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404 points voxleone | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.431s | 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. elzbardico ◴[] No.45664153[source]
American mojo have real world economic consequences. The value of the dollar depends a lot on how the rest of the world sees America.
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2. bigyabai ◴[] No.45664439[source]
You know what else has real world economic consequences? Dead astronauts.

I'm all for reinvigorating the global economy with a resurgence in scientific investment, but it only works if we do it patiently. China understands that, the CCP is quite capable of national planning that transcends administrations. You can't force a moon landing like it's a political OKR, if you do then you better have a pretty solid Plan B considering the amount of risk it represents.