this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
11 points (86.7% liked)
Technology
82250 readers
3912 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
While I don't like Musk, it's actually never made sense to even attempt to go to Mars without taking advantage of the helium-3 stores on the Moon.
Which is why a smart person would have started with the moon instead of saying in 2011 that he would put a man on Mars by 2021.
In one hand, the moon is smarter because you can have Interaction and any change takes only a week or two. While we can’t harvest local resources, the cost to location is relatively low. You could even completely run out of food and still have everyone survive
We can’t afford to screw up anything to mars when there is no Interaction and it takes 18 months or more to make a change. Imagine if there’s a medical Emergency or the garden dies: 18 months is a really long time. Everything you send there is correspondingly more expensive and everything needs to much more stock in case anything goes wrong. There are many more possible issues to plan and prepare for. This will be especially expensive until we develop in-situ resource usage
And we don’t even know if people could survive that long
The whole Mars mission was stupid and a fantasy of scifi fans with grade 9 science. A colony, on a planet with no atmosphere and exteme temperatures, yet humans can't handle the arctic.
I mean yeah, Musk is a fucking idiot that wants to retroactively prove the book he got his name from.
At least, that's my headcanon.
The huge potential of helium-3 is for nuclear fusion. Yet we don’t have fusion reactors that use helium-3 and fusion is “20 years away”. We could get to mars before needing this is any quantity
We have lots of fusion reactors.
They just release years of energy in a split second.
why.
We need to add more to that $38T debt?
NASA as a whole is a tiny fraction of the federal budget but has always generated outsized contributions to humanity. It’s an easy argument that money spent on nasa is money earned elsewhere. It’s a good investment
SpaceX Falcon has revolutionized space launches and I don’t believe that is government supported at all. It does fill government launch contracts but more cheaply than they could have done so themselves, and reliably enough to capture most of the world’s market. This does not add to the deficit and the early investments have been handsomely rewarded
Both SpaceX and blue origin, as well as other new generation space companies have been much much cheaper than old style projects. Just look at Artemis for example. Huge developments costs, continually More expensive, and $1B-$2B per launch. Yet I believe the total nasa funding for the entire starship program is around not like $2B. That is a very good use of our money. Heck, it’s probably cheaper than our little tantrum in Iran
Yes, but wouldn't it become that much easier to achieve with an effectively limitless quantity of the resource?
I don’t know whether that is currently a bottleneck or will be any time soon. I only know we’re “20 years away” from using it regularly, just like we have been my entire life
I suppose it’s good science to figure out if we can do it, just like it’s good science to see if we can establish more access to space