> The fact that humanity sent people back to the moon barely even registered.
Are you sure that people would have cared much even in better times?
Although I'm just as subject to the fatigue as everyone else, this just isn't a pursuit that I see as important.
TBH I think dealing with global warming, cancer, homelessness, AI impact on human cognitive development, and the loneliness epidemic are far higher priorities.
If I recall correctly opinion polling on the original Apollo program wasn't universally positive either. Space missions don't impress people who want money spent on the ground, it etc
The famous spoken word poem Whitey on the Moon was on exactly this topic.
"Accompanied by conga drums, Scott-Heron's narrative tells of medical debt, high taxes and poverty experienced at the time of the Apollo Moon landings. The poem critiques the resources spent on the space program while Black Americans were experiencing social and economic disparities at home."
Related, I've been surprised that we haven't had more violence against corporations and/or their leadership in the vein of Luigi Mangione.
E.g., suppose that 1,000,000 persons believe that a corporation's evil acts destroyed their happiness [0]. I would have guessed that at least 1 person in that crowd would be so unhinged by the experience that they'd make a viable attempt at vengeance.
But I'm just not hearing of that happening, at least not nearly to the extent I would have guessed. I'm curious where my thinking is wrong.
[0] E.g., big tobacco, the Sacklers with Oxycontin, insurance companies delaying lifesaving treatment, or the Bhopal disaster.
Litigation—the hope or fantasy to make a buck—soaks up a lot of the million-man animus I’d guess.
If that’s accurate, Luigi Mangione would be the exception that proves the rule. The “unwashed masses” generally want money more than they want to effect change in the world.
A lot of people spend mental energy fantasizing about getting rich off lawsuits. Like, a lot.
Those unhinged people might be busy in social media bubbles, fighting endless pointless battles (or simply doom scrolling) until they're too exhausted to do anything.
That is why you mix in "Something So Feminine About A Mandolin" in once in a while. Or if you really insist on only very well known tunes "Cheese Burger in Paradise" should still count.
Shipping anything built with -march=native is a horrible idea. Even on homogeneous targets like one of the clouds, you never know if they'll e.g. switch CPU vendors.
The correct thing to do is use microarch levels (e.g. x86-64-v2) or build fully generic if the target architecture doesn't have MA levels.
Not the OP, but: -march says the compiler can assume that the features of that particular CPU architecture family, which is broken out by generation, can be relied upon. In the worst case the compiler could in theory generate code that does not run on older CPUs of the same family or from different vendors.
-mtune says "generate code that is optimised for this architecture" but it doesn't trigger arch specific features.
Whether these are right or not depends on what you are doing. If you are building gentoo on your laptop you should absolutely -mtune=native and -march=native. That's the whole point: you get the most optimised code you can for your hardware.
If you are shipping code for a wide variety of architectures and crucially the method of shipping is binary form then you want to think more about what you might want to support. You could do either: if you're shipping standard software pick a reasonable baseline (check what your distribution uses in its cflags). If however you're shipping compute-intensive software perhaps you load a shared object per CPU family or build your engine in place for best performance. The Intel compiler quite famously optimised per family, included all the copies in the output and selected the worst one on AMD ;) (https://medium.com/codex/fixing-intel-compilers-unfair-cpu-d...)
> Not the OP, but: -march says the compiler can assume that the features of that particular CPU architecture family, which is broken out by generation, can be relied upon. In the worst case the compiler could in theory generate code that does not run on older CPUs of the same family or from different vendors.
Or on newer CPUs of the same vendor (e.g. AMD dropped some instructions in Zen that Intel didn't pick up) or even in different CPUs of the same generation (Intel market segmenting shenanigans with AVX512).
Just popping in here because people seem to be surprised by
> I build on the exact hardware I intend to deploy my software to and ship it to another machine with the same specs as the one it was built on.
This is exactly the use case in HPC. We always build -march=native and go to some trouble to enable all the appropriate vectorization flags (e.g., for PowerPC) that don't come along automatically with the -march=native setting.
Every HPC machine is a special snowflake, often with its own proprietary network stack, so you can forget about binaries being portable. Even on your own machine you'll be recompiling your binaries every time the machine goes down for a major maintenance.
it certainly has scale issues when you need to support larger deployments.
[P.S.: the way I understand the words, "shipping" means "passing it off to someone else, likely across org boundaries" whereas what you're doing I'd call "deploying"]
On every project I've worked on, the PC I've had has been much better than the minimum PC required. Just because I'm writing code that will run nicely enough on a slow PC, that doesn't mean I need to use that same slow PC to build it!
And then, the binary that the end user receives will actually have been built on one of the CI systems. I bet they don't all have quite the same spec. And the above argument applies anyway.
If you use a cloud provider and use a remote development environment (VSCode remote/Jetbrains Gateway) then you’re wrong: cloud providers swap out the CPUs without telling you and can sell newer CPUs at older prices if theres less demand for the newer CPUs; you can’t rely on that.
To take an old naming convention, even an E3-Xeon CPU is not equivalent to an E5 of the same generation. I’m willing to bet it mostly works but your claim “I build on the exact hardware I ship on” is much more strict.
The majority of people I know use either laptops or workstations with Xeon workstation or Threadripper CPUs— but when deployed it will be a Xeon scalable datacenter CPU or an Epyc.
Hell, I work in gamedev and we cross compile basically everything for consoles.
So you buy exact same generation of Intel and AMD chips to your developers than your servers and your cutomsers? And encode this requirement into your development process for the future?
