yea, I guess the long term goal is to set up a space station in lunar orbit, but like, I really fail to see the benefits of this and a cursory search says I’m not alone. fwiw I also disagree with manned mars missions having any purpose too.
seems like lighting 100+ billion $ on fire.
Sucks that I’ve been forced to stan a lol Elon position, but imo exploring and traversing through the universe is one of the only things that humankind can do that has the potential to secure the future of the species. Certainly you can debate the best use of the $, but I’d rather spend 100+ billion on science and space exploration than on droning brown people. Obviously you can do multiple different good things with the money (though we’ll definitely keep doing the droning, sadly).
I was the same way but changed my mind. i struggle to see how mars is going to be a more successful environment for the survival of human species compared to even the worst apocalyptic climate change predictions on earth. seems like any mars outpost would be inherently reliant on life on earth being sustainable, so meh
also dont think humanity is worth saving but that’s a me thing
i think big goals like space stations create enough basic science that translates into many comforts on earth, but i do understand the expense for human travel is orders of magnitude more than cube-sat or drone missions. if the choice is between sending one man into moon orbit, vs 10 satellites to the moon, mars, and venus each, might as well do the latter.
Yeah, I think PR is an enormous reason why they’re insisting on crewed missions.
Good opportunity to bump this post from before this thread was started:
+1 for “satellites good, humans not so much”
I agree that human colonization of Mars isn’t really a super great idea currently, at least without some significant lolterraforming. But, the lessons learned from ferrying humans safely through deep space and answering some of the requisite life support and habitation issues in order to survive somewhere like Mars would be pretty useful to continue toward making the needed technological leaps required to get us someplace actually decent.
I’m not sure how well-known this letter is, but in 1970 some NASA dude wrote to an African nun who wanted to know why we were doing space exploration instead of feeding starving children.
We need to get good at space because that’s where the resources are going to be when we start running out of them here. A good engine that allows for constant thrust opens the door to retrieving astroids and towing them someplace we can make use of them.
This is what makes Starship such a game changer for spaceflight: you don’t have to choose between humans or probes when you can just do both instead.
They’re going to send humans to the moon using a tiny ass Orion capsule:
That’s going to dock with a lunar Starship and then the Starship is going to descend to the lunar surface:
Look at all the room inside Starship that’s going to be left over after its 4 person crew transfers over.
Switching from throwing away the majority of a rocket every launch to throwing away nothing is going to drastically increase how much we’re able to put into orbit and beyond.
I know spaceX kinda it’s own self running competent company but still hard for me to trust any sort of future product function predictions from anything associated with musk lol
If they’ve figured out how to get around the rocket equation and can put all that into orbit cheaply I’ll still think Musk is an idiot but at least we’ll have a cheap way to put stuff into orbit.
ESA did a livestream from Mars today, kinda neat.
Not very in my opinion, think this got steam from some idiotic rogan thing.
Basically, the JWST space telescope has uncovered phenomena that isn’t easily explained by current cosmological or galaxy formation theories. we’re also finding super massive black holes that shouldnt exist at the distances we see them. It’s possible we got the age of the universe wrong, but, from everything I’ve been reading on this topic the last several weeks it seems very unlikely to me. Furthermore it seems to generate far more questions than it answers, particularly around our assumptions about dark energy.
bunk science in this layman’s opinion
this however is a really exciting time for cosmology and astronomy - recent discoveries have definitely shown that our leading theories about the early universe are way off. people are gonna put forth all sorts of stuff like this to try to get published.
it’s a bit unsettling to me honestly - I had not realized until this stuff how much of my atheism rested on a bedrock of shaky cosmology theory.
one cool thing I learned about JWST though is that it orbits the sun (not the earth) at 4x the distance of the earth to the moon! had no idea it was that far away. pretty incredible, it’s an engineering marvel in a ton of ways other than that - another being the temperature difference between its sunny side and “cold” side.
woops NASA accidentally severs contact with Voyager 2 probe 12 billion miles from Earth | Live Science
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