Deee writes:You’ve got your own tail. It costs something like $50000 to lift one pound of mass into space. Thirty years ago it was more expensive. Given those costs, visits to the Moon are not going to be lucrative in any sense but the academic sense. There is pressure from scientists for more robotic missions to the solar system, there is pressure from cosmologists for more deep space telescopes and there’s pressure from Earth scientists for more climatological missions. All of these interests and more compete with lunar scientists for a small NASA budget. There’s very little pressure from any scientists to send more humans to the Moon. The general public thinks going to the Moon is a waste of money. Nevertheless there’s lots to learn about the Moon from unmanned missions and indeed there have been many unmanned missions to the Moon since Apollo 11. One of the goals of the latest set of missions is to map the entire surface with greater resolution. The entire surface does happen to include the past landing sights.Quote:
yea, i got u, and while we are at it, why doesn't Spain send another ship around the world in search for more land. Lol, and the article says NASA wants to return a man to the moon by 2020, 50 years after the first landing. Also ironic that China says it would take them until 2020 to develop the technology to make it possible for them to send a man to the moon.
By the way Spain, and many other nations around the world do send cartographers, oceanographers, geologists and biologists around the world, not in search of new land, but to carefully collect more data and refine our knowledge of Earth sciences.