No? That would be ridiculous. You’re inventing dumb scenarios to make your argument work.
It’s more like: some organizations buy many of the same model of server, make one or two of them their build machines, and use the rest as production. So it’d be totally fine to use march=native there.
You just wouldn’t use those binaries anywhere else. Devs would simply do their own build locally (why does everyone act like this is impossible?) and use that. And obviously you don’t ship these binaries to customers… but, why are we suddenly talking about client software here? There’s a whole universe of software that exists to be a service and not a distributed binary, we’re clearly talking about that. Said software is typically distributed as source, if it’s distributed at all.
There’s a thousand different use cases for compiling software. Running locally, shipping binaries to users, HPC clusters, SaaS running on your own hardware… hell, maybe you’re running an HFT system and you need every microsecond of latency you can get. Do you really think there are no situations ever where -march=native is appropriate? That’s the claim we’re debunking, the idea that "-march=native is always always a mistake". It’s ridiculous.
We use physical hardware at work, but it's still not the way you build/deploy unless it's for a workstation/laptop type thing.
If you're deploying the binary to more than one machine, you quickly run into issues where the CPUs are different and you would need to rebuild for each of them. This is feasible if you have a couple of machines that you generally upgrade together, but quickly falls apart at just slightly more than 2 machines.
Lots of organizations buy many of a single server spec. In fact that should be the default plan unless you have a good reason to buy heterogeneous hardware. With the way hardware depreciation works they tend to move to new server models “in bulk” as well, replacing entire clusters/etc at once. I’m not sure why this seems so foreign to folks…
Nobody is saying dev machines are building code that ships to their servers though… quite the opposite, a dev machine builds software for local use… a server builds software for running on other servers. And yes, often build machines are the same spec as the production ones, because they were all bought together. It’s not really rare. (Well, not using the cloud in general is “rare” but, that’s what we’re discussing.)
The only time I used -march=native was for a university assignment which was built and evaluated on the same server, and it allowed juicing an extra bit of performance. Using it basically means locking the program to the current CPU only.
However I'm not sure about -O3. I know it can make the binary larger, not sure about other downsides.
It is completely fine to use -march=native, just do not make it the default for someone building your project.
That should always be something to opt-in.
The main reason is that software are a composite of (many) components. It becomes quickly a pain in the ass of maintainability if any tiny library somewhere try to sneak in '-march=native' that will make the final binary randomly crash with an illegal instruction error if executed on any CPU that is not exactly the same than the host.
When you design a build system configuration, think for the others first (the users of your software), and yourself after.
This various a lot between compilers. Clang for example treats O3 perf regressions a bugs In many cases at least) and is a bit more reasonable with O3 on. GCC goes full mad max and you don't know what it's going to do.
If you have a lot of "data plane" code or other looping over data, you can see a big gain from -O3 because of more aggressive unrolling and vectorization (HPC people use -O3 quite a lot). CRUD-like applications and other things that are branchy and heavy on control flow will often see a mild performance regression from use of -O3 compared to -O2 because of more frequent frequency hits due to AVX instructions and larger binary size.
I made a program with some inline assembly and tried O3 with clang once. Because the assembly was in a loop, the compiler probably didn't have enough information on the actual code and decided to fully unroll all 16 iterations, making performance drop by 25% because the cache locality was completely destroyed. What I'm trying to say, is that loop unrolling is definitely not a guarantee for faster code in exchange for binary size
Large blocks of inline assembly also destroy -O3. The compiler treats the asm statement as being essentially empty and makes decisions around it. Most inline asm is 1 instruction, so this is usually safe.
I'm sympathetic to the viewpoint but I'm not in the habit of policing the names people use for themselves.
I've certainly done more than my fair share of jobs in the Navy where the office I was formally billeted to had long since ceased to actually exist as described due to office renamings. Often things as simple as a department section being elevated into a department branch and people using the new name even while they wait 1-2 years for the manpower records to be fixed and the POM process to cycle through for program resourcing. But still, seems hard to treat it as a crime at one level when no one blinked an eye at the lower level.
Maybe Congress will eventually step in, but in the meantime the American voters made their choice about who they want to run these agencies, so...
The main title of the office is still “secretary of defense”, the executive order added a secondary title of the department and the office, it didn't replace the primary titles.
> the American voters made their choice about who they want to run these agencies
The American voters don't get to override the U.S. constitution. The American voters also voted in the U.S. Congress, which has the sole authority to name the department and title. My representatives have not voted to change the law. Do you not care about the rule of law?
> I'm not in the habit of policing the names people use for themselves.
I'm sure you think you're being clever, but this is such a bad faith argument.
Of course I do. I hope the rest of my fellow Americans will someday care as much as I do about it. It's clearly not the case today.
But, is it illegal to refer to Secretary Hegseth as the SECWAR?
If so, would it be legal to refer to him as the SECDEF? After all, that isn't the formal term that Congress established his position as under 10 USC 113.
It's not hard to see all the cans of worms that emanate from the topic. I said already that this is Congress's purview, and they have had ample opportunity to put a stake in the ground on their position in response...
These agencies such as the Department of Defense, whose secretary is...?
The department's name is *legally* the Department of Defense. If they want to change it, they can go to Congress and do it the legal way. They have a majority. There's nothing stopping them except for their disregard for the sanctity of the law.
Out of curiosity, why do you see this as a worthwhile endeavor?
My personal perspective is that the resources are better used for other purposes, but it's possible that I just haven't encountered some compelling reason yet.
