Gene Cernan has died (opens in new tab)

On the scale of tragedies that are currently occurring or for which there is a significant threat of occurring in the near future, the possibility that there might be a period of time with no living humans who have walked on the moon is so trivial as to trivialize the entire concept of "tragedy" by using that term to describe it.

What would be the reason to go back to the moon? I'm not being sarcastic either, I'm genuinely curious why.

To me, it just seemed like landing on the moon was more important than what we could learn from it, or possibly use it as a remote scientific base or something else. It was the idea of simply getting their that seemed the most important. I never thought we had any long term plans for the moon, so it would seem we've already accomplished what we wanted to do.

Thanks. The starting paragraph made me think he was the last person ever worked on moon alive until now.

> Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, died Monday, Jan. 16, surrounded by his family.

We don't need people on the moon. Robots are better.

A small sacrifice to avoid angering the aliens.

Science, exploration, and personal satisfaction. Don't underestimate that last; frontier exploration is a massive part of many of our cultures, but the painful truth is that there aren't any left on Earth. Everything's owned by somebody. Moving into space could have an almost religious impact down here.

The science is mostly geology and astronomy --- the moon is a great place for observatories --- but mainly it's engineering and life sciences; the moon makes a great place to learn about how to solve the kinds of problems that you have to solve when living somewhere like the moon. Which sounds tautological, but it's all stuff that we have no idea about and the moon, being on Earth's doorstep, as a good place to start.

Much further down the line, mineral exploitation. Trying to establish a proper presence in space by hauling everything out of Earth's gravity well is ludicrous, and the moon's the obvious place to go for resources. But that's much further down the line; we need to have people living on a regular basis on the moon first. Even learning how to do simple things like refining metal there is going to be hard. (See above, under 'engineering'.)

Long term, we probably want to have facilities at the Earth/Moon and Earth/Sun Lagrange points. These can be used as part of a system for cheap (but slow) interplanetary transport network (ITN). (See [1]). When we have that we can start sending supplies ahead on a regular schedule to places that we want to establish human occupied facilities at later.

The idea is that if we plan to put humans at X, we start sending cargo drops to X every few months via the slow but cheap ITN.

After those start arriving at X, we send the humans. The ship for transporting humans only has to carry enough supplies to keep the humans alive during the trip. It doesn't have to carry supplies to keep them alive at X, or equipment to set up their base or colony at X, because those have already been sent via the ITN. The ship for the humans can be optimized for one task: moving humans fast.

Setting all of the above up working with materials from the Moon and from bases on the Moon will be a lot less expensive than doing it from Earth. First, the gravity difference makes it a lot cheaper to get something from the Moon to an arbitrary point (like one of those Lagrange points) than it does to get it from Earth to there.

Second, because the Moon has no significant atmosphere you can do things on the surface that would not work well on Earth. For instance, on the Moon you could build a long linear electric motor on the surface and use it to speed a vehicle up to escape velocity. Try that on the surface of the Earth and your vehicle is going to get destroyed by friction in the atmosphere.

The Moon is the key to long term human utilization of the rest of the solar system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Netwo...

Because it's a step in the process of making moon bases, and eventually Mars bases, asteroid bases, Jovian-moon bases, deep-space bases, and eventually interstellar bases economically viable.

The Earth is very small, and the universe is very large. Eventually, we're going to want to use more than an earth-sized corner of it. Why not start now?

The Moon is rich in Helium 3, which is useful in nuclear applications. It's also a good place to coordinate missions to other destinations in the solar system, as the escape velocity is significantly less than that of Earth's, and there's no atmosphere to get in the way - an ideal place to launch from. There are also interesting astronomical benefits to studying the cosmos from the far side of the Moon - no radio interference from Earth to get in the way. It's also a nice place to test new ideas like space elevators from, since a space elevator on the Moon could be built with today's technology. This would play exceedingly well with the idea of using the Moon as a starting point for future missions, since you could get pretty much anywhere in the solar system on a very cheap fuel budget if you launched from a Moon-based space elevator.

Building a moon base would probably be good practice for building one on another planet. It could also provide opportunities for lots of research that isn't possible on Earth or on the ISS.

Going to the moon, and space exploration more generally, is not something that can be justified based on economics. We simply don't know enough about the future to know the potential upsides vs. the potential downsides of going vs. not going, particularly when the most significant consequences could be decades or centuries or more away. Those of us who advocate doing it are basing that on a general principle that exploration can eventually pay dividends, or, to look at it from the other side, not exploring can eventually lead to extinction.

There are a lot of benefits, as others have mentioned, that come from science and exploration. There is another related one, which is the many kids in high school who will then decide that maybe going into Sciences or some space related field is really worth pursing and making a living out of, rather than, say, decide to focus on building an app that makes a whipping sound when you shake your phone, or various funny noises: you get the idea.

Step outside. Look up.

There's your incentive.

Frankly there is very little reason if the costs are similar to that of the Apollo program. It's just too expensive for any reasonable return compared to sending robot probes.

However if the costs can be cut by a couple of orders of magnitude, that picture changes considerably. All of a sudden the scientific payback in terms of geological insight into the history of the Earth/Moon system or resource extraction such as water and fuel become a lot more attractive. With SpaceX and Blue Origin working hard to do exactly that, it's quite possible we might return to the moon in a decade or two.

Honest answer: because on the moon (in a pressurized environment), you can fly with wings strapped to your arms. That's enough for me.

To develop the technology for further exploration into space. Why explore? Man has been asking that question since the beginning.

I didn't realize the Apollo program covered the entire Moon and that we now know everything about it. /s

I've read enough about space technology to have a bit of disbelief in your statement.

The technology to launch someone skyward is basically identical, the technology in the craft, while benefited by more modern computing (as well as enhanced material science), also largely identical.

Being drunk off their ass [1] might help them having the guts. Can't blame them, they are sitting on a 2000 metric ton bomb.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jul/27/spaceexplorati...

I highly and frequently recommend "For All Mankind" as another great documentary if you haven't already seen it.

Also Apollos 15-17 were much more awesome missions than the earlier ones. If you had the choice of being the first man to walk on the moon for just over an hour, or the last man to walk on the moon for three days and nights with a car and a real life geologist to explain the sights, I'd take the latter.

"It's almost as if JFK reached out into the twenty-first century where we are today, grabbed hold of a decade of time, slipped it neatly into the (nineteen) sixties and seventies (and) called it Apollo." - Cernan

That quote stood out to me.

Coincidentally, I was looking at my Plantronics headset today before this news came out, and was amused at the fact that it looked so similar to the Mission Control headsets of the 1960s. I then discovered that this is because Plantronics made those NASA headsets, as well as the "Snoopy cap" flight gear the astronauts used in space.

Huh? Nautical miles are a fixed unit of measurement equivalent to 1852 meters today but originally defined as a minute of latitude. They are still commonly used for distances, e.g., range of a Boeing 777 as reported in Wikipedia. [1, 2] They are a logical unit to use for flight to the moon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautical_mile [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777#Specifications

Tradition. The space program grew out of aviation which uses nautical miles.

I noticed the typo too, emailed the author and he has fixed it now.

There's also some really great material at the JSC Oral History project:

https://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/oral_histories/oral_histori...