Why is nobody paying attention to this?

[fpb]

I had never even heard it, had any of you? And yet it is since 2007 that Germany had announced the establishment of a purely German space program, separate from the European space agency, and intended to go to the Moon. Now Peter Hintze, the German federal director of aerospace, has announced that Germany plans a mission to the Moon within ten years. One of the many ways in which the world media are corrupt is that they never pay any attention to news like this. There is a meme that Europe is lazy and declining, and that the future is in the Far East. Any news that contradict the meme simply are not publicized. And when German spacemen will in fact be walking on the Moon, everyone will be surprised, not knowing that the program had been widely announced.

(the news was reported by today's Italian Catholic newspaper L'Avvenire)

Comments

[elise-the-great.livejournal.com]

I am actually incredibly excited about this. Maybe once Germany lands on the Moon, we'll get in gear and start looking into space again.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I don't think there will be much done until there is real space settlement - colonies and permanent space station. Otherwise, space is best exploited by unmanned probes and satellites, which cost a lot less than astronauts. But the Germans evidently think otherwise, and they have this habit of being right.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Someone has to start. And if I were to bet, I'd bet that on a whole PLANET (Luna) there will be at least something whose discovery will more than justify the expense of manned exploration -- and probably lead to those "colonies."

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It would have to be something absolutely extraordinary. I suspect that it will go the other way: the settlement will be led by tourism - obviously, millionaires' tourism, like the kind that is currently feeding the Russian space program - and once there are permanent settlements on the Moon, they will grow by themselves. People will be born there and want to stay and work at home. The settlements will have to be self-feeding from the beginning, so a considerable amoung of farming and even mining will develop just to keep them going - and that will feed local growth. I doubt that it will ever be profitable to take goods in bulk from Moon to Earth or vice versa, and so interplanetary trade is unlikely to develop.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

I doubt that it will ever be profitable to take goods in bulk from Moon to Earth or vice versa, and so interplanetary trade is unlikely to develop.

I disagree. The ultimate limit on the reduction of transport costs is the amount of energy required to move the objects from the surface of one world to the other, and that's fairly low -- not much more than a couple of intercontinental jet flights.

The reason why it costs so much now is that we are moving everything by rocketship, and that it's right at the limits of our technological capabilities, so we have to carefully prepare each flight. Far better cargo transport systems than rocketships are in the works (particularly, space elevators, skyhooks, magnetic catapults and laser launch systems), and even where rocketships are concerned, we are developing far better hull materials.

And at that, tri-helium would already be valuable enough to ship, with current technology, if we had solved the problem of building a nuclear fusion reactor hot enough to burn it.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

There is this concept, especially in America, that only America has the capability to travel to other worlds. And that we Americans are getting to make some eternal cosmic decision about human destiny -- if we don't go to the Moon (or Mars, or wherever) Mankind will never go.

This is of course bunk. I half-hope that someone beats us back to the Moon, if only to wake us up to reality!

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

"There is this concept, especially in America, that only America has the capability to travel to other worlds."

It was not always thus, not even in my lifetime. During the Space Race with the Russians, while the Americans were staring dumbfounded at triumphs like Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, the Americans were not so sanguine or parochial.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Sooner or later someone was going to do it. What annoys me is that even I expected China or Japan or even India to beat us there, and that in spite of the fact that according to L'Avvenirem Germany had clearly stated her goals as long as two years ago.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

What's funny about that is that Soyuz rockets and spacecraft seem to still be the most reliable and perhaps cheapest access to space, with Russians still doing the bulk of the world's launches.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That is largely because once they had got to the Moon, the Americans completely discarded the Saturn 5 technology and started on a wholly different vehicle, the shuttle. The result was that the shuttle proved impractical and expensive, and the technology of Saturn 5 got no updates and may even have been partly lost as the people who worked on it die out or forget.

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

What's the point of going to the moon?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

To judge by what the Germans said, it is the technological by-products. And they may have a point. Germany has always built up economic power on scientific innovation carried out in their great universities, and this might be another program. After all, there are many things we take for granted that owe their existence to the first moon program, all those years ago.

[fishlivejournal.livejournal.com]

What was the point of going to the Americas? Australia? Any argument that you can make for getting out of bed in the morning will apply to exploring and colonising.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Hoped for access to spices, then gold, silver, furs, and perhaps timber; then tobacco and cotton, and land for colonists. Australia... not sure about the initial draw, but land until they run out of water, and gold and such. And it got found by Cook looking around; after all, with the Americas, that potentially had big payoff.

We've looked in space and have a rather good idea of what's there, and there aren't any resources worth the current access costs.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

What's the point of going to the moon?

In the short run, technological spinoff and political prestige. Which can be great -- America benefitted in both respects from the original Apollo Program.

In the medium run, to get Lunar resources, such as tri-helium, and to secure a trade port to the rest of the Solar System. As the closest world to Earth, but one that it is far easier to launch from, Luna is the natural port of the Terrestrial System.

In the long run, so that one's own society may influence the nature of the future Lunar human culture. A thousand years from now, Luna will probably have a population in the millions to hundreds of millions, and whether that culture has customs derived from (say) American or Chinese or German origin is going to affect the cultural balance of power both on Earth and elsewhere in the Solar System.

In the longest of runs, as part of an overall program to spread one's own culture beyond the Earth, so that when human activity inevitably renders Earth lifeless for a time, your own culture will be one of the ones to survive.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

What spinoffs from the Apollo Program? With non-NASA documentation.

If you mean He3 by tri-helium, word is that it takes more energy to extract from regolith than it could release by fusion. Not that we can fuse it.

