You can support going to the moon. However be honest: there isn't much value from it and there are plenty of reasons to say we shouldn't.

The path to international air flight began with often suicidal attempts to flap our arms with various instruments attached and act like birds, with many thinking we'd never go anywhere beyond that. With space we're already a bit more advanced, yet we're far from where we need to be - and the only way we're going to get there is by going out and starting on a very long journey.

We didn't do anything in 1969. Landing on the Moon and leaving a flag is like seeing the Wright Flyer go 260m, waving a Mission Accomplished banner, and then quitting with that as the state of art of flight - a mildly interesting novelty that was, at best, a proof of concept.

A SciFi generation ship could maybe do that to the closest stars before it fails completely - but we have reason to think those stars will have any planet we can terraform. (ignoring the ethics if life exists - we don't have the technology to detect life on other planets)

Mars is the only planet that could potentially support human life. Even then the best parts are about as nice as Antarctica - not very nice. Which is to say a catastrophic failure of life support gives you seconds to get the backup [scuba type gear?] working as opposed to guaranteed death. Mars is a lot smaller than earth and has much less energy (less sun). Thus there isn't much potential there.

Everything else we can reasonably reach is much harder to work with than Mars.

Face it, earth is all we get: make it last.

...of a density so low that it is 0 on average.

space has practically infinite nothing.

I know the pretty pictures always show the planets all nice together, but in reality there's this huge, irradiated, projectile-infested nothing that you and I cannot deal with, even with current tech.

The Earth has more land than mankind will ever need. The Earth has effectively infinite energy from the Sun. And most of the resources we need are derived from biological matter, which Space lacks.

Love the (sorry, but greedy) take. Maybe we shouldn't expand infinitely. I don't see our species as that special. Maybe we should stay a bit modest, and errm, down to the earth in our ambitions.

Both humans and resources can't be in infinite number at the same time. Something can be infinite relative to other, and I like the current balance, thanks.

Gathering more resources so the overlords can have more humans enslaved with shinier golden handcuffs, who can consume more so number line goes up is not a meaningful goal to pursuit, and robotic-only commercially rationalized spaceflight has only this to offer.

Scientific discovery, so we can have better simulations about things of no use or effect on us? Why? Taking people to places and utilizing the resources there, and building a more resilient humanity is a worthy endeavor, and while robots are useful for that, ultimately human spaceflight (or interplanetary/interstellar travel) is he goal, not having only a space industry.

The Jamestown colony relied on shipments from England.

> Building a self-sustaining colony is so far outside the realm of possibility that it isn't worth thinking about

And look at what America became.

Very funny!

Farside radio telescope:

https://www.colorado.edu/project/lunar-farside/

There is no reason the above cannot be maintained by robots, and many reasons it should be if we have it. We should also question if it is worth it.

Humans are going to walk on the fucking moon! How can you not be excited about that? There is value in pushing the frontier, in doing things at the limit of human technology, in seeing new worlds through human eyes.

Of course by work, I mean work directed by somebody else to serve their ends, in exchange for money to live your own life. If we could afford to have people work five hours a week and still maintain a functioning society, then surely it is a moral obligation for us to do that. If you decide you want or need to do some kind of voluntary work to keep your mental health intact, so much the better. And if those happy people want to voluntarily commit some of their energy to going to the moon for no reason, then good for them.

I really cannot imagine taking your position. Working less is the pretty much the only thing we should be putting energy into.

I get fulfillment via work.

> Working less is the pretty much the only thing we should be putting energy into.

A life without purpose leads to sloth and early death.

I wonder what this would look like. I feel like nearly all of mankinds greatest achievements are due to our current structure of employment or at being forced to do something at the behest of someone elses ends.

like out-of-control global warming, depletion of freshwater reserves, destruction of soil, mass surveillance, extremely uneven distribution of resources. I mean all previous innovations which were supposed to allow working less somehow never materialized in working less, and the quality of life improvements are greatly questionable, basically keeping the production-consumption machinery takes up all the surplus it produces, while depleting the resources we have.

The great achievements we have are much like the Moai statues on the Easter Island.

The bone evidence of pre-Columbian Indians in America is one of periodic starvation. For the colonists, the bone evidence is one of extremely hard labor and short lives.

America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.

“the superfluous is highly necessary”

– Voltaire

The arguments are entirely romantic. But then, what exactly is life without romance? That's probably the single greatest loss of modern society; that we've been convinced nothing matters but the material and concrete.

Or in my case I just went to my local high school marching band competition, and got to hear some great music. YMMV on what you find more romantic.

What??? I bet you consume large quantities of art and romance, like everyone else. Like look at the tremendous choices you have for entertainment.

The US put 5% of the federal budget into the original moon mission. NASA and SpaceX and the US Space Force combined don't spend anywhere close to that on R&D.

For starters, you are on HN amusing yourself in your free time.

What did we ultimately have to show for the money poured into Apollo? I'm a big fan of space exploration but putting twelve people up there for a few days at a time is pretty small potatoes compared to, say, the creation of smart phones or vast improvements in solar power and batteries or a thousand other things that have been done since 1972. I can push a (virtual) button on a rectangle I carry in my pocket and be instantly on a video call with my mother who lives a thousand miles away. And I don't even have to pay by the minute. That's positively magical, and in terms of actual real-world impact on average people it's far more significant than moon landings.

