Space Waste?
Nuclear reactors to the moon!
I was the kind of kid who would get up early before school in hopes of seeing a space shuttle launch live on television. My sleepy romanticism of the space program was often squashed by weather and other delays. I did a project in middle school about colonizing the moon. I was an unabashed enthusiast of manned space exploration.
And then, at some point, I grew up. Indeed, I was at the NASA Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville just over a week ago, marvelling at the size of the Saturn V on display, and chatting with a friend about the fact that while I certainly favor the scientific mission of NASA, manned space exploration seems like a poor use of resources.
And sure, my inner-middle-schooler is stirred a bit by the Artemis project, but the me-in-the-now has to wonder if the investment is at all worth it. I would much, much rather the billions going to a trip to the moon go to research grants or to using NASA for scientific, unmanned research, where the likely return on investment is higher.
And yet, we have this headline from Politico yesterday, Duffy to announce nuclear reactor on the moon.
My initial reaction was, “It often feels like we are governed by fifth graders.” I then noted that was maybe I was being too kind, giving them the acumen of 10-year-olds, as Paul Campos wondered, What if the US government were in the hands of a bunch of dull-normal eight-year-old boys?
It seems worth noting that the directive for NASA to take the US back to the moon was made by Trump in his first term. It is of a piece with his general backwards-looking understanding of America. After all, one of our most significant achievements was going to the moon. But there is also a reason we stopped going. After Apollo 11, the symbolic power of landing humans on the moon was substantially lessened with each subsequent mission. What was once “one giant leap for mankind” became a bit of a yawn. Yes, there was more to learn with each trip, but the returns were not relative to the cost and risk.
Some will counter that this is all part of a forward-looking vision for going to Mars. Again, middle school me is totally down with a mission to Mars. But adult me does not see it as worth the expense and the risk. The proverbial reason to climb a mountain is that it is there. That’s not a good enough reason to go to Mars. It is manifestly obvious that robotic probes can do more science on Mars than humans can. Robots can go farther and work longer.
I see no sustainable presence on the Moon, let alone Mars. And even if the resources could be expended to do so, what is the benefit? Sure, there is some science fiction (if not science fantasy) argument that all of this leads to long-term colonization, but even my overactive imagination has to say that such goals are wildly unrealistic.
The Politico piece makes all of this part of the “second space race.”
“It is about winning the second space race,” said a NASA senior official, granted anonymity to discuss the documents ahead of their wider release.
[…]
The first country to have a reactor could “declare a keep-out zone which would significantly inhibit the United States,” the directive states, a sign of the agency’s concern about a joint project China and Russia have launched.
[…]
The space station directive aims to replace the aging, leaky International Space Station with commercially run ones by changing how the agency awards contracts.
NASA plans to award at least two companies a contract within six months of the agency’s request for proposals. Officials hope to put a new station in space by 2030. Otherwise, only China would have a permanently crewed space station in orbit.
First, I see no reason to be worried about the Russians. Second, this is not the kind of race we saw in the ’60s. There was a real political urgency about showing which side could achieve space-based feats. There was real political power regarding who orbited the Earth first or who got to the Moon first. That is not what is going on now.
If the issue is, as it should be, one of resources, then I would rather have USAID and funding for Medicaid than a space station. And if there is a really good reason for having a space station, then let’s hear the justification beyond the kinds of reasons kids might think it is cool.
Meanwhile, via NPR: Why a NASA satellite that scientists and farmers rely on may be destroyed on purpose.
The data the two missions collect is widely used, including by scientists, oil and gas companies and farmers who need detailed information about carbon dioxide and crop health. They are the only two federal satellite missions that were designed and built specifically to monitor planet-warming greenhouse gases.
This seems kind of useful (he said, understatedly) and is relatively cheap. And yet, the administration doesn’t like reality about climate change, so adios actual data.
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Curiosity Rover has traveled 22.1 miles in 12½ years.
