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?
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.