Do you watch sports, football, the Olympics? If not I'm sure you know someone who does. Same category as this. Each of the 32 NFL team is worth about the cost of 1-2 Artemis launches. The entire league could fund the whole Artemis program nearly twice. Hosting the Olympics is worth about 3-10 launches.
Like sports, the objective is ultimately useless except as a showcase of what humanity has to offer, and people like to see that.
I think in general space exploration is a great use of taxpayer money, but the artemis program doesn't seem great from either a "science per dollar" or "novel accomplishment per dollar" standpoint.
If the goal was just to flex on the rest of the world I would've much rather we focused on going somewhere new or returning to the moon in a more sustainable way
Each Artemis launch costs something like $4b (that's the incremental cost of a new rocket, it's much higher if you amortize the design costs).
IMO the program is not optimized for cost or sustainability, it's optimized for creating jobs in various congressional districts. Of course that provides a certain amount of political sustainability to the so-called Senate Launch System.
I just don't see a future where NASA can afford multiple SLS launches per year to maintain a continuous Lunar presence
I think that is the point, but whether this mission will actually do that is rather unconvincing.
After (and if) Artemis III lands on the moon and brings home the astronauts there seems to be very little planned on how we actually get to the moon base which NASA is claiming this will lead to, let alone the manned Mars mission that is also supposed to follow.
In other words, I think NASA is greatly exaggerating, and possibly lying, about the utility of this mission.
> there seems to be very little planned on how we actually get to the moon base
There is a lot of research going into in situ construction methods and even nuclear power plants on the moon [1]. (Which would be necessary to bootstrap eventual indigenous panel production [2].)
To me it’s encouraging to see this fundamental work being attacked than an endless sea of renderings. The reason you aren’t seeing heavy detailing, despite construction slated to begin with Artemis V, is we’re waiting for the launch vehicles. (“Any exploration program which "just happens" to include a new launch vehicle is, de facto, a launch vehicle program” [3].)
> This effort ensures the United States leads the world in space exploration and commerce.
> “History shows that when American science and innovation come together, from the Manhattan Project to the Apollo Mission, our nation leads the world to reach new frontiers once thought impossible,”
> Under President Trump’s national space policy
I smell politics and American exceptionalism, not science. There are a lot of could-bes in these statements as well, I have serious suspicions that these goals are not serious engineering. I am 99.999% certain that NASA will not build a nuclear reactor on the moon this decade, nor even the next decade. NASA is not giving me any signals they are capable of that.
> I am 99.999% certain that NASA will not build a nuclear reactor on the moon this decade, nor even the next decade. NASA is not giving me any signals they are capable of that
You don’t think NASA and the DOE, together with Lockheed and Westinghouse, can build a reactor? Why? The major technical issues were largely de-risked with the 2022 solicitation.
Even if you think Space travel is worth the money (which I personally do), adding humans to the mix makes projects incredibly more expensive. Even in the realm of space travel and research, sending humans is a questionable use of the money.
The most important (if not entertaining) things you can do in space don't involve humans. Telescopes, communications, earth observation, sending probes to distant bodies, etc.
It's nice that we can send humans to space and it's good to keep that capability going so that the knowledge doesn't die. But the unmanned missions tend to pull the weight of actually accomplishing useful things. Humans just get in the way.
I think there is a major difference though. Sports events are not pretending to be anything else. The Artemis mission claims to be advancing science and claims to be a stepping stone for an eventual moon base and a manned mission to Mars. I personally have serious questions about all of these.
Do you really disagree that it’s advancing science? Surely actually testing hardware, building knowledge on how to run this type of mission, learning to use lunar resources, figuring out how to keep people alive, etc. will teach us things we couldn’t learn any other way.
Fwiw do share your concerns about the methods (sending humans on this specific mission is questionable, SLS is questionable compared to SpaceX approach).
Do you think we will learn more from Artemis or the Asteroid Redirect Mission? Because that's a concrete example of how funding this mission caused other experiments to be cancelled.
Fair point, but that’s an argument about prioritization within NASA’s budget (and its size relative to other spending), not the scientific value of the mission.
There's never non-zero value to any challenging engineering problem. The question is whether the finite resources spent to solve it are best spent on it versus other projects.
And in this mission in particular, you can't divorce science from politics. NASA's budget was reined in by Trump 45 and his admin picked Artemis because a manned mission to the moon invokes a particular feeling and memory, not because it benefits science. The moon is a known quantity, and going there is not more valuable than the other projects the government could have spent $100 billion on.
Keep in mind, this is one of the most expensive single launches in history while there is a partial government shutdown and the rest of the federal government that does real research has been gutted by this same administration. So it's tough to talk about "scientific value" when it's obvious that this mission is doing little science at the same time the government has decreed it won't be in the business of paying for science.
The moon isn’t a known quantity, we sent a handful of people there for a combined few days half a century ago. There’s immense scientific and engineering value in keeping a generation of engineers fluent in deep space operations.
If you’re angry about this dumpster fire of an administration wasting money and gutting research (I am too), the answer is to fight for better funding across the board, not to tear down one of the few ambitious programs left that’s actually pushing the boundaries on what we can do. NASA’s budget amounts to a rounding error and isn’t zero sum with the rest of federal science funding, these are separate appropriations.
I'm going to tear down spending $2.5 billion to test the toilets on a space ship every chance I get. It is a massive waste of resources and depletion of human capital that would be better spent on other projects that could advance science and human understanding.
