Yeah I'm curious too. It seems like if there was actually some commercial benefit to this then USA would be dropping rovers on the moon every week. But it's mostly lost interest now.
If you're a private company looking to build a mining base station, tourist hotel, or any other thing a private company might want to do, then it's best to get the kinks worked out by practicing with an unmanned lander a few times first
I think Artemis is largely going in the wrong direction. It's not really unfair to say the main reason it exists is to give the SLS a reason to exist. The grand ambition of Artemis is to recreate the Apollo landing (with some identity politics injected), and create a mini-ISS around the Moon. Even if you took us 10 years in the future and this was achieved (which one can very safely say it will not be), it would not be particularly relevant.
The reason I say it's the wrong direction is not only the lack of ambition, but cost! Artemis is planned to cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which is just absurd given our trajectory with space. This (back to the topic of this thread) company sent their rover to the moon on a $67 million SpaceX launch. Add the cost of their rover and operations, and it's likely this entire project, of landing a rover on the moon, cost less than $0.1 billion.
The future of space belongs to whoever can get these costs down as much as possible. Because the goals are big - like industrializing the Moon. Water is enough to make rocket fuel, simple raw resources can be exploited to develop things in a near 0-g environment, and so on. At NASA level costs these sort of concepts would bankrupt the entire country. So it's going to be whichever entity/nation can operate most cost-effectively that will decide the future of space. And, for better or for worse, I know who I'd expect to win that game.
dylan604|2 years ago
krisoft|2 years ago
What would you be mining on the moon and what for?
relativ575|2 years ago
https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-lunar-payload-services
This mission itself is in preparation for future missions contracted by NASA
somenameforme|2 years ago
The reason I say it's the wrong direction is not only the lack of ambition, but cost! Artemis is planned to cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which is just absurd given our trajectory with space. This (back to the topic of this thread) company sent their rover to the moon on a $67 million SpaceX launch. Add the cost of their rover and operations, and it's likely this entire project, of landing a rover on the moon, cost less than $0.1 billion.
The future of space belongs to whoever can get these costs down as much as possible. Because the goals are big - like industrializing the Moon. Water is enough to make rocket fuel, simple raw resources can be exploited to develop things in a near 0-g environment, and so on. At NASA level costs these sort of concepts would bankrupt the entire country. So it's going to be whichever entity/nation can operate most cost-effectively that will decide the future of space. And, for better or for worse, I know who I'd expect to win that game.