Blue Origin was founded by Jeff Bezos. They have not done many flights, mostly sub orbital missions. Not sure what the point of a Moon mission is now. Been there, done that.
Like Magellan sailing around the world the second time to visit the least interesting rock he found the first time.
And, unlike Magellan, we can send robots much cheaper.
There are a lot of things we know about the moon now that we didn’t know in the Apollo days.
After Apollo, it was assumed that the moon was basically a dry, dusty ball of rock with little of scientific or commercial value. As you say, been there, done that.
But a new collection of probes in the past couple of decades has upended our view of the moon. First we learned that there are hundreds of millions of tons of water ice in permanently shadowed craters. . Then we learned that the Moon has its own water cycle which may be the source of water in those craters. Then we discovered lava tubes and skylights, which could provide vast living space fully protected from hazards and temperature swings, and which could have pristine environments untouched by radiation or micrometeorites for billions of years. There may be a lot of scientific value there.
Finally, we have geologically mapped the Moon and discovered it is full of resources we could use.
Then there’s another practical reason for sending humans to the moon: to learn how to live on other worlds before we send people to Mars or an asteroid. The Moon is three days away. Mars is 2 years away at worst, and six months at best. If you are going to learn how to build facilities that can keep people alive for years, and which could possibly fail, where would you rather be?
Finally, before we send people to Mars for several years it would be really nice to know how humans respond to low gravity. We have only two data points right now - zero-g and Earth. We know that zero-g does bad things to people, but we have no idea what living in 1/6 to 1/3 g will do to us.
For these reasons, robots don’t cut it. Exploring lava tubes is especially hard for a robot, since there is no solar power down there, and radio won’t penetrate the rock overhead. And we don’t know what they look like inside, so it’s hard to design a robot to traverse them.
Much of what we want to do with the moon is not pure science, but industrial exploitation. We’re going to need people on site for that, as robots today can’t come close to doing the things required.
What about robots 10 years in the future? I assume they will be much better than what exists now.
Not a chance. For example, if we wanted to harvest ice from Shackleton crater, we would need to build a processing facility on the rim of the crater, then somehow feed power down to the crater floor where the harvesting happens.
To do that would require surveying, preparing areas, building facilities, running power cables for miles, navigating the unknown structure of the crater, yada yada.
Our best robots today can wheel around on the surface (very slowly), and take the occasional measurement. And development of space robotics just isn’t that fast. For example the 2020 Mars rover is not that much different than Curiosity, and is based on its design. Curiosity was launched in 2011.
Finally, if the main purpose for going back to the moon is to learn how to keep humans alive on other planets and moons, you kind of need to use humans.
I think one of the main purposes is to give big contracts to Spacex, Blue Origin, Boeing, etc. Just like defense contracts that are sometimes given to make things the military did not ask for or wants. As the saying goes, follow the money.
That would indeed be the way it used to work. One of NASA’s purposes was to feed a constant stream of dollars to big defense contractors on cost-plus contracts that guaranteed maximum profits, delayed schedules and cost overruns.
This actually represents a complete change from that. For one thing, Boeing got bupkis. Their presentation was deemed to be flawed and simplistic, and the 737MAX debacle caused NASA to demand access to the source code of whatever software was used. SpaceX and Blue Origin agreed, Boeing refused. So Boeing got kicked to the curb.
Understand what a huge change this may represent, The original moo plans were all Boeing. A Boeing SLS rocket would take a Boeing Orion spacecraft to the moon, where it would dock with an international ‘gateway’ modelled after the ISS with modules built by different international partnees as well as large U.S. contractors.
But SLS is way behind schedule and way over budget. Gateway has been scrapped as part of Artemis. NASA announced recently a new model that would allow commercial rockers like Falcon Heavy and Blue Origin’s New Glenn to take modt of the hardware to the moon, with only Orion and the crew flying on SLS.
But now they are contracting out the lunar lander, and one of the contracts went to SpaceX for a lander based on Starship. Starship and its booster have far more capability than SLS. One of the arguments for continuing funding of SLS was that Starship was still pie-in-the sky, and it would be foolish to risk the Artemis program on a rocket that is still being designed.