Apollo - Cold war. USA must do it before Russia and win the space race. Money is not a restriction. USA did it before Russia and won the space race.

Artemis - Prove a multi-national program can function under financial, economic, political, and even technical restrictions. We can't simply land and observe, it needs to be a team effort under a tight budget.

https://www.planetary.org/charts/apollo-vs-artemis-spending

Some of it.

Not first to the space, not first to the Moon, not first in human spaceflight, not first in spacewalk, etc.

[1] - https://www.planetary.org/articles/1027-when-nixon-stopped-h...

The move of picking an advantageous finish line is easily countered by… picking an obvious successor finish line. If they’d stuck a base on the moon that’d have been a pretty compelling “actually, here’s the next finish line.”

Maybe they have some space-station based claim.

I think both sides broadly agreed on all of those as their "next big goal" (with slight question mark over the space plane, as you could reasonably say the Soviet programme was purely reactive).

The race ended after the fall of the Soviet Union (with the Challenger disaster being an additional factor), not because it had been definitively won.

And left to die in orbit.

Although, to be specific, he did not say it was a race, but rather something the U.S. should strive for—even specifying a deadline.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AmericaBad/comments/1apgsc9/regardi...

That's either revisionist or ignorant (likely the latter, looking at cheap memes). The term was coined by American journos in the early 50's, and the actual events started in 1955, very publicly. And objectively speaking it never ended until the USSR crashed.

You should probably read something on the Soviet space program (starting with Rockets and People, for example), and the US one while you're at it. The Soviets didn't went all in on satellites. They simply returned to the original ideas Korolev & co had long before Sputnik ever flew, namely LEO modular assembly tech followed by manned circumnavigation of Venus (before the surface conditions were known) or Mars (after that) as a meaningful first step in deep space exploration. Which was pretty pragmatic and long-term thinking, although it's hard to say how realistic it was politically: they would have finished by the late 80's at best and securing the funding without propaganda-worthy progress wasn't a given. Regardless, they succeeded at actual LEO colonization, which was presumably "not space race" (I'm sure Space Shuttle/Freedom being a massive failure and NASA seeking Soviet expertise after the crash has nothing to do with that framing...).

Lunar missions, let alone single-flight ones without modular spacecraft, were a practical dead end and a distraction, the engineers understood that perfectly. The party however got successfully baited by JFK's advisors into the race they couldn't win because they still needed to close the "reverse missile gap" after the US panicked and closed the actual missile gap they imagined existed by building a ton of Titan IIs. The Apollo people were also in perfect understanding that the program had no practical followup and only existed for novelty, see anything written by Chris Kraft and Gene Kranz who were actual participants. STS was a colossal blunder and a setback as well, in practical terms, and it was obvious before the first flight.

The race was never limited to manned missions either. For example most of what we know about the Solar System comes from the JPL, which is hugely underappreciated. The Soviets only succeeded with Venus missions.

... or maybe just called some convenient events "space race" and refused to notice the others. Like a literal space colony circling above, for example. If you control the framing you control the reality.

We have immense computing power now compared to 50 years ago. But that doesn’t help to escape the gravity well of earth. We’re still using the same chemical rockets to go to space, haven’t invented any new type of rocket drives

* The Lunacy of Artemis – https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm

* Artemis II Is Not Safe to Fly – https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....

I get the achievement here: it's quite difficult to combine data from these various sensors into one. Is the "AI" bit referring to how that integration was done?

I've put a couple of resources here for you. The first one described the program from a neutral perspective (in line with what you ask - grounded POV to satisfy paranoia): https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/moon-landing/

This one is for people a little further down the conspiracy pipeline, and it debunks the various things that moon landing conspiracists like to talk about: https://www.iop.org/explore-physics/moon/how-do-we-know-we-w...

Both are worth a read!

Finally this is an excellent jumping-off point to understand the Apollo program in more detail, once you're satisfied that it did happen (if you don't think so, you'll reject the source out of hand.) https://www.nasa.gov/the-apollo-program/

The program itself was really, really, really cool and is worth reading about. A truly enormous achievement involving millions of people and an entire country's scientific and engineering capacity.

https://apolloinrealtime.org/

I've listened through those flights few times and it still each time takes me back to memories still giving me goosebumps. Especially Apollo 11 when I was nine year old kid listening tiny battery radio all nights at our summer cottage attic.

It is a fantastic site.

The resolution is to realize that Apollo was a dead-end stunt, not some universe-altering historical event. The lack of consequences was an inevitable result of the structure of what Apollo was.

We haven't gone again since because there's not much point to it. The US spent an amount of money equivalent to about 10 Manhattan Projects to ultimately put a dozen people on the moon for a cumulative total of somewhat less than one person-month. There was no military utility to it, no commercial benefit, just some science and exploration. Once you've done that a few times, what's the impetus to continue?

The technology was so bleeding-edge that each mission required a huge amount of bespoke manufacturing that got thrown away after a single use, and massive teams of people to run everything, such that each individual mission still cost billions of inflation-adjusted dollars. The American public's stomach for spending such vast sums of money just didn't last. Imagine if you needed to build and throw away an entire Airbus A380 to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. Maybe it would have been summited a few times to show it could be done, but we probably wouldn't keep doing it.