[bitt]

also see:

https://www.benzinga.com/news/22/08/28370222/elon-musk-says-area-51-not-so-secretive-heres-how-he-plans-to-greet-aliens

Elon Musk On Aliens Asks If Universe Is 13.8B Years Old, Shouldn’t They Be ‘Everywhere?’

[Scrambler Bob]

“I think we should build a city on the Moon and on Mars.”
= = =

And the roads will be full of electric cars.

[MarMema]

Because those were the best of times for America. I want those back.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Stanley Kubrick would disagree. 🤡

[Paladin2]

No cheese on the Moon is a deal breaker...

[KarlInOhio]

Musk agreed with the podcast hosts that it was “weird” that the U.S. had not returned to the Moon’s surface since 1972.

Why was it weird? It was expensive, dangerous and a dozen more visits wouldn't have pushed science, commerce or geopolitics forward much. Have we even yet fully exploited the samples we brought back?

Now that China is sniffing around the moon the geopolitical reasons look like they are coming back.

[Bubba_Leroy]

I am old enough to remember watching all of the Apollo missions on TV. It is hard to believe it has been 50 years since the last one. Even harder to believe that we did it using slide rules when the most powerful supercomputers in existence had less computational power than a smartphone.

[GOPJ]

Landed on the moon - and took off to reunited with an orbiting spaceship - AND did it with a collection of computers that together weren’t half as powerful as an iphone.

[Fiji Hill]

Don't Touch the Moon!
I need it for loving.
Don't touch the stars,
I need them, too.
All you frantic scientists,
Find something else to do!

[who_would_fardels_bear]

Is keeping people alive on the Moon easier or harder than keeping them alive in the ISS?

If we had a permanent base on the Moon, what would be its purpose? I could see manning a huge telescope or telescope array on the dark side of the moon would be great when it was facing away from the Sun.

If there is something to H3 for fusion, but is that really harvestable in reasonable amounts as in the movie "Moon"?

[montag813]

Is Helium 3 a legitimate opportunity from the Moon?

[doorgunner69]

Why It Matters: Musk agreed with the podcast hosts that it was “weird” that the U.S. had not returned to the Moon’s surface since 1972.

Not weird, LBJ and the democrats crippled us funding the Great Society.

Supporting generations of negro welfare left no money for anything else.

[T.B. Yoits]

From the article: I think we should build a city on the Moon...

Nothing like screwing with a celestial body that controls so much of our planet's systems.

[BobL]

Trivia fact: The Lunar Module computer tracked the orbit of the Service Module so closely that it knew both when to it could take off and what direction/altitude was needed to reach it.

To put it another way, when they were at the Moon, they didn’t even need to talk to ground controllers to get home.

[Army Air Corps]

Ping.

[chaosagent]

When asked how the U.S., who started from behind in the space race, managed to get to the moon before the Russians, he said, “Our Germans were better than their Germans.”

[Steely Tom]

...it was like reaching into the future and bringing the technology forward."

Listen Elon, we Americans used to do that all the time. It was kind of a way of life, once.

[x]

Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it's cold as hell
And there's no one there to raise them if you did

[rx]

While the Saturn V rocket was in testing, Wernher von Braun gave lectures and made videos in which he stated that the US would have to build a much more powerful rocket than anything in existence at the time (~'61-'62) to feasibly bring man to the moon.

In the years that followed, he laid plans for such a rocket, but that project was cancelled when the time schedule and budget grew out of control. No other more powerful booster was completed before Apollo 8, the three-manned mission that was claimed to have circled moon in a vehicle that was essentially the same as that which would be called Apollo 11.

Did Wernher get it wrong? Did Nixon and the desire to win the Cold War with the Soviets change the US and NASA's space plans that Wernher couldn't have contemplate? Why wasn't that someone else, whose vision must have outstripped Wernher's to be able to use Saturn V to do the Apollo moon missions put in charge of the has-been Von Braun?

No, Wernher wasn't replaced and no other rocket science genius took over. Hmmm.

Apollo 11 images such as this one below show a necessary lunar excursion wardrobe change that could not have occurred and was never claimed:

Then there are internal contradictions such as these among the official Apollo 11 photo imagery:

Here's the official NASA spokesman Donald R. Pettit, Ph.D. explaining why we haven't been able to go back to the moon for 50 years:

Priceless!

[AnotherUnixGeek]

Why It Matters: Musk agreed with the podcast hosts that it was “weird” that the U.S. had not returned to the Moon’s surface since 1972.

No, it's not all that weird - Musk was right when he said the US landing on the moon was what was weird. There's simply been no financial or political incentive to return to the moon. Now, in 2022, we have private corporations seeking to establish bases on the moon for financial profit - that gives us a sustainable reason to go to the moon and stay there.