Opportunity traveled 28.06 miles in 15 years
As I noted on the daily thread, my hunch is that this might be a means to bring Musk to heel over his threats to finance campaigns against Republicans. One of the primary means to get stuff too the moon would be SpaceX.
@Mu Yixiao:
I took this to mean Earth –> Mars “farther,” rather than miles traversed *on* Mars. It’s a lot easier to fling a robot at a planet rather than sending people there, in other words.
It’s all irreleveant, but who are they planning on declaring the moon a keep-out zone to? Fox News and its viewers? The genocidal settler state of Israel? Totalized ugly Americanism may have its short-term benefits and may gain a few allies. But the long-term is vanishing for America.
And think of entering a spacecraft built by some hobgoblin MAGA entity. John Glenn could joke about low-bids and government contracts, but that was at the height of American power and influence. Imagine strapping yourself into the low-bid craft overseen by DOGE reboots.
The best book for dispelling middle school enthusiasms about Mars colonization is Kelly Weinersmith’s A City On Mars.
@Jen: I decided not to try and interpret the stats, as it is often hard for me to know what people intend when they just post something like that.
I can say for sure that the 12.5 and 15 years definitely make my point. The mileage issue, I suppose, could be debated. How far humans would be able to go on a manned mission, I am not sure.
I was also implying that the money for manned space flight to Mars would definitely be better spent on developing better robots.
@Steven L. Taylor: My guess would be that the rovers covered a lot more ground than a man could manage in a pressure suit and tethered to a small lander for food, water, and oxygen. Something like the “hab” in The Martian, but realistic, would require a lot of lifts. @Kingdaddy: cites A City on Mars. I haven’t read it, but I would expect radiation is mentioned prominently.
@Steven L. Taylor:
This is an excellent point. I will endeavor to do better.
I have two thoughts about this:
1. There is a fairly good case for putting a communications base/relay on the farside of the moon. There, it would not have to cut the the chatter of all the broadcasters that are earthbound. It could talk to the quite a few already vehicles/drones we have established in the Solar System, and also talk to the quite a few more missions to the asteroid belt to gather its mineral riches.
2. One might think that solar panels would do well, along with batteries. If one had a firm that is deeply committed to making batteries (even though some think it is a car company) one might be excused for thinking one will be tapped to provide batteries.
A small nuke plant (and this is only 100kW, so that doesn’t seem big to me) might make sense, augmented by solar, and it could be a shot across Musk’s bow. Which fits better with how Trump and MAGA deal with potential problem children. They don’t entice enemies, they threaten them.
“Mark Watney’s cancers would have cancers”.
That’s what Andy Weir describes as one of two technical problems with his book (and the movie based on it). Radiation exposure is a thing, since Mars has no magnetic field like Earth does.
(The other technical problem is that dust storms, while they do exist, do not exert much force since the atmosphere is thin.)
I don’t know exactly what protects the ISS, but it could easily be low enough to be protected by Earth’s magnetic field.
We don’t yet have a good answer for this, which means that robots are going to have to be our go-to for a while.
1) Robots vs humans. No one will spend the amounts on robots that they would on humans. take Apollo. Had that money been spent on robots, we’d have tons of Moon rocks, including from the far side of the Moon. But there’s no way NASA would have gotten 4% of the budget for several years to launch probes and landers, no matter how many sample return missions might have been possible.
2) The last three Apollo landings carried a rover, which allowed the astronauts to travel tens of kilometers from the landing sites. Missions to Mars would carry such things as well, which would cover more distance in a few weeks than the automated Mars rovers have done in years. Of course, the cost would be many, many, many orders of magnitude higher.
3) Radiation is a major concern. The ISS does orbit within Earth’s magnetic field, so it’s protected, but gets no additional protection from the atmosphere. So the astronauts are more exposed (this is also a concern for pilots and cabin crews and frequent fliers). It often gets overlooked in fiction, or solved with magic tech. In reality, Lunar and Martian settlements would need to be underground, using soil and rock to block radiation. Astronauts on the surface would get exposed.
