Is it really necessary to send humans to those places just to get the knock-on benefits? Couldn’t we do those things directly, without going there?
It seems to me that, today, those who have the money to spend on these endeavors would only do so if there were perceived short-term benefits to themselves. That means they plan to exploit the resources, or increase their own power somehow.
I know the good engineers that make this happen are doing it for the challenge and in the pursuit of knowledge, and I know that’s why we poors support it, but that doesn’t “pay the bills.” What is the motivation behind the money? Why are they really doing this?
So I can’t speak to the actual motivation for the moon, but can for one reason for at-least-temporary human habitation there. Solar system exploration (and, inevitably resource extraction.
When you launch rockets from Earth, a vast majority of the fuel you start with is burnt off just getting to orbit, out of the deepest part of our gravity well. If you want to go anywhere else in our solar system, you’re severely limited to what’s left. The moon’s gravity is low enough that it could work as a refuelling station. Provided we find enough water there and set up solar hydrolysis stations there and build the infrastructure to get it up to orbiting ships. All that will take people to set up, and possibly to manage long term.
Couldn’t we just have an orbiting refueling station though? Seems to me like it would be even more efficient.
The perfect solution would be an orbital station with a space elevator. An 36’000 km elevator is kinda difficult to build and maintain safely though. Without cheaply carrying resources up there, its utility is limited (sure can slowly put things up there, but it’s very inefficient).
What Moon has going on is Helium-3, which can be an amazing energy source by itself.
It may be possible to harvest fuel on the moon itself. Also the amount of work to keep that in orbit, etc, the moon may be more promising.
iirc it also has a lot of fusion fuel in the form of Helium-3
The problem is: is there any evidence for water on the moon?
And even if there is something on the moon, from which fuel can be manufactured, you still have to get the fuel production components there (which includes launching those from Earth). And then anything you launched from the moon originally came from Earth, so now you’re launching it twice.
And that’s the problem: anything that you wanna launch from the moon will have to, almost in its entirety, have to be launched from Earth originally before it can be launched from the moon. So what’s the point?
It would be different if our moon were rich in resources and could be transformed into some sort of manufacturing base for all sorts of goods and fuels, etc., but it isn’t.
The moon, uniquely, has no atmosphere and no magnetic field, meaning the solar wind may have deposited large quantities of Helium-3 in the lunar dust over millions or billions of years. Helium-3 is possibly a viable fuel for fusion energy production at an industrial scale. Current reactors fust Hydrogen-2 with Hydrogen-3. Hydrogen-2 is abundant but Hydrogen-3 is exceedingly rare. If I remember correctly, there are only on the order of 10 kilograms of it currently available on Earth. Helium-3 is possibly a good substitute for Hydrogen-3 in fusion reactions.
Fusion reactions already produce net positive energy in laboratory settings, although it will be some time before this scientific net positive can be turned into an engineering net positive, and even more time still until it becomes an economic net positive.
Yes. We know there’s water there and how much accessible water is there.
And it’s plenty for some exploratory uses, but not enough to make an economy extracting fuel from there. So yeah, that entire thing is bullshit, while the idea of using the water there in a way that doesn’t go away may or may not be.