NASA tweaks call for lunar lander concepts

SapceNews.com ^ | April 27, 2019 | by Jeff Foust —

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The previous missions only explored a very tiny bit of the Earth-facing Lunar surface and all of those were generally in the same area. 99.9% of the moon remains unexplored by man, and unmanned missions have mapped the surface but never explored it.

There are more than just rocks on the moon. There are valuable minerals and other things we do not have on Earth like Helium-3 for safe fusion reactors.

Exploration seems to be a dirty concept these days. Everyone just wants to be safe and comfortable. Its sort of like running a business: it takes money to make money; it takes exploration to discover new things. Exploration entails risk.

Exploration is the mission.

Perhaps you are too young to remember the time of the Apollo missions, but it was a time of worldwide Hope. Hope for the future hope for mankind - you could feel it, hear it anywhere you went in any country. It was a good time to be alive. Kids wanted to learn to be engineers, explorers pilots, mathematicians, scientists of all sorts. Now kids are changing sexes, learn false history - if they learn anything, reading is a lost art, books are too difficult to read, and so on. Dismal.

Without manned missions, without hope, we will continue to get more of this self-defeating navel gazing until the whole culture/country is lost in a miasma of recriminations and petty squabbles, children will become common place sex objects for adults, and so on - with the most undesirable things happening everywhere; the most dystopian of futures becoming reality. We need HOPE. Restarting manned space flight gives us hope again. Exploration gives the human race Hope and Purpose again.