I saw this movie…
Great, let’s scar the moon for some greed.
Would we be able to see it from earth?
I’ve seen pictures of the earth from the moon and you can barely identify the continents. You definitely can’t see individual open cast mines.
LMAO!
Space X is pivoting from Mars to Lunar…
you mean the same old back tracking bullshit that he has always done.
While I don’t like Musk, it’s actually never made sense to even attempt to go to Mars without taking advantage of the helium-3 stores on the Moon.
Which is why a smart person would have started with the moon instead of saying in 2011 that he would put a man on Mars by 2021.
In one hand, the moon is smarter because you can have Interaction and any change takes only a week or two. While we can’t harvest local resources, the cost to location is relatively low. You could even completely run out of food and still have everyone survive
We can’t afford to screw up anything to mars when there is no Interaction and it takes 18 months or more to make a change. Imagine if there’s a medical Emergency or the garden dies: 18 months is a really long time. Everything you send there is correspondingly more expensive and everything needs to much more stock in case anything goes wrong. There are many more possible issues to plan and prepare for. This will be especially expensive until we develop in-situ resource usage
And we don’t even know if people could survive that long
- mars has no magnetic field so both moon and mars are fully exposed to radiation, but an astronaut needs to survive like 3 years of it to goto mars
- we know that microgravity causes long term health issues limiting long term presence in orbit. But we don’t know how much gravity is enough to prevent those issues. Going to the moon is short enough to not worry and gives us a second data point. Going to mars is long enough to be a serious problem if it’s gravity is not enough
But in the other hand mars is smarter because more gravity and more resources. If you believe we should eventually have colonies in space, that will never happen on the moon but might on mars
If we have colonies on Mars I can’t see why we also wouldn’t have colonies on the moon if only to support ships going further out into the solar system. Refuelling on the moon makes much more sense than refuelling on earth.
The only way that isn’t the case is if we build a space elevator to bring resources up to spacecraft orbit, but if we’re at that point I still think we would build colonies on the moon just because, even if it’s just at the level of a Saudi Arabian vanity project.
For sure, any longer term presence outside orbit will hinge on finding resources. And i don’t think it even matters if we’re able to harvest helium-3 or something that might be worth bringing back, but to be able to use enough resources to make it affordable. Every pound lifted from earth to outside orbit will always be too expensive and local resources much much more affordable. While it starts with shelter and radiation shielding (ie live underground), we’ll need to generate bulk consumables like water, oxygen, fuel, and we’ll need to grow at least some of our own food
But we don’t even know if we can live on the moon. Microgravity has bad long term health effects such that we really don’t want to spend more than a year there. Does the moon have enough gravity to be substantially better?
If we do establish a larger off earth presence, we’ll have to compromise on enough gravity for long term health and livability vs as little gravity as necessary to keep space accessible