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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday July 05 2017, @04:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the shoot-for-the-moon dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

As Japan becomes the latest country or private entity planning to send a person to the moon, RT.com takes a look at some of the most ambitious plans for a future manned lunar mission.

Whichever country or corporation returns a human to our celestial neighbor will be the first to do so since NASA's Apollo missions concluded in the early 70s. In fact, whoever ventures to the moon will be the first to go beyond low-Earth orbit since 1972.

Space exploration has generally been the preserve of nation states and their taxpayer-funded space agencies. More recently though, private companies, most notably Elon Musk's SpaceX, have been leading the way in the aerospace sector.

Billionaire Musk recently laid out his plans to colonize Mars. For some, however, a return to the moon would provide good preparation for the months-long trek to the Red Planet.

Here, RT.com takes a look at some of the frontrunners in lunar mission planning.

Source: RT


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Magic Oddball on Wednesday July 05 2017, @02:09PM

    by Magic Oddball (3847) on Wednesday July 05 2017, @02:09PM (#535185) Journal

    There's a few problems with that logic. First, there wasn't the kind of extreme inequality & poverty that is now the norm — a person could feasibly earn enough to support a family in a nice middle-class lifestyle without even finishing high school, and knew they'd almost certainly have their job as long as they wanted it as long as they performed well. When a person feels like they're treading water economically, is perpetually worried about the next financial crisis, and sees no reason to believe things will ever get better, the only way they're likely to cheer on any endeavors that don't benefit them directly is if they're already fans of the effort.

    Second, on that topic: different people find different kinds of endeavors exciting, worthy of pride, or otherwise worth spending much-needed funds on. For you, it's space exploration; for someone else, it might be educating kids, saving certain endangered species, protecting the environment, creating an amazing no-kill shelter system, medical research, crime prevention, etc. — they'd feel the same excitement & intense pride in their country if it threw itself fully into achieving their pet project's goal that you would if it threw itself into yours, and would react to your preferred endeavor the same way you likely would to theirs.

    FWIW, contrary to the popular belief, a lot of people during the 'Space Race' didn't think that it was a worthy goal; it didn't unite the nation nearly as much as we've been led to believe...

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