It's not science, it's engineering. I don't think it's advancing science in a way that wouldn't be possible with a fraction of the cost without sending humans there.
The fact that we hope to get some new tech with this whereas sports aims for nothing is just icing on the cake. I think big space missions are worth it every now and then on a humanitarian level; even if no new discoveries are made, a new generation of engineers will become fluent in what we have already discovered. Humanity's education is not "done" when the last fact is written in a book, it needs to be constantly refreshed or it will disappear.
Even in sports you do not get "nothing", it has certainty helped advance the field of medicine.
> a new generation of engineers will become fluent in what we have already discovered.
We seem to have lost the technology of going to the moon we gained from Apollo. So without an actual follow-up and a tangible long term plan I suspect the exact same will happen this time around.
Or, more likely, it is an indication that manned moon missions are simply not that important, that this technology is simply not worth the cost of maintaining.
In contrast, we kept the technology of doing robotic missions in space, on the moon, and even on other planets and even asteroids (the latter two have much to improve upon though).
Whether a moon base is needed or even beneficial is a question I have not heard a convincing answer in favor. And even if moon base is indeed needed and/or beneficial to future space exploration / resource extraction why robots cannot more efficiently build (or assemble) such a moon base is another question I need an answer to.
We are sending humans to (or around) the moon now, but it may just turn out to be a wasted effort, done solely for the opulence (or more cynically bragging rights / nationalist propaganda).
> Whether a moon base is needed or even beneficial is a question I have not heard a convincing answer in favor
If we want to go to Mars, the Moon is a good place to learn. Simple things like how to do trauma medicine in low g; how to accommodate a variety of human shapes, sizes and fitness levels; how to do in situ manufacturing; all the way to more-speculative science like how to gestate a mammal. These are easier to do on the Moon than Mars. And the data are more meaningful than simulating it in LEO. If we get ISRU going, doing it on the Moon should actually be cheaper.
If we don’t want to colonize space, the Moon is mostly a vanity mission. That said, the forcing function of developing semi-closed ecologies almost certainly has sustainability side effects on the ground.
We don‘t want to colonize space. Colonizing space is science fiction, not a serious goal for humanity, and certainly not an engineering challenge. There is no reason for humans to live anywhere other then on Earth. We have more reasons to live on Antarctica or the deep ocean then on the Moon, Mars or Alpha Centauri.
What I really want is for us to send a lander and a launcher to Mars capable of returning to earth the the capsules Perseverance has been collecting. I would love for geologists on earth to examine Mars rock under a microscope. I would want them to take detailed pictures of an exoplanet using the Sun as a gravitational lens. And I would love it if they could send probes to Alpha Proxima using solar sails to get there within a couple of decades.
None of these would benefit from having a moon base. In fact this moon base seems to be diverting funds away from missions with more chance of success and more scientific value.
I do. Plenty of people do. Plenty of people also think exoplanet science is useless. I disagree with them. It the arguments are symmetric to those against human spaceflight.
> certainly not an engineering challenge
…how? We don’t have the technology to do this.
> There is no reason for humans to live anywhere other then on Earth. We have more reasons to live on Antarctica or the deep ocean then on the Moon, Mars or Alpha Centauri
> None of these would benefit from having a moon base
Of course it does. ISRU (and baseload launch demand) decreases costs of access to deep space.
> diverting funds away from missions with more chance of success and more scientific value
The science slakes our curiosity. The engineering slakes our needs. And they both benefit from each other. Claiming Starship and in-orbit refueling won’t benefit scientific missions is myopic.
No you don‘t want to colonize space, nobody actually wants it. You may think you want to colonize space but actually you don’t. Space colonization is science fiction and not an engineering goal. It is a video game you can fantasize about but you don’t actually want to do it. Nobody does.
Surely you must see the difference between expolanet science and dreams of space colonization. The former is actual science which further our knowledge of the universe with tangible results, and the latter simply isn’t. People who don‘t like exoplanet science may have their reasons, but people who don‘t like space colonization are simply being realistic. Because the former is science, the latter is science fiction.
Finally there is nothing about space refueling technology which requires a moon base, and especially not manned moon missions. If you want space refueling infrastructure manned moon missions is not the only way to get there, and probably not even the best way. I also have my doubts here. If space refueling is so important we would be doing it already. Sending fuel from earth in a separate lunch. A case in point James Webb was originally designed with refueling in mind. They dropped it from the final module because it simply wasn’t worth it.
I think I mostly agree with the other comment by runarberg—Earth is the place to be. But it is also worth noting that even if we do end up colonizing space, Mars is still really pointless. Mars is not significantly more habitable than orbit.
There’s some gravity: the wrong amount. In space, you can at least get 1G with centripetal force.
In orbit, you are halfway to anywhere. On Mars, you’ve gone back down the well. Make sure to bring enough gas to get out again…
Mars is just a bunch of irradiated rocks. Bring your own ecosystem, and wait a couple thousand years while it installs.
The only thing Mars has going for it is that it’s really far away, so we can still pretend to entertain sci-fi plans about colonizing it. The practical next step for space colonies would be large investments in additional space stations, a step so imminently possible that the only way to take it seriously would be to do it.
> Earth is the place to be. But it is also worth noting that even if we do end up colonizing space, Mars is still really pointless. Mars is not significantly more habitable than orbit
I’m not pitching a specific destination. And I’m not pitching exploration to the masses. Most people on the planet never have and never will leave their home country.