4) The early space enthusiasts like Tsiolkovsky, Clarke, and many others, did not know many of the obstacles and problems of space travel. For instance, how human physiology adapts to weightlessness (we don’t know the effects of prolonged stays in lower gravity fields like Mars’), or the quality of lunar dust, or the composition of Martian dirt, etc.
5) What I keep harping on: there’s nowhere to go, there’s nowhere to make money. There are plenty of resources in space, but nothing we can’t get far, far, far cheaper from Earth. Even stuff like solar panels in orbit would be too expensive (I think the Weinersmiths cover this in Soonish). Until we find something that’s too scarce on Earth, which cannot be substituted, and is plentiful somewhere like the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, the moons of the gas giants, etc., there won’t be a reason to go.
@Kingdaddy:
It’s on my list.
@Jay L. Gischer:
The far side of the Moon would be the best place for a radio telescope. For one thing, the lower gravity allows for a really large dish, and the bulk of the Moon would block all interference from Earth.
Moon dust is nasty stuff.
@Modulo Myself:
And how much of the Moon could they realistically mark as a “keep-out zone?” With the understanding that areas of the near side, the far side, and the poles would be of special interest, those are still enormous areas–the entire Moon is 1.5 times the area of North America. This territory marking sounds like the plan of the “dull-normal eight-year-old boys.” They need a Lisa Simpson to point out the absurdity of the scale of their concept, as she did with the legend of Paul Bunyan when she said, “his size seems to be really inconsistent. I mean, one minute he’s ten feet tall, the next his feet are as big as a lake.”
I think you overestimate what robots can do compared to a human. Robots have certain advantages, but so do humans. If robots were so clearly superior for science and exploration, we’d see them replacing people in those roles here on Earth. We’d use robots to run experiments on the ISS instead of people. Robots are certainly very capable for some things, but they have pretty significant downsides. For example, I’m bullish on self-driving cars, and they’ve gotten good, but after decades of training and engineering, they still aren’t ready for prime time.
In my view, people and robots are complementary, with the whole being more than the sum of the parts.
I also think you’re underestimating the benefits of Apollo in a larger context. We’ve been reaping technological rewards from that for a very long time. We learned an extraordinary amount related not just to engineering, but also human biology – things we would not have learned if it were all automated robots.
That said, I think a manned Mars mission should be a low priority. If Musk wants to spend his billions toward those efforts, I’m happy to encourage it, including some assistance from the government. But I don’t think the value is enough to justify what we did for Apollo, which was the equivalent of $200 billion in today’s dollars.
@Eusebio:
I see General Buck Turgidson saying “We can not allow a keep-out zone gap!”
@Andy:
In terms of pure numbers, NASA spent billions on Apollo and got back over 300 kilos of rocks and dirt from another world. I’ve no idea how much the Soviets spent on Moon missions, certainly a lot less even if we include the development costs of the ill-fated N1 rocket and the Soyuz capsules, and got back about 150 grams of lunar samples.
A human expedition anywhere can accomplish a lot of things faster than the very limited probes can. On the flip side, probes can stay on a planet, or in orbit around it, for decades.
BTW, the first Mars rovers used solar panels. That’s adequate on Mars, even if sunlight is weaker than on Earth. Their problem is they eventually get covered in dust and fail to deliver enough power. Latter rovers were outfitted with radioisotope generators (like the Voyagers, Cassini, Galileo, and New Horizons, but not Juno) to get around this issue (and to keep the systems warmer at night).
@Andy:
It is less that I am overestimating robots and underestimating people. It is that I am pricing in the relative costs of getting robotic rovers to Mars versus people. Also I am pricing in the ability of robots to exist on Mars versus humans.
Obviously, if the choice, all things being equal, picking humans versus robots. I would pick humans.
