I can think of no conceivable gains to humankind as a consequence of wasting so many of the world’s resources blasting a few people into space to explore the dark side of the moon.
I strongly suspect that it will be claimed that there are some spin-off benefits, but the probability that these could have been found without the excesses of this programme is very likely, and there is no prospect whatsoever of human habitation of the moon, or of the exploitation of its resources to benefit people here on Earth.
It is therefore appropriate to note, as the New York Times do, that this programme is nothing more than a giant exercise in political pettiness waged between world leaders with very small, and easily bruised, egos.
Is it possible that we might ever get to the point where politicians might think about the greater good rather than meaningless point scoring?
So government pisses the money away on doing useless things then. At the same time private indistry – Musk’s SpaceX – can do the same thing vastly cheaper and also provides broadband internet anywhere on Earth and is about to start rolling out satellite telecoms everywhere too.
All hail the private sector then.
I know, I know, expecting Spud to grasp an implication is like trying to seize a rainbow.
the dark side of the moon.???
FFS! Which tracks?
The one with the clocks and EMS VCS-3 synth arpeggios.
Was reminiscing with friends last night how despite not being a music student my excellent music teacher at grammar school let me fiddle with the county’s VCS-3 when it turned up for a month. Great fun. Must have had an influence.
Perhaps you could call that a spin-off.
50+ years on from the moon landing, but the complaints remain the same.
I can’t pay no doctor bills
But whitey’s on the moon
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still
While whitey’s on the moon
https://genius.com/Gil-scott-heron-whitey-on-the-moon-annotated
It’s astonishing that he not only wrote that, but was proud of writing it, and told other people. Candidly, he should have been deeply ashamed.
Er, Steve: African Americans score, on average, roughly 1 standard deviation (about 15 points) lower on standardized IQ tests than White Americans, often placing the mean around 85.
YTOTM came out in 1970, this was years after the USA went all in on “great society” programmes aimed largely at uplifting the negro community. It started perhaps the largest inter-racial transfer of wealth in demographic history, dwarfing any profits suspected to have been made in imperialism, colonialism, or the trans-Atlantic slave trade put together:
Great Society programs, launched by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s, have cost taxpayers over $22 trillion in anti-poverty, health, and education spending over the past five decades.
The Apollo Program, total cost, is estimated at $300 bn today’s money.
But it’s never enough, eh?
Get a fucking job then, Gil. Or make up your own work.
He’s dead, Jim.
Not surprising really, G.
Of course he can’t, he is thick as pigshit and has no imagination.
The US could be interested in realising the Moon’s offensive and defensive potential before the ChiComs do. Think a lunar robotic missile base?
Does the US army have a Colonel Breen? (IYKYK)
Well, there is no other benefit we could do with in the current situation…
Why put missiles in a fixed position at the bottom of a gravity well?
A fleet of missiles in LEO could hit any target in the US or Europe within four minutes from launch. That’s too fast for a response. A missile launched from Luna would take a couple of days.
The ISS and Shuttle programs weren’t a total waste of money, even if most of the “scientific experiments” were on a par with what you’d see if you opened my fridge. They confirmed that mammals need gravity for metabolic processes, including becoming pregnant. Low-gravity bases on the Moon or Mars would be slow suicide.
“A missile launched from Luna would take a couple of days.”
Umm under 24h, *if* you’re willing to expend the fuel, use a lunar high elliptic as starting point, the Moon for a gravity assist, then a full end-burn around E-L L1 to crank your initial speed up as high as possible.
And, of course, go for a near-vertical hit. Our atmosphere is not as thick as people imagine…
Got to time/aim *really* well, but you get some *really* impressive J/kg numbers that way. *Penetrative* J/kg even…
Makes nukes look like wet firecrackers.
If you’re going for a tactic like this, it isn’t about *fast* response.
It’s all about punching hard and quite craterish…
Mars will be a one-way trip for humans for the conceivable future. Maybe in 2525. If Man is still alive.
