To think millions of litres of fuel shouldn't be wasted on sending a rocket to the moon

[Viviennemary]

With this current fuel crisis it's total madness sending a rocket to the moon. What is the point. Nobody is even going to land on the moon. Doubt therei s any oil on the moon.

Human population will fall exponentially over the next few generations and there is a large risk of population collapse due to the exponential effect of below-replacement birth rates, which is the case now in almost every country outside sub-Saharan Africa.

And I was agreeing with you.

The total cost of each Artemis launch is around $4.1bn USD.

So far over $100bn has been spent on the weapons used in the recent conflict in the Middle East.

I hardly think advancing human knowledge and science is a waste of money that we should be concerned about when humans are spending exponentially more blowing each other up.

Any species that stays on a single planet will be ultimately doomed to extinction eventually.

That isn’t really the point though. Knowledge is valuable in itself and if other human beings had not pursued new knowledge and discovery that others at the time said was “pointless” and just focused on day to day life as it was you’d still be living in a cave trying to figure out how to light a fire and hoping wolves don’t eat you during the night.

What makes you think protecting our environment and space exploration are mutually exclusive?

As other's have pointed out already, technologies developed for the space program are already hugely in daily use and an integral part of modern life, and that will keep happening. There's medical research being done that's a potential game changer currently.

But, off the top of my head (and I'm far from an expert) - water recycling and reclamation techs, alternative fuels, better and more efficient battery technology, smaller, safer nuclear tech, harsh environment crops, high-usage, hard wearing fabrics...

A viable Mars shot will need all of those. We definitely do, to begin colonisation. We'll also need terra-forming tech to rejuvenate soil and reseed the atmosphere if we're going to stay there.

If the tech can be used on Mars, it can potentially be used on Earth. If we can plant and grow on the Moon or Mars, we can plant and grow in the dustbowls of Africa and the deserts. If we can build an atmosphere there, we can repair ours. A big issue in our energy networks is efficient transmission and storage - cleaner, safer nuclear addresses this, as do long-storage batteries that don't use horribly polluting and incredibly rare elements. If we're forced to develop a battery that can store and yield for months for a Mars shot, that's tech that can come home into the EV industry. Biggest problem converting all cars to EV - the batteries are heavy, polluting, flammable and don't hold great charges. Solve that, and the world can convert. There's a huge chunk of the oil demand addressed.

They aren't exclusive goals.

To get to Mars, we have to go back to the Moon, and it's really not as easy as 'just go then.' This is how we do that.

Could we develop all those things without the space program - maybe. Would we - maybe not. If there's no end-goal and no money to fund the research, it won't get done.

The biggest periods of tech improvement are wars - because there's motivation for development. I'd rather we went to the Moon, and to Mars.

Too, the whole of human history has been 'what's next?' This is what's next. We've been looking up at the stars since we were Apes. Get a child interested in Space and you get them interested in math and science, tech and engineering. They're curious and they want to learn. Just inspiring that is a worthy goal all on its own for me.

You're calling it 'boys toys', but an express goal of Artemis is to put the first woman on the moon. Until this mission, no woman has left Earth-orbit - the Apollo astronauts were all men. That changes now. In a time were there's a concerted attack on women's rights and freedoms and equality, that's huge. That's an international generation of girls looking up - like the boys did with Apollo - and saying 'okay, maybe this stuff is for me?'

But yeah, let's not try for any of that because your petrol got expensive.

Never ceases to amaze me that people have such strong opnions on things, yet freely admit the know nothing about it, have the same rights to vote as the rest of us,

Personally, I am very excited for the launch, as is my 9 year old son who has built the lego kit of the Artemis launcher and is going to stay up tonight to watch the launch. I am glad he has more imagination, curiousity and wonder at the universe than many posters here.

We went to see Project Hail Mary this weekend and it blew his mind. Same with Interstellar, The Martian. I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up working in Aerospace Engineering as an adult.

We look at the planets through our telescope. He loves it. To see people land on the moon again in 2028 will be one of the highlights of his life. The scale of the universe is awe inspiring and seeking knowledge of it and our place within it has been a fundamental part of the human condition ever since humans evolved.

THANK YOU!

Some of these comments make me feel like I must belong to an alien species. 👽

The moon isn’t a planet. It’s a moon.

The near solar system is incredibly resource rich. Technological advancement would sky-rocket (no pun intended) if we can ever manage to make use of it. Both through the resources themselves and the continuing innovation demands of getting there and bringing it back. Humans, as a species, did not evolve to stagnate the way we have over the course of most of our lifetimes.

