NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

Remind me why we need to get to the moon again?

China will remind us soon enough.

The first time was to beat the soviets. This time is to beat china

American Republicans have invented that it's in a race with China even though it's already been and it's not clear China thinks it's a race.

Why must there be a NEED? Why did we ever send ships across the ocean to explore? Where was the need? People like doing science, and so we're doing science.

So we can delay dealing with the complete unrealism of our expectations of the future.

That was (for the western hemisphere) mostly to steal gold and silver from other civilizations. Oh, and to grow addictive drugs for export, like in Virginia. It was never done for other than banal reasons, although I'm sure pious rationalizations were offered to make people feel better about the ongoing genocides.

Wasn't it to discover alternative trade routes and also to show physically that the world is round? I think they didn't know that there were usable land to grow tobacco when they started.

That feels like a bit of rewriting the past. How could someone plan on stealing valuables from somewhere across the ocean... before they know there even is an "across the ocean" to get to?

It also feels quite off to reduce all of human curiosity to a means of getting one over on someone.

I suspect China thinks that dominance of space comes with superior research capability, and are delighted that the current US government is doing everything it can to sabotage that whilst fixating on a symbolic achievement which shouldn't really matter much to the US...

1. To avoid discussing Epstein.

2. The masses need circuses. As for bread, Marie Antoinette's press secretary said it best.

3. Trump thinks he'll corner the market on cheese.

For a serious answer: it's a lot cheaper to launch rockets from there, and we're running out of stuff to do in the region immediately surrounding Earth.

Is it? You have a build a whole fuel refinery on the Moon before it's worth even thinking about.

And even then, you have to get whatever you want to launch to the moon in the first place...

Building the fuel refinery is a high upfront cost which will quickly disappear. The delta-V required to exit Earth's surface is nearly an order of magnitude higher than what's required to exit the Moon's surface, and the moon is full of fuel.

Humans have demonstrably known the world is round since at least ancient Greece.

Columbus claimed it was radically smaller in diameter than previous calculations, and was begging for funding to go around the other side of the world to get a good trade route to India and China for trade goods. He was following some bad math, and adding his own worse math to the mix.

People were sure he was going to die, because they did not bring enough provisions to actually go around the world.

The first of those is banal, and the second is wrong -- they already knew the world was round, and had a more accurate estimate of the diameter than Columbus was claiming.

Amusingly, Spain famously did set up trade to China through the New World. Silver was mined in South America and taken to China (or to the Philippines), traded for silk and other luxury goods, which were then taken back across the Pacific, over land to the Atlantic, and then on to Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_galleon

That wasn't the motivation for the first trip, but it was for continuing it all. It was driven by economics, as anything large scale must inevitably be.

To look for the Epstein files!

Foreign policy and security policy, mostly. That mattered a lot the first time and it will matter a lot this time. Apart from that, there's absolutely no need.

It would be really nice to do much more biology research under no and low gravity conditions, of course, but not at those prices.

Round, they knew, but still, to do it physically, was still somehow important - even for those who paid for it.

Banal, depends on what you mean by this word.