UKC Forums - Why would you want to live on the Moon?

Why would you want to live on the Moon?

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The Ice Doctor 01 Jun 2018

For the vistas?

Congratulations Mr Bezo's, for wasting a lot of money. I bet he didn't pay his tax bill.

Amazon gets a round of applause.

Money better given to the poor and struggling than squandered on a pointless project.

wbo 01 Jun 2018

In reply to The Ice Doctor:you know theres not a finte amount of money. One doesn't preclude the other

wintertree 01 Jun 2018

In reply to The Ice Doctor:

Someone is spending one ten millionth of the worlds GDP annually on rocketry. Almost all that money eventually goes in to wages and therefore back in to the economy. It’s not lost. It’s not something I’m going to get stressed about.

Why would I want to visit the moon?

The view
The experience
The hiking
The perspective
Flying - human arm muscles are strong enough for powered flight (with strap on wings) in one atmopshere of pressure in lunar gravity. Someone is going to build a big dome for flying in.

It’s very naive to think of space as a waste of money or a pointless project. Quite apart from dreams of off world living, right now...

Without space access we basically wouldn’t have weather forecasting or seasonal forecasting - think of the consequences for global farming, for hurricane and tornado preparedness etc. Almost nobody alive is unaffected by the impact of weather forecasting on agriculture.
Most data on artic and Antarctic ice loss (and growth, but mainly loss) comes from space. Climate science in general depends on all sorts of measurements from space.
GPS/GNSS
Iridium global mobile phone service. Useful to adventurers and critical to a lot of early stage disaster relief efforts.

I could go on. The significant cost of access to space limits all of the above to some degeee. Lower cost space access will improve all off the above. SpaceX hope to bring fast internet (indeed any connectivity at all) to a lot of the developing world in a few years - and with connectivity comes education, awareness, links to medical professionals, agriculture specialists etc. It seems to me that developments in space apply directly to many different peoples.

Post edited at 21:27

wbo 01 Jun 2018

In reply to wintertree:as a point of pedantry I'd be pleasantly surprised if much of that money went on wages

wintertree 01 Jun 2018

In reply to wbo:

> as a point of pedantry I'd be pleasantly surprised if much of that money went on wages

Follow any money for long enough and it gets paid to someone somewhere as a wage.

In terms of direct expenditure on wages, there’s about 1000 direct employees behind a Blue Origin launch. That’ll be a wage cost of - very approx - $100m per year.

The fuel cost for a launch is - approx - $0.1m. Their rocket is reused launch to launch.

Sure, there are other direct and indirect costs, but the average employee salary at SpaceX or Blue Origin is decent, and they have a *lot* of employees. Circa 7000 at SpaceX.

Clauso 01 Jun 2018

In reply to The Ice Doctor:

I'd live there. I'd take tiny steps, purely to piss Sting off.

tom_in_edinburgh 02 Jun 2018

In reply to The Ice Doctor:

Why would anyone want to live in the McMurdo station in the Antarctic or on the International Space Station? For the adventure, for the experience or because that's where they need to be to do the work they want to do.

The moon has vast amounts of useful minerals and solar energy to work them. The moon is so different from the earth that access to the moon at reasonable cost would change the rules for many different industries. There would a wave of innovation as people started to think about different ways of doing things which make no sense on earth but would in a low gravity, cold vacuum with vast mineral resources and energy.

Some examples: you could construct large spaceships on the moon to travel to Mars or mine asteroids. Smaller craft based on the planets could deal with getting into orbit and re-entry, The main ship would not be constrained by the need to attain escape velocity from Earth or re-enter without burning up because it never lands on Earth. You could conduct experiments on the moon which would be impossible or far too risky to conduct on earth and too large for a space station. You could store genetic material on the moon to keep it safe from almost any conceivable disaster that affected earth: like the seed vault in the arctic but with a whole different level of protection. You could build a really great telescope.