If we want to go to space, we probably want a lunar base.
> There’s some gravity: the wrong amount. In space, you can at least get 1G with centripetal force
Maybe this is important. Maybe it’s not. We need physiological experiments.
> In orbit, you are halfway to anywhere. On Mars, you’ve gone back down the well
In orbit you’re perpetually nowhere. On a surface you have in situ resources.
> Mars is just a bunch of irradiated rocks. Bring your own ecosystem, and wait a couple thousand years while it installs
Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s moving from New York to Wyoming. Maybe those are the same thing. But I’m more of a red Mars advocate today than I was when I read Robinson’s trilogy in my twenties.
> only thing Mars has going for it is that it’s really far away, so we can still pretend to entertain sci-fi plans about colonizing it
It’s mass and an atmosphere. That’s a lot to what Earth has going for us.
> practical next step for space colonies would be large investments in additional space stations
Practical next steps are lots of experiments in centrifuges and micro and low gravity. To fund and focus that you need a goal.
>> In orbit, you are halfway to anywhere. On Mars, you’ve gone back down the well
> In orbit you’re perpetually nowhere. On a surface you have in situ resources.
It’s the bottom of a dried-out well in the middle of nowhere, that’s not an improvement over just being in the middle of nowhere with a full tank of gas.
>> practical next step for space colonies would be large investments in additional space stations
> Practical next steps are lots of experiments in centrifuges and micro and low gravity. To fund and focus that you need a goal.
The at least semi-plausible goal is the asteroid belt.
We are nowhere near the capability to launch robots to the moon that can autonomously build or assemble a moon base for any useful definition of moon base.
> We are sending humans to (or around) the moon now, but it may just turn out to be a wasted effort, done solely for the opulence
My 4 year old is extremely excited to watch the launch tonight because it’s manned. I’d say a few billion is worth it if all it does is inspire a new generation of astronauts, engineers, and scientists.
And neither are we anywhere near the capability to lunch construction workers to the moon which can build or assemble an equivalent moon base with their human labor. So this answer does not satisfy me one bit.
> inspire a new generation of astronauts, engineers, and scientists
This is a good point. And I would like it to be true. However when you have to lie about (or exaggerate) the scientific value of the mission, that is not exactly inspiring is it. Your 4 year old could be equally inspired by the amazing photos James Webb has given us, and unlike Artemis, James Webb is providing us with unique data which is inspiring all sorts of new science.
> And neither are we anywhere near the capability to lunch construction workers to the moon which can build or assemble an equivalent moon base with their human labor. So this answer does not satisfy me one bit.
We have the capability to do that. We don’t have the will to do it, but we have the technology. We don’t even have autonomous robots that are capable of building a moon base on earth.
> Your 4 year old could be equally inspired by the amazing photos James Webb has given us, and unlike Artemis, James Webb is providing us with unique data which is inspiring all sorts of new science.
He’s not though. People gather around as a family and watch manned space missions. It’s exciting in a way that a telescope or a probe isn’t.
Indeed, in 1969, as a small child, I watched the Moon landing together with my parents, in Europe, like also the following missions, in the next years.
They have certainly contributed to my formation as a future engineer.
The key here is “could be”. But most four (or in my case, six) year olds can’t really grasp the abstract concepts of what JWST is or the data it’s sending back. For that matter most 40 year olds can’t.
A manned mission on the other hand is tangible in a way a probe isn’t. “See the big round thing in the night sky? There are four people going around it in a spacecraft”.
It isn’t a _complete_ argument in favour of manned missions- that has to account for the risk of the endeavour and reward of the science potential of having people there to react in ways robots can’t. But it’s hard to pretend that the inspiration pretty much everyone feels when they see manned missions is somehow achievable purely by robotic ones.
> neither are we anywhere near the capability to lunch construction workers to the moon which can build or assemble an equivalent moon base with their human labor
Why do you say this? What is the bottleneck you feel we are more than half a decade from?
The moon has about the same make up as the Earth when it comes to distribution of elements in the crust. If it's anywhere near 8% like Earth then it makes sense to mine aluminum and other metals on the moon in order to build megastructures in orbit. Since the moon has no atmosphere you can accelerate things using mechanical mass drivers. Basically rail systems. At 5,300 mph you hit escape velocity and can then move payload somewhere with no rockets. It would keep us from polluting Earth too. This is the precursor to O'Neil cylinder type structures. AI robots will probably be the play but you still want a transportation system that works and frankly building a landing zone would improve overall outcomes regardless.
The rocks at the surface of the Moon are richer in metals than the crust of the Earth. They are especially richer in iron and titanium.
Without oxidizing air, it is easier to extract metals from the Moon rocks.
There is little doubt that it would be possible to build big spaceships on the Moon.
However, what is missing on the Moon is fuel. For interplanetary spacecraft, nuclear reactors would be preferable anyway, which could be assembled there from parts shipped from Earth, but for propulsion those still need a large amount of some working gas,to be heated and ejected.
It remains to be seen if there is any useful amount of water at the poles, but I doubt that there is enough for a long term exploitation.
I imagine a foundry would use solar power and lasers to heat up the material. No atmosphere means less heat energy wasted. My thinking has been how to get enough actual build material to build something like an O'Neill cylinder. Well you'd need really thick metal plates. And then you'd want to get them into orbit without rockets. And these stations would likely be at the same orbit as Earth or nearby. Mainly because of how much sun energy you get around here. Going out to the outer solar system is a different beast all together.