Following the argument you are making has caused untold suffering, because we have drastically failed to advance in the way we should have. The problems of the world aren't solved by looking inwards in that way. Every large scale advancement in the standard of living of humans, in the increase in population longevity, in increased healthspan, has come from advancements in technology. Stifling it out of some broken idea of fairness only hurts everyone in the long run.

If NASA had kept it's funding through the 70s and 80s we would almost certainly have cheaper energy, less oil dependence, far better medicine and less famine. Instead, we're now at a point where art can barely innovate consistent with almost all decline civilisations throughout history.

The technological efforts made by the greatest of minds just for space travel seems such a waste when there are so many problems that need solving on Earth.

Hundreds of potentially inhabitable planets have been identified already, some with all of the conditions required for life, and some with identifiable gases in their atmospheres which we know to be indicators that life is already there:

e.g. Exoplanet K2-18b: alien ocean world may be ‘teeming with life’
https://www.thetimes.com/article/b90c424e-90a4-4966-b35b-ce764d4f7a8b?shareToken=4af6547d5802e234f096690476c00d63

To not be remotely interested in the universe in which you live and the implications of such findings for the human race (Fermi paradox, anyone?) is mind-boggling to me.

The applications of advances in science and technology as a result of the investment in technology for space travel has solved and improved many problems on Earth already. Where do you think scientific innovation and investment comes from? A large proportion of scientific advances arise because of the space industry or weapons industry. I know which I’d prefer we spent money on.

A lot of advances in technology over centuries just seem to end up causing issues that then need to be remedied by new technology. More people on the planet due to advances in medicine, vaccines etc.

What a ridiculous statement. Without technology you’d be sitting in a cave hoping not to freeze to death or be eaten by wolves. A small cut on your leg could kill you from infection. You’d be lucky to live to 25.

The PP that said eventually our planet will become uninhabitable: even if the worst possible outcomes of climate change come to pass, earth will still be a thousand times more habitable than eg Mars, just because Mars is an incredibly long way from being habitable

It isn't about climate change. Ultimately it is about the death of our sun. OK, billions of years away so not the most pressing of concerns but we have to start somewhere, because even if we solved climate change and established universal peace and love overnight, we need some way of surviving at that point and sitting around leaving it to future generations is ...well, a bit sad really. The steps will be tiny but PPs have pointed out the number of advances and innovations that were at the least aided by space exploration and research and there will be more to come.

My grandparents were born before the Wright brothers flight and sat up to watch the first Moon landing. We can do amazing things if there is the will and the Artemis programme and crew are part of that.

@ProjectHailMary and some people still have struggles like that due to richer nations fucking up the climate for others, causing famine etc

Not to mention the fact that eventually an asteroid too large to repel may come directly at the Earth (likely to happen long before the Sun dies, statistically) so any species living only on one planet will have a limited lifespan.

The difference between us developing interstellar travel before we wipe ourselves out on Earth/ a space object wipes us out, or not, will be the factor that determines whether the human race survives in some form for billions of years or is gone in what — in terms of the timescales of the universe — is the blink of an eye from when it first evolved.

Look at it positively: we use technology to solve our big problems. That creates new problems, usually smaller ones, which we then solve

There are existential risks, I agree, which is where my story may finally fall down. But until that point, our quality of life has been immeasurably improved. And had we not had technology we would face a different set of existential risks, not no risks.

Nobody is saying they don’t. But their struggles would be a hell of a lot worse without any technology, healthcare, etc.

Mass scale exploitation of natural resources before the implications were understood and continuation of this for political and economic reasons is causing great suffering, as is uneven distribution of resources. Yet without all of those scientific advances your life and the lives of the poorest on Earth would be far, far worse.

I highly doubt, also, that the santimonious posters on this thread would like to see an even distribution of current human resources across the globe because that would involve their own living standards and those of their families being vastly curtailed for a couple of generations. This is why politicians will not cooperate on this but that doesn’t make science “bad”. Science is the only solution to those problems and we should be investing far MORE in it.

A huge waste of brain power…

Jesus Christ. Not like OP can talk.

www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/22/scientists-call-for-action-air-pollution-space-launches

As Matt Damon’s character in The Martian said, we need to “science the shit out of it”.

And as Ryan Gosling’s character in Project Hail Mary (reportedly) said to the leading scientist in his field, some people are a “staggering waste of carbon”. 😆

Some of the comments on this thread have been so depressingly stupid that I think I’d quite like to go to live with Dr Ryland Grace on Irid where things seem to be more sane.

The culprits are countries getting richer. The West in the 19th and 20th centuries and India and China now.

Technology is what allowed those countries to get richer, and is what has allowed rich countries to become cleaner.

Per-capita emissions in the West are falling pretty fast.

If the US wasn't spending money on the moon, it would have more money to spend on war.