To me, a significant part of the value presented by space exploration is the way that it inspires society. I think that whatever else we would do instead would need to be equally inspiring. Honestly, I can't really think of something comparable.

So lets focus on genetics and see if we can get fire breathing dragons instead. That should be just as inspiring

Humans with feline features!

There are a lot of options, but they are hard to think of...

I was really hoping someone could come up with an idea along a completely different line.

Sure, but might as well start with the basics and iteratively go from there. :)

The electronics we're typing these comments on were only rapidly miniaturized originally to be small and light enough to shoot into space.

There are second, third, etc order effects to things like a space race.

Sure. So let’s do something useful and new. We know how to go to the moon - it’s just a matter of money (and political will). If there’s something else to do on the moon, let’s be clear that is the objective.

I do agree with this. If we are returning to the moon just to say we did, as a space lover, I do have an issue with this and can't really get on board. I am hoping we have some other larger goal in mind, like maybe are back to the idea of a permanent moon base and a potential jump off point for other projects or we have a list of long term moon experiments to do. But yea, it just isn't exciting if we are going there to take a couple pictures and just to rub it in the face of China or India or some other nation. We've already done that.

The goal could be simply to learn how to do it again, since almost everyone who actually has done it--on any level, be it engineering, management, manufacturing, flight crew, ground crew, etc--is dead. That's a totally worthwhile exercise if it's actually a serious goal to explore further.

We have plenty of people working on space - we go to Mars with robots all the time which is harder than the moon. We have a space station (though it is nearing end of life). We have all the needed knowledge it is just applied elsewhere. There will be some things to learn about the moon that are different but not much.

Apollo made about a half dozen crewed trips to the moon (quantity deliberately left vague to account for quibbling over technicalities). They made it a relatively reliable, repeatable affair. My point is that organization--the team of people who have done that no longer exists. So until another team starts doing it again, we just don't know. Theoretically it's very probably achievable, but theory absent experiment doesn't really mean anything.

There is value in experience, but for something like this I'm going to submit that the larger value is in learning to spin up teams that do something completely different.

IF you were talking about building a good public transit system the value is in building a team and keeping it running. However this is - for all we know - just a one off show and so there isn't value in getting experience. The people looking at Mars have value in experience, and there may be value in robotic moon missions, but so far as I can tell human missions are just for showing off and should be treated like a one time show off and then get rid of the team for another 50 years.

Yea but it is also about opportunity cost. I would love if we can do everything, but we can't. Sure, we can put a man on the moon again, but is the cost that we are not gonna be able to send a probe to Titan? Ultimately it comes down to resource allocation. Is putting the man on the moon for just merely because the people who did it are not around worth the resources? No, not compared to the other things we can do in space. Actually, putting a man on the moon again probably very much robs resources from other project that will actually push novel exploration.

Unfortunately it feels more like the drive to return to the moon is just a way for the high school quarter back to relive his glory days, as the stereotype goes and is actually less about accomplishing something meaningful to push science and understanding. Tons of things we could do to push science and understanding that is novel that we may forgo to relive former glory.

I actually think getting the political will, money, and execution together would be the part that would be a noteworthy show of force (and I'd argue being unable to get it done would be equally noteworthy in the other direction).

But a show of force for who? We're not in the middle of a Cold War. Are we trying to upstage India or China? And could we get the same political ends via something more useful/with better returns?

For everyone (including India and China).

Could we get the same ends via something more useful? In theory, sure, but it seems pretty evident that the answer in practice is no, since our congress has mostly been gridlocked for the past 16 years.

Fair enough, but IMO there are better places we should be focusing on getting political will together if we want to focus on something big.

Yes and no, I'd say. Going back to the moon is big but it's also pretty self-contained, in a way. It just costs money (and doles a bunch of it out to the contracted companies). It's also mostly time-boxed.

Healthcare, worker's rights, voting rights, infrastructure, etc, are all more important (so I agree with you there), but also all have way more consequences that are wider-ranging and longer-term (which I'd say contributes do the political dysfunction around those topics).

This should be an "easy win" by comparison, and the "PR" impact of success (or failure) will be significant.

Edit: that said, if you gave me a magic wand to pick any one of these topics for the US to succeed at, it wouldn't be going to the moon.

I would like to point out it is not a sure thing, rockets explode all the time. It is fantastically dangerous.

The matter of factness of the shuttle shows how good the program was, but we still had two explode completely.

Sure, I didn't mean to imply space is easy. It's absolutely not. I just want to get a return on investment. And up-staging India and China for the sake of it probably doesn't give much return.

I'm all on board for doing something useful and new, my comment was not in support of having a space race for the sake of having one.

Nah, that’s false. Miniaturization was already underway before the Space Race. The space program absolutely benefited from it, yes. But NASA wasn’t at the forefront of those developments.

I was talking about rapid miniaturization, not just miniaturization in general, which I agree was underway before any space development.

NASA literally had departments and budgets dedicated to miniaturization.

I’ll give you an example: the technology in the Instrument Unit on the Saturn V, which was the computer that controlled the Saturn V during launch, was largely derived from System/360. By technology here I mean things like the Unit Logic Devices (ULDs) out of which the logic boards in the Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC) were made. No surprise, I suppose, given that it was contracted to IBM’s Federal Systems Division.

Sure, but compare density of a s360 mainframe and the Apollo Guidance Computer - they pumped a lot of money into integrated circuits just as they weee becoming viable to hit their size, mass and power targets.

Sure, this would likely have happend anyway, but possibly later with all related knock off effects.

> Sure, this would likely have happend anyway, but possibly later with all related knock off effects.

What are we missing because they did that though? Or what came latter? There is no way to answer this. It is easy to see what happened because of effort, but not what you didn't get (or got latter) because to focused on something else.

Minuteman III perhaps.