Mars pushes the frontier (even if no one might survive the trip due to human body deteriorating), going around the Moon is meh - we were there ~57 years ago multiple times so what's the point?
Mars isn’t a frontier, it is a wrong turn that leads to a dried out toxic well in the middle of nowhere.
We should aim for the asteroid belt. Maybe we can mine them or something. It’d be less like a frontier and more like an offshore oil platform, but still, it is at least semi-plausible.
This argument comes up a lot, about whether a space program is “worth it” in some sense. One problem I’ve found is that these discussions often treat this in the abstract. And then we get into the nature of human endeavor, the economic benefits of that R&D, etc.
Let’s talk about this in terms of practicalities. The NASA budget for 2026, per Wikipedia, is $24.4B. I often find it hard to really reason about the size of federal budgets, and the impact on tax payers, but I have a thought experiment that I think helps put it into perspective. Suppose we decided to pay for the NASA budget with a new tax, just for funding NASA. And we did that in the simplest (and most unfair) possible way: a flat rate. Every working adult in the US has to pay some fixed monthly rate (so excluding children and retirees). Again, per Wikipedia, that’s around 170M people. Take the NASA budget, divide by 170M, and you get … $11.96/month.
Obviously, there’s lots of flaws in this. That’s not we pay for NASA, we have income tax as a percentage with different tax brackets. But it is a helpful way to frame how much a country is spending, normalized by population. And I think it puts a lot of things in perspective. $11.96/month is comparable to a streaming service. And we talk a lot about whether NASAs budget is better used for other purposes, but we don’t do the same thing for a streaming service.
Hell, look at US consumer spending: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm (note that that spending is in dollars per “consumer unit,” which is I think is equivalent to an adult US worker, but there might be some caveats). Based on that, the average US consumer spends around $26.17/month on “tobacco products and smoking supplies”. I just feel it’s a little silly to worry about the NASA budget when the US consumer spends twice that on what is objectively a luxury good. At least NASA won’t give you cancer.
> And we talk a lot about whether NASAs budget is better used for other purposes, but we don’t do the same thing for a streaming service.
Actually, we do. I just cancelled two of mine in the last hour, and I know many people who are serial join/cancel subscribers because they "talk a lot about whether the [monthly fee] is better used for other purposes".
NASA isn't expensive. The science parts and the job creation parts almost certainly return a significant economic multiplier. The spend is very good value for around 0.5% of the federal budget.
That doesn't mean Moon shots are the best possible use of that budget. There are strong arguments for creating more space stations first, and then using them as staging for other projects.
Mars and the Moon are ridiculously hostile environments. Hollywood (and Elon Musk) have sold a fantasy of land-unpack-build. There aren't enough words to describe how utterly unrealistic that is.
Current strategy is muddled, because it contains elements of patriotic Cold War PR fumes, contractor pork, and more than a hint of covert militarisation. Science and engineering are buried somewhere in the middle of that.
I would like to watch a new Moon landing, but in my opinion more useful would be to build a space station with artificial gravity.
At some point it may become cheaper to build a spacecraft on the Moon and launch it in interplanetary missions than to do it from Earth. It might also be useful to build some bigger telescopes on the Moon than it is practical to launch from Earth, because due to the pollution of the sky extraterrestrial telescopes become more and more necessary.
Despite the fact that there may be some uses for bases on the Moon, it is likely that those bases should be mostly automated and humans should stay in such bases only for a limited time, much like staying on the ISS. The reason is that it is very likely that the gravity of the Moon is still too low to avoid health deterioration. According to the experiments done on mice in the ISS, two thirds of the terrestrial gravity were required to avoid health issues and one third of the terrestrial gravity provided a partial mitigation.
So even the gravity of Mars is only barely enough to avoid the more severe health problems, but not sufficient.
For long term missions, there is no real alternative to the use of a rotating space station, to ensure adequate gravity.
While with underground bases on Moon or on Mars it would be much easier to provide radiation protection, there remains the problem of insufficient gravity. It may be necessary to also build a rotating underground base, at least for a part where humans spend most of the time.
That’s a very fair point. Frankly I don’t know enough about the Artemis mission and general path, and would like to learn more. I’m certainly open to the argument that NASA’s budget isn’t properly allocated to the right priorities. I was responding just to the classic argument of “why spend money on NASA when we could be spending on …”
> Out of curiosity, why do you see this as a worthwhile endeavor?
to me it's inspiring and gives people something to cheer for. It also keeps a lot of people employed, productive, and at least has the possibility for new innovation. When looking at the mountains and mountains of wasted taxpayer dollars I dislike these the least.
The moonshot is a halo program that, when executed in a non-profit form, ends up benefiting society as a whole due to smart people being cornered and forced to solve hard problems that typically have applicability elsewhere on Earth.
Edit: remember the Kennedy speech — We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.
That remains to be seen. By giving Musk the prominence to set up DOGE and destroy USAID, they've indirectly led to the deaths of almost a million people.
By launching starlink, they're also increasing the amount of aluminum in the upper atmosphere, which may have catastrophic effects on the ozone layer.
To your last point, because DOGE shut down programs in a such a way as to make that impossible, to the point they chose to let food rot, let medicines go bad, and stranded Americans overseas working on the projects without a way home.
That's debatable. Musk bought his way into politics and shut down USAID very specifically because USAID was investigating him [1]. Oh, and he used his position in DOGE to assist in making sure that government contracts went to his companies, or licensing out his SpaceX workers when his idiocy led to a shortage of air traffic controllers [2], which was very obviously a publicity stunt if nothing else.