And if Woman can survive.
Honestly dunno, but if the motivation is not military, what is it?
FOMO?
But FOMO of what?
A very small gravity well, requiring relatively small rockets, or not even rockets if you use accellerators, to have them drop a *long* way down a much deeper gravity well..
Get the mass compact and shielded enough to withstand the heat of re-entry, and you don’t even need explosives….
Give them the right shape and colouration, and they’ll be “invisible” to radar and opticals.
Given that any serious moonbase will be fundamentally troglodite, pretty deep troglodite, even, and the surface is a vacuum so normal explosions simply won’t work….
You’d need deep-penetrating, nuclear-tipped bunker busters to even stand a chance to hit anything operationally important.
Anything surface-side would need a direct hit, with serious high explosive or nukes to do any significant damage.
And the moon-missiles don’t even need to be surface-based..
You can flip clusters of them *around* the Moon and have them zip around at *really* low altitudes ( no atmosphere to slow them down…..) , which means they’ll already have most of the speed needed to cross the gap to Earth-Moon L1…
Which means there can be basically nothing *to* hit, except some very-fast-moving targets that are by necessity *extremely* sturdy and solid…
And in a vacuum…. you’d have to be *extremely* accurate with some serious punch to knock one off course…
None of this is actually new… Been a part of speculative fiction for almost a century, and actual military “what-if’s” for… about half a century….
Up until now economically unfeasible. With Musk succeeding? Ummmmmm…. Good thing we have some old and pretty solid agreements that no nation would actually do that.
Even the Warhawks at the height of the Cold War realised that would be a Bridge too Far, like Nukes in LEO ( as MvdR mentioned ).
Mostly because that fancy mountain base would protect them from Nukes, but *not* from repeated Rocks from the Moon.
The LEO Nukes would not give them *time* to “duck and cover” , and the Rock Delivery Special would have them sit at a *very* easily hit target.
It’s amazing how personal potential survival can focus the mind on how *Bad* an idea is…..
Low lunar orbit is pretty unstable as the moon is quite lumpy gravitationally. So you would be expending delta-V much of the time to keep the things from crashing into the moon or wandering off somewhere.
yes… But you wouldn’t be keeping them for a year or so, wouldn’t you?
There’s other ballistic solutions higher up, where that “lumpyness” becomes negligible.. And offers other possiblities to gain kinetic energy *very* efficiently.
And this is an application where you’re very much not Embuggered by the fragility of squishy bags of protoplasm, or the need to actually, y’know…., brake.
No Brakes is sorta the point of this kind of thing…
Those are trivial compared to the costs of constructing a “serious” moonbase, which is in the realm of sci-fi-underpants-gnome economics even if one of the gnomes is called Elon. Assuming this can be overcome (for the sake of this nerd-out), shockwaves travel through rock and regolith on the Moon as on Earth. But underground on the Moon isn’t like underground on Earth in one important way; any structural damage means breathing vacuum.
Overhead shrapnel bombs will take care of most surface assets. Anything hardened, such as an access to a deeper facility, can be nuked. In a big shooting war a fixed base anywhere has the same problem. You know where it is; it’s dead.
Stealth missiles in lunar orbit utilising orbital mechanics for added effect are much more plausible, but again the costs compared to low-earth-orbit (or geosync) stealth missiles don’t make a lot of sense.
In the meantime, a couple of EMP nukes launched inland and overhead from near each coast of the US using small missiles on small boats will pretty much take America out. I tend not worry about things I can’t control but that scenario gives me more fidgets than the Moon being a harsh mistress.
‘the Moon being a harsh mistress’
I’m glad you like Bob Heinlein’s tale!!
Heinlein’s got many good tales.. 🙂
Most people miss that the Moonbase in Harsh Mistress *started* as a Communist ( Stalinist/post-Stalinist) penal colony, and still was built and ran on forced labour.
The lingua franca on the colony is *russian*…
Once up and running it was happily used by the UN *as well* … for the same purposes…
( which says something about how he viewed *that* particular institution….. with pretty accurate foresight..)