Being a port implies something to trade.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That is why, in my view, any kind of settlement will go the opposite way: first viable communities, producing their own goods, will be formed on the Moon - and space tourism for millionaires is the only way I can see them forming - and only afterwards will trade of any kind develop. North America and Australia had both been know for over a century before anyone thought to seriously settle them; while Columbus' journeys led to the Spanish conquest of the Amerindian empires within two generations, Cabot's journeys in the service of the king of England led to precisely nothing. That is because the empires of Mexico and Peru were already potent, civilized and rationally organized territories, and, even if it had not been the case that Western military technologies could overwhelm them, they would still have been natural foci for trade and political contact - same as the Chinese, Japanese, Mughal and Persian Empires at the same time. European ships simply dodged the enormous expanses of empty North America and Australia in search of already existing and rich communities. The exception is Brazil, where the Portuguese had the earliest intuition of the idea of settling a large, empty country to turn it into an asset, and the Portuguese settlement of Brazil nearly failed in its early stages, and only succeeded thanks to the dynamics of slave-raiding and slave-driving. Trade in pelts and fishing went on with North America for over a century before the British began to seriously settle the shores of the continent, and when that happened, it was not mainly as a commercial decision, but as a by-product of the worsening internal tensions that were soon to tear England apart in a vicious civil war. People do not, as a rule, have a drive to go out and settle empty lands, and will not do it in great numbers unless the alternative is dire. The American colonies were founded by "vexed and troubled Englishmen" in desperate flight from their own native lands.

[irishkate.livejournal.com]

The Germans announced this mission in 2007 and the mission was canceled due to costs - it may yet happen. However the media outlets do report it - I have heard it on several.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Out of all the people who replied here - all of whom are interested in news and current affairs and most of whom are fascinated by space exploration - you are the only one who heard about it. And even so, either you or the Italian Catholic newspaper where I read it must be wrong, because according to L'Avvenire the program carried on without breaks and what was announced now was simply the decision as to the time and kind of its final goal. And frankly, I suspect it might be you who misunderstood something. To start on an expensive long-term project, then to stop because you are terrified by the expense, and then to start again, is the kind of stupid, time- and money-wasting, demoralizing behaviour I associate with the British rather than with the German public administration. It is the way in which the British lost an empire through penny-pinching, and in which, in the early sixties, they failed to enter the space race. Half a dozen expensive programs were started and cut off after a few months or years, because the very people who had dreamed them up browned their trousers at the thought of actually having to spend money. That is not, in my experience, the way the Germans do things; long-term programs are commitments, even if the price rises. So - not to dismiss your views, but unless you can point me to your source for the Germans having given up this plan and then started it again, I will take the newspaper's version over yours.

[irishkate.livejournal.com]

Apologies I can't tell you when or where I heard the original news or the cancellation - it would have been a radio news program or discussion program more than likely.
When I read your entry I was surprised but I haven't been listening to the radio so hadn't heard. I also did misunderstand something - they have not said they plan a new mission, the reports are people saying they recommend a mission.

A quick google search throws up several german pages and space related pages where the cancellation gets mentioned as being due to lack of funds.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5g7z_aO846NW_5YRJmQYmqKZiBESw
http://de.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idDEBEE56P01720090726
However the Wiki page is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_and_future_lunar_missions#cite_note-22

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The Wikipedia link to a German TV site is broken. Of the other two you offer, one mentions that the Liberal and CD agreed that they would support a moon program if they win the election, and the other that "in the past", not saying when, the federal government had stopped such a program on financial grounds. You may be right, but it is not quite proven yet. And all your sources are in German, which only underlines my original point - why did nobody outside Germany relay this information?

[linalamont.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Maybe it's the science fiction? I mean, the real space programs are competing with science fictional space journeys in which we meet Daleks and Klingons and other cool-but-deadly aliens. How can the moon or Mars or any place humans might really get to compare?

But perhaps for the Germans it will feel necessary to assert their identity at a time when Germany has in some ways ceased to exist as a nation, becoming a mere province in the European Union, and because of very low German birthrates has an uncertain future. (The overwhelming majority of my second cousins in Germany never had any children and are becoming too old to do so, those few who have reproduced have mostly had only one child.)

[pathology-doc.livejournal.com]

To quote Mr Spock: fascinating.

With regard to the US, it beggars my imagination that a second-generation shuttle is not already in service (or at least ready to go into service when the first-generation survivors retire) - it's been over twenty years since the first was destroyed, and yet no follow-up exists. In the 1960s, the human race got to the moon in eight years from declaration of intent. If the US can't put a manned mission back on the moon by 2017, it has a problem. A big one.

In the meantime, private designs have won prizes for first-to-achieve milestones (the Ansari X prizes). Small milestones, but milestones nonetheless. Those are the sorts of programmes that surely could be sustained and expanded even by relatively minor economic players.

The other thing to keep in mind is that space is implacably hostile - as hostile as global exploration was five hundred years ago - and people are going to die out there. The only thing to do when this happens is to hold an inquest, discover the causes, correct them and move on. Handwringing over every risk and every death, and pointedly wondering whether it's really worth it, shouldn't be allowed to shape policy.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. The same is true for war. I cannot believe the kind of talk that is being made about a few hundred casualties over eight years - have people forgotten Vietnam, let alone the world wars, or what is going on in Congo right now?

[pathology-doc.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure about just a few hundred, but your general thrust is correct. A day's fighting* on the Western or Isonzo fronts ninety-odd years ago could easily have generated the equal of all the casualties the Coalition military has suffered in Afghanistan and Iraq put together.


* = Leaving aside disproportionate things like July 1, 1916.