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404 points voxleone | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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elzbardico ◴[] No.45663900[source]
Lots of people complaining that we have already won the "moon race" and that this makes no sense. This is a completely wrong reading of the situation.

Let's say we forgot how to do heart transplants. Once we did them a few times perfectly, got all surgical techniques right, but patients died shortly after the surgery due to rejection. We quit the whole transplants stuff for years, the techniques and the equipments were lost over time. But then, some 40 years later, we now knew a lot more about immunology, have incredibly advanced drugs, and an aging population. So, because of that, we decided to develop the surgical procedure techniques, long-lost, again.

This is a good analogy for the situation. The moon is an important milestone for further commercial and scientific exploration of the space. We lost the ability we once had to reach it. And anyway, we were not as ready as we are today to follow the next logical steps. If we manage to harvest water from moon ice now, we will be establishing the basis for a kind of serious exploration and development that we weren't nearly ready to achieve in the past.

So, no, we are not doing it just to prove "we haven't lost our mojo", for bragging rights. We are doing it because we are in a development stage where it makes sense to finally return to the moon.

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zm262 ◴[] No.45663918[source]
It matters more to US politically than scientifically. It's totally about the US mojo in the eyes of politicians and thus funding.
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1. enraged_camel ◴[] No.45663944[source]
This dismissal is quite shallow. Yes, it matters politically - but that has enormous downstream repercussions. China beating us to the Moon helps reinforce the narrative that the American century of global dominance is over, and China is the new superpower that is unseating it. The implications of that would go well beyond politics.
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2. gorbachev ◴[] No.45665791[source]
You don't win that fight by sending a few folks to the moon.

You win it using the playbook the CCP has been systematically and very successfully implementing for a few decades. They are very good at long-term planning. The US plans in 4-year (or 8-year) cycles, and often times reverse course completely at the end of those.