So it's a product that was bought and used to enrich a single person. Sure seems like a for-profit to me, at least in this administration.
The problem is the amount of aluminum. Government non-profit spacecraft do not use very much aluminum, because they don't launch thousands of LEO satellites per year. By building the first megaconstellation and kicking off competition, SpaceX is exposing humanity to different risks, namely ozone depletion and new mechanisms of climate change:
You seem to be saying that non-profit entities are incapable of killing people? Or that it's fine if non-profit entities do kill people?
> Besides, why can't other non-profit governments pick up the aid?
I think you're being obtuse. An analogy: "Sure I turned off the circuit breaker that was powering the life support machines, but why couldn't someone else bring in a UPS and plug them in to that?"
Specific innovations tend to be protected via IP when they are developed privately and, as a result, “butterfly effect” developments in a completely different field from cross-pollination are less likely to occur later down the line.
Maybe ... depends on the net net ... some people have internet access and can throw some satellites into space ... on the other hand, wealth and influence accrues to a specific kind of destabilising wanker
Because humans are destined to colonize space, and this is just an early step in a journey that will take hundreds or thousands of years.
More importantly, challenges like space exploration help drive knowledge and our economy; and are critical for national prestigue.
(And, most people don't focus on this, space exploration is a way for the US to demonstrate its military technology in a non-antagonistic way. There's a lot of overlap in space exploration technology and miliary technology.)
It is great to advance of what is humanly possible. Sending a robot? Great! Good data. If it dies, who cares, it does not live anyway. All abstract.
But sending a human? That feels more real. If we have the power to go alive to the moon, we also have the power to go even further. And we lost it, now we are reclaiming it.
And it doesn't matter to me what I think of the US government - this is progress for all of humanity. Also the comment section on the youtube stream is interesting - lot's of different flags are posted, sending good wishes from all around the world, low effort comments otherwise of course, but largely positive. (Very rare I think)
So, more rockets into space please and less on earth.
> My personal perspective is that the resources are better used for other purposes, but it's possible that I just haven't encountered some compelling reason yet.
Well, people are often obsessed with rationality, and seek reasons to do something, but there is one reason that works almost for anything: just because. If we want to go forward, we'd better try a lot of things, including those that do not look very promising. We don't know the future, the only way to uncover it is to try. Did you hear about gradient descent? It is an algo for finding local maxima and to do its work it needs to calculate partial derivatives to choose where to go next. In reality doing things and measuring things are sometimes indistinguishable. So society would better try to move in all directions at once.
A lot of people believe that to fly to the Moon is a good idea. Maybe they believe it due to emotional reasons, but it is good enough for me, because it allows to concentrate enough resources to do it.
> the resources are better used for other purposes
It is much better use for $$$ than the war with Iran. I believe that the war have eaten more then Artemis already, and... Voltaire said "perfect is an enemy of good". The Moon maybe not the perfect way to use resources, but it is good at least.
Because it is good for humans to have a thing to do. Not sure why this is not considered a valid reason. A lot of these 'it would be better to do X' assumes everyone has the same psychological profile as you. They don't. Many people are driven to explore and would go mad otherwise.
I want humanity to continue to be explorers. The Moon is a good next thing, then asteroid mining, humans on Mars and Venus, and eventually colonizing the Milky Way.
It's quite telling that all the replies you're getting are about "hope" and "jobs" with no actual scientific reason. I guess we're taxing people for vanity space missions and jobs programs. Makes sense.
Man I’m tired of people only caring about money when it comes to space. Meanwhile they lose their shit when someone suggests that tax payers shouldn’t pay for people’s Coca-Cola.
Because one day, far far in the future, the humanity would reach out to the stars, and these are the first tiny steps to enable this. There's always the question of directing the resources, and this program is not that expensive, really - around $100bn. Given that fraud at COVID time alone is estimated to have cost the Treasury twice as much, seems like a worthy investment into the future.
I do much better with things to look forward to, or when I have a feeling that progress can be made. An interesting movie coming out, new music coming out. Or even better reminding me what humans are capable of above just grinding to get by or grinding to exploit others. Haven't been many moments of feeling progress lately.
Sure, if we lived in a purely utilitarian world, there's some merit to the argument that space exploration is a waste of resources that could be more efficiently used elsewhere. We don't live in a utilitarian world though, and instead we have the same (and in reality much, much larger) amounts of money and resources that get spent on this moon mission being spent instead on bombing the Middle East with nothing to show for it other than an impending global economic crisis.
Could the money spent on Artemis be spent somewhere better? Probably, but how about we start with not burning through 38 billion (and rising!) on a farcical boondoggle of a military operation whose only effects so far are increases in the cost of literally everything? The first WEEK of the war cost 11 billion[1], but when it comes to NASA we're suddenly penny-pinching?
And that's talking pure monetary expenditure, without even going into the human lives lost, the lessening of sanctions on Russia (which will in turn cause even more suffering in Ukraine), or the halting of trade through the Suez, etc. etc. etc.
From where I'm standing, even if Artemis turns out to be a complete and utter disaster with not a single benefit of any kind coming out of it, the worst possible case scenario is a few astronauts die and we wasted a few billion (and I guess NASA gets shut down). That's of course us working under the assumption that there won't be a single novel scientific discovery of any kind, or that we will learn absolutely nothing from these missions.
