[ExI] What happens to US space programs after November?

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Mon Jun 15 11:48:36 UTC 2020


On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 3:02 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> *If Trump wins US astronauts will probably walk on the Moon before the
> end of the decade. [...] If Trump loses, good bye Artemis and the hope to
> return to the Moon.*


Good. At this point in our technological development I see little point in
sending astronauts to the moon and even less to Mars. I can understand
wanting to have a 2 planet civilization but It makes no sense to spend $1
trillion to send a couple of people to Mars and then spend another $2
trillion to bring them back. I'm in favor of sending people into space I'm
just not in favor of bringing them back; when we have the technological
capability to make a fully self-sufficient colony on the moon or on Mars
then it would be time to send people there but not before, and right now we
can't even make a self-sufficient colony on Antarctica. In the meantime It
would be vastly more scientifically productive if the government forgot
about Buck Rogers and just gave NASA the money it needs (which would be
many orders of magnitude less than manned spaceflight) so it can build all
4 projects in this video, although the first one talked about, HabEx, is my
least favorite:

4 Future Space Telescopes NASA wants to build
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8KlX2OFg-s>

John K Clark
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