Moon Mission

[Hom3r]

Tonight Artemis II is due to leave Earths orbit

[Mr K]

I'm volunteering for the next step, a voyage to Mars. I've had enough of this planet.

Mars looks a bit like Lanzarote, so should be nice , with loads of Pizza restaurants.

Originally Posted by Hom3r

Tonight Artemis II is due to leave Earths orbit

Well technically not quite, it’s going to the moon, which is in earth’s orbit . But yeah, if the moon wasn’t there it is going to be going fast enough to sail on forever. Best hope they don’t miss …

[Anonymouse]

I hope they make it okay. I'd love for Tasmin Archer to be proved wrong. It is high time we went back.

[Anonymouse]

And now they're saying it's "too expensive" to send people, and robots/AI can do it better.

Yeah. Craven cowardice, more like. Does the phrase "Risk is our business" ring a bell? It doesn't matter that it was said by a fictional character - it's still true!

"We choose to go to the Moon and do the other things - not because they are easy, but because they are hard!"

There was nothing fictional about JFK!

And robots/AI can't do it better. They can do it, I agree, and they can pave the way to address dangers and reduce risk, preparing the ground and doing most of the grunt work. But people will still want to go. Hell, I would. Maybe my unsteadiness and useless right hand wouldn't matter so much in 1/6 G. On Earth, if I fall it could be disastrous (especially at my age, 60* - just getting up is hard enough, never mind if I injure myself). On the Moon, I could bounce back on my feet.

Speaking of expense...Apollo cost less than 5c per day per person. How much did Vietnam cost? How much is Iran costing?

"Those billions would be better spent on Earth!" Yes, I've heard that before. Let's see what we wouldn't have without Apollo R & D, shall we? Mobiles. GPS. CAT scans. Ultrasound. Smaller computers. Velcro. Weather monitoring and early warning of incoming - can't stop it, true, but at least we can warn people before it hits. We'd still have developed them, I grant you...but nowhere near as quickly.

Effectively those billions - and far more - were spent on Earth. How much are satellites and mobiles worth? Trillions?

The Moon is still a new world, surely an ideal place to find new knowledge...which we sorely need.

Plus there's the human factor, why Kirk was free-climbing El Capitan: "Because it's there!"

We should go. I believe we can't not. But we should go ourselves.

Buzz Aldrin talked of the "magnificent desolation". Show me an AI which could come up with something so profound.

AI wouldn't have known to take a photo of Earth from Apollo 8, the very first to show our world in its entirety (still a popular photo, on a par with the Tennis Girl - what a beautiful bum she had!).

AI wouldn't have been able to cope with Apollo 13; likely it would've calculated the odds and written the crew off. It was humans who solved that one, turning 13 into a "successful failure".

* Still can't believe that. It still seems yesterday I was watching Armstrong on TV.