The current unjustified war the US is waging on the other hand has already killed thousands of people, and will continue harming every single person on this earth through the economic fallout alone. The US is quite literally setting money on fire with every single bomb they drop over Iran. And the true worst case scenario that I can easily imagine happening is nukes getting dropped and all the consequences that follow from that.
I'm guessing that one reason we got Trump is that the Democrats presented two poor alternatives in a row.
It was clear that Biden was mentally slipping. Even if you were a fan of his general politics, 4 additional years of mental decline while in office was a scary prospect.
And then Kamala Harris was given very little time to sell herself to the voters.
I'm wondering if Trump would have won had the Democrats presented someone more appealing earlier in the campaign.
If you were worried about Biden’s mental decline but looked at Trumps behavior and statements as from someone mentally competent and not also slipping into dementia, then you just wanted Trumps politics and vibes your way into thinking it was ok.
I’m so excited for the future where nobody apparently voted for Trump and never backed him, the same way everyone mysteriously didn’t vote for GWB after his fuckups got too big to ignore
I believe Trump would have won 2020 had the COVID pandemic not happened. Things were very chaotic in 2020 America. Biden and his extensive experience in the federal government looked reassuring to a lot of Americans. Biden would have had a tougher time against Trump had 2020 been more like 2019. I believe Biden would have had a tougher time against Bernie Sanders in the primaries had COVID not happened, though a counterargument is that Super Tuesday happened on March 3, before shelter-in-place policies were in effect in California.
A big reason for Trump's success despite his polarizing nature is the polarizing effects of the platforms of our two parties, which distinguish themselves on "culture war" issues such as abortion, gun rights, immigration, LGBT+ rights, and race relations. There are many Americans who love the MAGA agenda, and there are also many Americans who are not in 100% agreement with MAGA but who'd never vote for a Democrat since they feel that a candidate with the opposite cultural views is anathema. If third parties were more viable in America, the latter group of voters could vote for a candidate that is more to their temperament instead of voting for whomever the GOP nominee is.
Had COVID not happened, Trump might not have gone batshit crazy with a vendetta against the entire concept of independent federal agencies. Actively rejecting the advice coming from Fauci et al would seem to be a large part of what sensitized him to the larger pattern rather than just writing each instance off as an interpersonal issue.
(by "Trump" and "him" I mean the person himself plus his symbiotic ecosystem of enablers and followers)
I'm not a politico, but IMHO Harris didn't have enough time to clarify her positions, and to address the points raised by her opposition.
Also, I wonder if the way she was chosen by the Democratic Party rubbed some people the wrong way enough for them to abstain from voting as a form of protest.
I interpreted the clause “two poor alternatives in a row” as Biden + Harris in the 2024 presidential election, and not Clinton + Harris, since Clinton was the 2016 nominee and Harris was the 2024 nominee after Biden dropped out, but the 2020 nominee was Biden, who did successfully defeat Trump that year.
In my opinion, Clinton’s and Harris’ losses had less to do with their gender and more to do with the candidates themselves:
1. Clinton was facing strong anti-establishment headwinds, and Clinton is a very establishment politician. Many people in 2016 were piping mad at establishment politicians. Trump was able to win the GOP nomination on a platform of “draining the swamp” and pursuing an aggressively right-wing agenda compared to more moderate Republicans, and Sanders, who also had an anti-establishment platform, proved to be a formidable opponent to Clinton. Despite Clinton’s loss, she was still able to win the popular vote. Perhaps had there been less anti-establishment sentiment, it would have been a Clinton vs Jeb Bush election, and I believe Clinton would have won that race.
2. Harris never won a presidential primary election. The only reason she ended up becoming the nominee is because Biden dropped out of the race after his disastrous debate performance against Trump, which occurred after the primaries. Since it was too late to have the voters decide on a replacement for Biden, the Democratic Party selected a replacement: Harris. She only had a few months to campaign, whereas Trump had virtually campaigned his entire time out of office.
3. Let’s not forget the Trump factor in 2024. During Biden’s entire presidency, Trump was able to consolidate his hold on the GOP and his voting base, and in some ways he even expanded his base. The conservative media was filled with defenses of January 6, and Trump was able to convince enough Americans that he and his supporters were persecuted in the aftermath of the 2020 election and January 6.
Look, after lurking through that submission about the Olympics a few days ago I get HN is divided on sex/gender identity, but I'm pretty sure that Joseph Biden is absolutely a man. "Cisgender", if you must.
His approval rating is at a historical low for any president at this point in their term, I think. People don't like ICE, pedophiles, or wars in the Middle East.
> I'm guessing that one reason we got Trump is that the Democrats presented two poor alternatives in a row.
Oh please.
Are you seriously comparing the disaster that is Mango Mussolini to the likes of (practically any) alternative candidate?
The sad reality is that the American people wanted Trump and _voted_ for him. TWICE! The rest of the world has come to terms with this and knows there is no going back to the old hegemony (put simply, the American people may vote for another Trump; we now know the USA can no longer be trusted as a good faith partner). The world has changed, and many in the USA who didn't vote for Trump have yet to realise this and still think they can go back.
Besides, if all candidates are crap, you vote for the one that will do least harm. And then look at reforming a political system which leaves voters with such a poor choice.
Are you sure that people would have cared much even in better times?
Although I'm just as subject to the fatigue as everyone else, this just isn't a pursuit that I see as important.
TBH I think dealing with global warming, cancer, homelessness, AI impact on human cognitive development, and the loneliness epidemic are far higher priorities.