A bright spot in otherwise bleak news. Spectacular blast-off yesterday. A diverse astronaut crew with one Canadian will go farther into space than any human. We can still do great things if we put our minds to it.
is it great though?
ive been looking through the various news articles on the program, and im having a hard time finding any substantive public reason to be going there. theres certainly lots of american flags and great statements about the achievements of mankind and the unity of it all.
but im a skeptic on these things. what i see is something else.
as near as i can tell, the moon mission is a publicly-financed pilot program for elon musk and the rest of the space billionaires to get public funding for what will inevitably be a private mining business. the oligarchs are good at this-- use the tax dollars extracted from fast food workers and walmart greeters to fund their projects, then stuff the income from the resulting industry into their personal mattress.
the only profitable reason to go to the moon that i have seen so far is that it is a possible source of H3, a light isotop of helium used in radiation detectors and possibly for the cooling systems in . . . data centers.
but maybe im wrong, and something will surface after the confetti is cleared up.
There is knowledge for knowledge's sake. Then, there is also the idea of colonizing another heavenly body. We may need to do that when earth finally gives up the ghost. And, we have to beat the Russians and Chinese - otherwise, they will claim it for their own.
I'd think that in the moon's even lower gravity, any helium would be long gone. It certainly doesn't chemically combine with anything. What mechanism is keeping it trapped?
It's a project, at least nominally peaceful and forward looking. Compare with the human propensity to ritually burn up resources in profligate extravaganzas of senseless aggression (see US "intervention" in the Middle East of late as an example among literally thousands of wars in our history). Manned space exploration seems a better use of focus and energy, even while more direct improvement of everyday lives is arguably preferable to rocket rides.
That doesn't happen to be the way we do things though. Particularly the current vile and despicable US administration. Going by its rhetoric and actions, improving everyday lives is a waste, riddled with fraud and abuse. The result is that many many more people will suffer and die around the world. It's not as if forgoing extraterrestrial ventures would change that.