Thank You Boeing, NASA and ESA
 

Whew! Pulled the rabbit out of the rumpled hat! Thanks to all for not giving up and persevering to make Artemus 1 a successful reality. It looks like humans may again walk on the Moon! KUDOS!

After the ongoing many depressing effects of pandemic, most welcome is something positive about our collective future.

I don't think we have any future on the moon or on Mars either. It's interesting to explore those places; we might learn more about the history of the solar system. But the idea of people actually living on a dead sphere with little or no atmosphere and every bite of food having to be imported from earth is ridiculous.

A lot of the fervour for space exploration is just people thinking that they can get out of gaol free when they have made earth uninhabitable.

I tend to agree. Sure space exploration is interesting and exciting but, at what cost?

NASA's budget in 2021 was US$ 23 billion. (ESA's was €6.5 billion.)

One could allocate that to protecting the planet instead, or one could ask what the US military did with US$ 801 billion in 2021, and couldn't some of that be better allocated...?

I, like you , am happy enorbet.

I suppose you gentlemen and ladies responding so far are unaware of how different the world is now because of space exploration. We literally would not likely be having this conversation right now were it not for the push for electronics miniaturization not to mention the massive boost to medicine and health practices from studying what it takes to survive launching to Space. Add in new materials from metals to fabrics, new understanding from data on climate and weather, archaeology, virtually every area of endeavor was affected even the value of long-term planning and the psychological affect of something non-political, something simply human that's positive and hopeful are all in heavy debt to the exploration of Space. Plus, especially after the DART mission, I wonder what cost you imagine NOT being able to stop a threatening asteroid impact might pose.

Sure the dollar amounts look huge to we average Joes but it is an absolutely miniscule percentage of the federal budget and one of the very few that is universally positive. I'm just glad that some percentage gets spent on advancement as well as the concept that great things can be achieved beyond the mundane. That there are also immediately measurable positive spinoffs galore is just frosting on the cake. The long term positives are often less recognized but worth your awareness.

@rokytnji :thumbsup:

Yeah I don't get it why some people fall back on the "couldn't that money have been better spent on <insert fave cause>" trope while ignoring truly non-productive even destructive expenses both personal and collective. How can anyone not take joy in expanding our idea of what is even possible? The story is repeated throughout History. Of what use are automobiles, sea-going boats, radio, TV, telephone, travelling on rails, aircraft ?, etc etc ad infinitum. I don't doubt that some questioned the expense and effort of melting iron when we already have copper and bronze.

1. Compare the NASA budget to the US military budget.

2. Look up "terraforming". No one is going to ship endless supplies from Earth to another planet. The objective of a colony, rather than just a station, would be to make it self sufficient.

3. Even if we did everything right and extended the period during which this planet could support our kind of life that period WILL end. It is likely to end FAR before the sun shifts from hydrogen fusion to helium fusion and pops, stripping atmosphere from and cooking all of the inner planets. The only way for Humanity and the associated animal and plant populations we value will survive is to find new places to survive that are not a "single point of failure".

??? OK the military DWARFS NASA's budget. What's your point? Mine would be that NASA's budget should be larger and Military's smaller.


Actually I don't have to look up "terraforming" as I've engaged in long arguments about it with experts on Physicsforums.com and other scientific message boards as well as having read serious books around it since I was a teenager 50+ years ago. I am aware of how lacking we are with our current technologies to terraform but I think the problem will lead to solutions and those solutions will likely affect methods on Earth as well. In fact we already have a need for such methods right here on Earth since apparently Anthropohenic Global Climate Change will change agriculture on a massive scale.

In my view the leap to "find new places to survive that are not a single point of failure" especially if you're implying planets around other stars, is vastly more complicated than terraforming let alone enclosed environmental systems capable of growing sustenance.

Regardless, advancements begin with small steps. The first tenuous steps must be taken or no journey is possible.

I hope you're not including me in that. :/


I was intending to include that in my post but got sidetracked looking at military spending and forgot.

NASA currently gets around 0.5% - there was an unsuccessful petition a while back to double it to 1%.

I wonder if you gave people a list of spending categories and a pile of coins representing their countries budget, how much they would allocate...

satellites
 

If you include satellites as part of space exploration then we have the GPS geolocation system, the Hubble telescope, Google maps, satellite Internet service, satellite phone service, military spy satellites, and the International Space Station. None of this existed when as a kid I stood during the evening in my front yard and watched Sputnik I pass overhead broadcasting "beep beep beep".

Hear, hear!
(Now if Boeing just had some decent management. :) )

You guys might enjoy this link.

https://www.nasa.gov/specials/trackartemis/

Required WebGL and a decent graphic card/CPU for this website to work in your browser.

If you get a very large pink triangle, I don't know why it's happening, but grab the Orion spacecraft to rotate it and it'll disappear from view. I think the pink triangle issue is related to my computer being Linux and having a NVIDIA graphic card or its driver. This website has worked fully, without pink triangle, in some browsers (Falkon, Konqueror, and Vivaldi) and not in others (Firefox surprised me; I was expecting it to be the most compatible one).

It works in Firefox for me.

Actually, that WAS my point. We need a military to survive as a country, but not a military more than five times that of the next five countries COMBINED! We need Space Exploration and eventually space colonization for humanity and whatever we take with us to survive at all.

It took us under 20 years to go from "hey, those Russians just put stuff in ORBIT, ALIVE! Holy cow, we better catch up!" to "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind!". I remember, I was watching. IT changed the world in MILLIONS of ways, then we stopped investing at that rate and laid off so many engineers with multiple PhDs that we had areas that had orbital engineers flipping burgers!

If we let things go to pieces on the ground we die. If we give up on exploration beyond our planet we die. We need ALL of it to survive and thrive.

We need to get smarter.