Yes, I was a bit glib in the OP. I am not underestimating the importance of Apollo 11/the Apollo project (but I am noting that there were diminishing returns with each mission, which surely you would allow). I am also unclear on what the value of Artemis is.
@Andy: I am going to stand by this:
Obviously, this would be different if we could easily get people to Mars, house them there for a prolonged period, and bring them home safely. But that is truly science fiction at this point (if not pure fantasy).
Let me be clear that I am grateful for the space program, from its origins in the 50s up until the present day. There is little doubt that the manned space program brought substantial benefits. But it can’t be ignored that it was an artifact of the Cold War and that while it is fun to dream of Star Trek futures, as Kathy notes, there is nowhere to go and no money to be made going. And it strikes me as noteworthy that while much technology has advanced since Friendship 7, the basics of space travel are not radically different all these decades later. Big rocket goes up, capsule comes down. The reusability has been the largest general advancement.
@Steven L. Taylor:
The really big advance would be single stage to orbit. IMO, I don’t think it’s possible without something radically different, like nuclear propulsion.
There are concepts for assisting the booster on the way up. I saw a video about the idea the other day. TL;DR: too hard, too expensive, and not enough difference.
So the other big advance would be something completely out of left field, like antigravity, or whatever movie and TV starships, starfighters, etc. use to land and takeoff on any planet they fancy (ie “impulse engines” in Trek), or teleportation (it’s a nice plot device now and then, but IMO not even remotely possible), or something even stranger and unexpected like inter/trans dimensional somethings.
And now I’ve progressed from realistic to speculative to sheer fantasy.
ETA: space elevator or a skyhook? Not at our level of technology. maybe next century, as per Clarke’s timeline
@Steven L. Taylor:
On a cost-benefit basis, I agree that unmanned missions are currently better. But I disagree with the idea that unmanned missions are inherently superior based on the ability to do science. There is a limit to what robots can do. Robots can do a lot on Mars, and they should, but they can’t do everything. Again, if that were not the case, we’d be replacing scientists with robots here on Earth.
A lot of this is academic because there won’t be a manned mission to Mars for at least two decades in the best case – and the history of these kinds of projects suggests that timeline will slip a lot. It’s very likely, IMO, that we will both either be dead or in an old folks home, and my kids will be middle-aged before it’s even possible.
But I think it’s a worthy aspiration and not a childish fantasy. It may be the case that, as we learn more about the limits of engineering and the human body as the effort progresses, a Mars mission would not be worth the effort or just too difficult. But to get to that point, we need to learn more, and I much prefer doing that learning, which is likely to have other benefits, than just preemptively declaring it to be foolish and impossible.
@Andy:
Some gentle meta pushback to go back to some diagnosing of why sometimes you and I (or you and others) get into semi-contentious back-and-forths. I would gently note: I never said any of that.
in my view, I am clearly questioning costs v. benefits and focusing very heavily on the costs as well as general feasibility.
I think that I am saying, given the current technological and fiscal constraints, we are better off with unmanned space exploration.
Reasonable people can disagree. Note that, again, I am not saying it is impossible. I am asking questions about cost and feasibility. I am also questioning the approach by the current administration. You are arguing about ideals and hypotheticals, and I am asking whether, in 2025, we should be spending money on Artemis and whether there is any real ROI at the moment of trying to pretend like we are going to Mars.
Note: I would be a bit more sanguine about some of this if I didn’t think that Trump’s space directives weren’t really backward-looking and that if declarations about the Moon were being made by a serious, qualified NASA head, and not an interim with two jobs.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I’m not sure how to take this any other way:
Note that I agree that is currently the case simply because we can’t get people to Mars and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. When/if we can do that then I question the notion that probes can do “more science” than humans. For some basic things, yes, for a lot of other things, no. As I said before, humans and probes are complementary, not interchangeable.