The LEO nuke thing was used by him as well… Space Cadet..
The Corps’ *prime* responsibility was maintaining and servicing nuclear warheads in orbit…
When it comes to mil’tary stuff, given his connections, you can be pretty sure whatever he wrote *has* been considered, at least as a potential tactic/threat.
Even if it’s “underpants-gnome economics”.
Things become a *lot* more feasible when, in Stalinist Style, you can and will force labour at gunpoint, in essentially the perfect prison, and not care about the attrition rate.
There’s *always* more “Enemies of the State” to be found, after all….
you don’t even need explosives
Explosives (other than nukes) are otiose. Kinetic energy at 10km/s (allowing for some atmospheric deceleration) is 50MJ/kg, TNT is ~4MJ/kg a rounding error.
there is no prospect whatsoever of human habitation of the moon
is that a line from War of the Worlds by Jeff Wayne?
Similar!
Isn’t Spud one of Mazzos true believers that the state makes everything? Shouldn’t he be happy the government is doing this?
Anything that does come from this mission, however slight will be used by Murphy to show how all conquering the stae us.
But, to Spud, it’s the American state – under Trump, no less.
Isn’t this the courageous state in action? Who else could find a slower and more expensive way of putting a diversity hire on the moon?
Yup. If Biden or the Sainted Obama had done this, it would have been the Courageous State in action, boosting confidence and showing that anything is possible with enough government money.
But now? Orange Man Bad.
NASA is neoliberal.
Commie dick Murphy lies. His grand objective is to destroy all assets. He’s pissed because Trump et al are HAVING FUN as they ‘waste’ assets.
Um, did he complain that politicians have very small egos?
“the dark side of the moon” doesn’t exist. I dare say the bloody Babylonians and Greeks knew that. Certainly every intelligent schoolboy has known it for centuries.
What a tit he is.
It will actually be mostly dark on the far side, as we are just past full moon. They’ll get a small crescent lit.
I broadly agree with Spudman, but the likelihood of those spin-offs being discovered anyway is pretty low.
If you spend money anywhere, you will get spin-offs. Public sector, private sector. You need a tool for a job and it doesn’t exist, you invent it. And having put in the investment, why not let everyone else use it (free or for a price)?
Spuds a clanger?
We’ll see what he says if/when the Chinese attempt something similar.
There will either be silence, or some sort of “China stronk, why can’t we catch up?” comment.
Oh do feck off, Spud.
Progress is made by pushing boundaries, not circling your own navel.
Did we waste ‘the world’s’ resources or just our own?
And he should be careful with this ‘we’ stuff. Or else ‘we’ might think that posting garbage on YouTube is a waste of ‘our’ resources, Comrade. A man of his age and girth could use some physical exercise and calorie restriction. I am sure we can find suitable manual labor that would not be a waster of ‘our’ resources.
Digging holes and filling them in again would seem like a good use for his ‘talents’. Might even learn something about economics.
With my plan he would just be digging one hole and would probably only get partway through filling it back up on himself.
I do wish the MSM who are gushing over this would get this right: They are “going to the moon” in the same way I “go to Greenland” when I fly to Chinada………
I can think of no conceivable gains to humankind as a consequence
I’m going to take this as an opportunity to point out that there are two different categories of science: applied science and basic science.
Applied science is looking for solutions. Basic science is gaining knowledge for no particular reason. Moon missions are basic science. Note then that Spud’s outburst is ignorant. It matters not if there are ‘no conceivable gains.’
On going, note that things like expeditions to Antarctica, like the moon, are basic science. YET, when BBC/Guardian receive press releases from the expedition, they attempt to create some value for the expedition, as if it were applied science. The expedition staff may also proffer some alleged benefit, setting up their next grant. When you read a sciencey press release, first ask is this applied or basic science. Then, if basic science, why are they yammering on about alleged benefits?
/pendantry