[amannm]

> we have not succeeded in replicating that milestone

it's hard to succeed at something you aren't even trying for in the first place. the moon landing was funded during the cold war where ICBM adjacent knowledge was required in the face of an existential threat. it wasn't solely for the benefit of shared global human knowledge/progress or whatever. for the US, there's a lot more to lose than gain in terms of "face" by attempting a victory lap against the rest of the world. executing any sort of manned moon or mars mission won't be taken seriously by the US until there's real political/economic pressure to do so (in the form of maybe China laying down a roadmap to land on mars or something).

[rendx]

Actually, I'm glad they didn't. There are finite resources available, and it may be a less popular opinion but I think it can be used in better ways than to explore Moon more.

[wolfram74]

If we'd put more efforts into settling space, the demand for photovoltaics would have been higher. That might have pushed us down the learning curve faster and PV might have started turning coal power plants into stranded assets in the aughts or even the 90's instead of the teens. It's a tough what-if to model.

[bregma]

Ah, yes, the old fallacious trope of "if they didn't spend the money on X they would have spent it on Y". It is, of course, true as long a Y is luxury yachts or maybe the enforcement of personal power such as weapons of mass destruction.

Even today there is very little effort to end poverty or cure cancer but trillions spent on massive manly flexes and the accumulation of every-increasing personal wealth by ever decreasing numbers of individuals. Since we haven't spent the money here on Earth to explore the moon in the last 50 years do we have any proof we have spent it on the better ways instead?

[em3rgent0rdr]

Exactly. Everything has an opportunity cost. And there's diminishing marginal returns on every subsequent moon landing.

[edgyquant]

Resources being finite is the best reason to go up there and start extracting more

[hutzlibu]

Actually space is (probably) infinite, so there are potentially infinite ressources avaiable, if we choose to invest in the next step, even if that investment only will pay out in the long run.

[ssnistfajen]

The Space Shuttle was developed as a covert weapons program as well, for deploying nuclear warheads directly from orbit to give enemies a much shorter response window. This is why the Soviets quickly developed their own space shuttle program, because they recognized the military purpose behind it.

There's a radical school of thinking of which I don't agree 100%, which is that the Space Shuttle program was a Cold War remnant stuck in a sunk cost fallacy, and set back space exploration for decades since it was extremely expensive and completely limited to LEO and siphoned funds that could've been used for more efficient rockets and modular stations beyond LEO.

[throwanem]

> The Space Shuttle was developed as a covert weapons program as well, for deploying nuclear warheads directly from orbit to give enemies a much shorter response window.

You need to cite this.

While NASA's own history ("The Space Shuttle Decision", pub. no. SP-4221) describes the way in which the STS design was rescued from cancellation through Air Force-requested modifications to support satellite-capture missions which after Challenger never materialized, I have never seen any reference in any source to support the idea that the Shuttle was designed to serve as an orbital bombardment system in direct violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.

[qbasic_forever]

Huh? I've never read about the shuttle being developed to deploy nuclear weapons. The idea of launching a warhead with the shuttle, which itself requires an immense amount of resources to leave the launch pad, only to just send the warhead back down to earth instead of just... launching the warhead from a slim little ICBM that a submarine is carrying... doesn't make a lot of sense. Warheads aren't designed to sit orbiting in space waiting to launch either--their payloads are constantly decaying and only have a limited service life. I can't see it ever making sense to not launch them from subs under the ocean.

AFAIK the shuttle was intended to be a "tow truck" for satellites, able to launch and service them in low Earth orbit. Many of those satellites were for spying and espionage.