Fundamentally, when it comes to creating new science or engineering, one never knows the ROI in advance. That’s a big reason why government should fund basic science and projects like this because the private sector often won’t, because it’s risky with no idea of whether there will be an ROI or not. I do not look at this as any different. One can certainly rack and stack this in terms of priorities, but if ROI is going to be the basis for a government sponsored effort, then we are going to cut a lot more than just this.
As for your criticism of the Trump administration, the Biden administration supported this project and the current Trump admin has proposed gutting a significant portion of NASA funding in its FY26 budget request that would effectively kill it. This is one of those cases where rhetoric doesn’t match action. The BBB was originally slated to cut NASA too, but funding for Artemis and related projects was amended back in by the Senate.
@Andy:
I dunno. I would think my clarification above would be enough, no? Above I said, “Obviously, this would be different if we could easily get people to Mars, house them there for a prolonged period, and bring them home safely. But that is truly science fiction at this point (if not pure fantasy).”
Also, I, honest to God, would think that context clues alone would mean that I meant what you say above, “Note that I agree that is currently the case simply because we can’t get people to Mars and that isn’t going to change anytime soon.”
A serous, non-snarky question: how is that not clear from the OP. Or, how did our subsequent interaction not clarify this?
Where did I give the impression that I was arguing that robots were superior to humans, save in the sense that they are easier to get to Mars now and can survive on Mars now?
I am asking because this is a super low-stakes conversation wherein I am honestly unclear on why you are pushing as much as you are. It may help me understand future interactions.
This is fair, and I generally agree. But that general proposition does not automatically mean that trying to get to Mars as a government-funded project is a good idea or a fiscally responsible one.
I will acknowledge that somewhere above, you were happy to let Musk spend the money (but, of course, he funds at least some of his space operations via government contracts).
All well and good, but rather orthogonal to my point.
And, if it makes you feel any better, I don’t think Biden was correct in wanting to go back to the moon, either.
Yes, it’s a low-stakes conversation. And I think we’re speaking past each other again.
And yes, I think you clarified your point, which wasn’t apparent in the OP, and it was the OP I initially responded to. I tend to take declarative statements as honestly given, especially when double-downed on later on, and even rereading the OP, I think it’s not obvious to assume that your statement was entirely qualified and subject to the difficulty of getting people to Mars.
And then this:
That is me agreeing with you.
I probably should have stopped there. Me again:
I think your complaint here is fair. I think I was intending to just restate my position, but on rereading it, it definitely comes across as entirely missing your follow-up comment. That comment was written on my phone in a waiting room for a doctor’s appointment and a bit rushed – I didn’t do my due diligence, so apologies for that.
I agree with you that it’s a debatable point on which people can disagree.
I think part of our disconnect is the characterization in much of the OP that this project is in some way childish or unserious, and also from Trump, so it’s automatically bad.
Criticism of cost-benefit I can understand and at least intellectually agree with, also characterizing it as a fantasy for middle-schoolers got my hackles up. Lots of serious space people think it’s worthy of support for various legitimate reasons, and have long before Trump. The Obama admin, for example, was supportive of a Mars mission too, but skipping the moon and sending humans into deep space to an asteroid instead, albeit on a more gradual timeline.
So, in summary, I think a manned Mars mission is a lot more achievable than you do. I don’t think it should be the JFK uber-goal for space, but I don’t think it should be shit-canned either. I think it will probably happen eventually (if history is any guide), probably after we are both dead.
@Andy: Ultimately we agree on quite a bit, yes.
But this explains a lot about this interchange and others
So, sure, I get that you might have interpreted what I said as you did. But I think you are frequently too slow to integrate the interchange in comments wherein I try to clarify when I think I usually try to clarify if I have been misunderstood.
I still think that you did not allow context to shape your understanding of the statement about robots. But I think I better understand how we sometime end up in these cycles.
@Andy:
Fair enough—but saying that earlier would have allowed me to address that.