Belligerent Savant » Sun May 30, 2021 11:47 pm wrote:.
I didn't move the goalposts. I specifically raised manned vs unmanned travel to Mars/Moon in a prior comment. Perhaps you misread my commentary.
Fair enough, but just to be clear: I do think getting people to Mars is a hell of a lot harder. Not impossible, just hard, and there's a good chance some people will die trying.
There can be no discussion Re: human travel to Mars without first addressing the many hurdles inherent to such a feat.
"Money" is no longer a viable excuse with Musk and Bezos investments in space. This is no longer a 'lack of govt funding' conversation. In any event, this was always a BS excuse. Money can be generated -- has been generated -- to fund all manner of ventures.
It may no longer be a viable excuse now, but it was back in the seventies. There's a limit to how much useful work you can do on the Moon with short trips. The next logical step would be a permanent base, and that would cost a hell of a lot more, something that Nixon decided wasn't worth it.
If Starship is successful it will be a whole other ball game. It can park 200 tons of cargo on the Moon in one go, so essentially an entire Moon base. Blue Origin might get there, but Bezos is going about it the wrong way. He's doing it the old space way: design and build the finished article and test it till the end of time before launching it. Musk is successful because he wasn't afraid to blow shit up and iterate.
Bezos tried hiring Gwynne Shotwell away from SpaceX, and when she declined he instead hired a conservative old space guy who in turn hired a bunch of his old space buddies. Apparently the internal workings at Blue Origin is a bit of a shitshow, and the whole operation feels more like your standard pork-extraction scheme than a serious contender.
The entire argument hinges entirely on the assumption that the moon landings occurred as depicted, and that the van allen belts are not as harmful as otherwise indicated.
The Van Allen belts are harmful if you go there and stick around, but the astronauts going to the Moon at thousands of miles an hour only spent a short amount of time there, limiting their exposure. Still not the healthiest thing you can do, but worst case is cancer several years in the future, not instant death.
You can live another 100 years without observing a human on mars or the moon, and still you will hold on to the narrative that we've been there, 150 years ago.
Yes, I would. There's just too much stuff needing to be faked otherwise. Lunar lander site, wheel tracks from the buggies, Moon rocks which have been studied extensively, reflectors placed on the surface, God knows how many subcontractors believing they were building the real thing (which begs the question: if they built the real thing why not just use it for its intended purpose?), everyone at mission control lying or being fed fake data, everyone tracking communications and telemetry in various parts of the world lying or being fed faked data from space, the Soviet Union not noticing anything amiss, etc.
People went there, and then stopped going because there wasn't much point in doing the same thing over and over again, and the funding for an expanded footprint wasn't forthcoming.
On Edit: rather than continued to and fro, as I anticipate we've long-since reached an impasse, i'll offer a gentleman's wager:
If a human is convincingly depicted to step foot on the Moon or Mars (i.e., no fancy CGI or deepfakes, which unfortunately will become increasingly challenging to confirm/identify with each passing year) in the not-too-distant future, i will happily ship to your attention a bottle of your preferred libation (or a case of your preferred beer). I'll cover all international shipping charges!
Hopefully it'll happen while we still maintain a presence here on this forum... or here on Earth.
I don't drink, so just keep a six-pack of Coke on standby (I'll also accept an ounce of good weed).