But if the lander is going to be a variant of Starship, NASA apparently has confidence that Starship is real and will fly. If it does, kiss SLS goodbye eventually, as it has similar class performance but will cost about 100 times as much to fly, and NASA can only fly one or two per year at best. SpaceX will be able to fly a Starship every day. Once Starship is operational, it will make SLS look like a dinosaur.
The last big change (and most important one) is that going to fixed price contracting means NASA had to give up the old way of doing things, in which NASA maintained tight control over the design and implementation, with constant tollgate reviews, requirements changes, etc. Wanting that level of control is what drove them to cost-plus in the first place, as no company is going to offer a fixed price for something that the customer can change at will.
So now, instead of NASA getting to decide what kind of rocket, what engines, where it will be built, which boosters it must use, yada yada, NASA will just say, “We need 50 tons on the moon with these specifications.”, and companies bid fixed prices, and then NASA gets out of the way, mostly.
It’s a very positive step away from the type of shenanigans that used to go on.
One thing Luna WON’T become is a prison colony. Cheaper to send violators to Antarctica or just drop-em in the ocean. Sorry, Heinlein. It probably won’t be a UN military base to impose “order” on humanity. So what to do with Luna? I searched on NASA MOON PLANS and the first hit was this pdf. The Project Artemis doc declares,
A test-bed for living elsewhere in the universe, sure. “Scientific advances,” sure. “Economic growth” seems a bit vague to me. Extracting minerals and delivering them Earthside? Lunar farms shipping produce to hungry Earthlings? A tourist industry? More likely just a dirtbound American industrial frenzy, domestic factories selling more stuff to the government. Of course (warning, political jab!) everything this POTUS touches, dies. Will Artemis be any exception?
Hey, diddle, diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow–a product of Boeing Space and Missile Systems–jumped over the moon…
Definition of a cow: A mouse built to government specifications.
(Heinlein used elephant, but cow works)
I can paint a future where moon manufacturing is incredibly important.
For example, the Moon’s surface is enriched in oxygen, iron, and titanium. It’s even easy to mine - iron exists in the regolith in modes that might be able to be harvested with a simple magnet. The titanium can be harvested by simply scooping up regolith and heating it with solar furnaces. Titanium powder could then be used to 3D print structural members. Or the powder could be shipped up to orbiting facilities to use in printing structural members for spaceships, satellites, whatever. Maybe in the future huge satellites and space stations could be orbited by only shipping up the electronics, life support and other complex things, assembled in orbit by using beams and other heavy structures sourced from lunar raw materials.
Then there’s fuel. Lots of ways fuel can be harvested from the moon. The regolith is around 40% oxygen, as I recall. Oxygen makes up the large majority of weight of hydrogen/oxygen fuels. By shipping just the hydrogen from Earth, we could reduce the fuel cost space missions dramatically. Or, we can harvest both hydrogen and oxygen by dissociating lunar water. Or, we can heat lunar water directly with nuclear power and use it for fuel.
Lava Tubes on the moon provide almost unlimited living space shielded from solar and cosmic rays, micrometeorites, and other space hazards. They would be safer and easier to ‘terraform’ than the surface of Mars.
And don’t discount tourism or even retirement homes i the more distant future. I’m creeping up on sixty, and already living in 1/6 g is starting to sound pretty good. On the moon, an 80 year old could bounce around like he’s 20.
But the most important industries are the ones we cannot know of now. The moon has resources and abundant energy. The only thing stopping us from exploiting it is the high cost of space flight. Once we find a reason to live and work there, we will discover new things.
Every new frontier beings serendipity with it. The key is that the frontier needs to have some sort of profitable activity to sustain it. We can already identify plenty of potentially profitable things to do on the moon. We can’t find a single one for Mars so far.
Undoubtedly in the long term. But this administration isn’t much on long term projects other than unsavory political moves. Watch interest and support fade when immediate results with political gains aren’t forthcoming.
NASA has plans to “master” the Moon using robots. The first step on this path is the creation of a series of automatic all-terrain vehicles that will transport scientific instruments over distances of up to 1,900 km to collection and analysis points for lunar soil samples. Five all-terrain vehicles are supposed to be equipped with automatic laboratories for studying the lunar soil. The ATVs must run on solar power, being on the move for three-quarters of the time and sampling the rest of the time.
Great news. Now SpaceX can openly work on the mission and NASA funds can be released.