When the moon was blown out of orbit in 1999, taking the Alphans with it, it also created a rupture in space-time here on Earth, which is why we are all living the alternate version where we never returned to the moon.

>arguing it unfairly advantages startups

Way to say your dealers suck.

Simplify. The best part is no part. The parts omitted never fail. They don't require maintenance, supply chains, continuous improvement.

The Moon is target practice. We need to get away from innovative bespoke engineering, into industrial mass production with continuous improvement. To do that we need to fly often. Mars just doesn't have the launch window availability. The biggest part of the challenge is that we were born in the bottom of a deep well. To toss enough stuff out of the well for a long journey is critical. Boosters that reliably fly on time often and cheaply enough to get ships and fuel out of the well. Ships that carry fuel into orbit and return over and over since the vast majority of the material we need to send out of the well isn't payloads or ships, it's fuel. Kilotons of fuel. Once the factories and processes are set up for that going far beyond the Moon is fairly easy. But with a narrow opportunity every two years that's not going to happen in a human lifespan. It's not enough refinement cycles per year.

I see this accelerating the Mars objective, not deferring it.

This is the crux. Optimization of supply chains to eliminate inventory makes them frail. Or, to quote Wirth:

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

The last of the US federal helium reserve - including land and equipment - was sold in 2024.

Is joke of course. Was angling for the same joke.

3He is normal helium atom with an extra neutron, hoped to be used in some forms of fusion. It's not considered radioactive. Emitted by the sun it's trapped in lunar rock possibly at concentrations of up to 50 parts per billion but more likely 5-10ppb. The utility of extracting it from the Moon is hotly debated. On Earth isolating it from normal helium involves the same sort of centrifuge used to isolate isotopes of uranium, radium, hydrogen but there is far less of it than in lunar soil.

This is not actually the case in the subject at hand. It's all normal helium. When cooled enough all other gases will precipitate out as they freeze - including Hydrogen - leaving only helium as a gas and so easily isolated. That's actually why it's valuable since it's the only gas that will boil off at temperatures so low that the conductors immersed in the fluid will superconduct supporting the currents necessary for the intense electromagnets used in imaging and such. /Explaining nerd jokes since 1983

I think the mistake is imagining that the politicians are doing anything at all based on reason and science, rather than basing everything on politics and vested interests.

It's agents all the way up.

But yes, great point. Why are we using all this stuff to make life more complicated and creating lots of worthless tasks.

Other similar stars were here in this galaxy for 8 billion years before the Sun even formed - twice as long as then to now. Inception of life as we know it on Earth was effectively instant upon planet formation, which was contemporaneous with solar ignition.

There are no FTL speeds. No exceptions.

The Milky Way is home to about a billion civilizations more advanced than us. We are late to the party.

Fortunately space is really big, or we would be them.

This is nonsense. They skim from the first subcontractor to maximize proceeds from the top line while maintaining deniability. The prime gets a slice and then there's a sub-sub tree leaking all the way that eventually converges at a boiler room in India where the actual work is performed for $500.

Thank goodness it doesn't run AI. Was pricing small TVs to use as an auxiliary monitor today. It's hard to imagine how they make this work financially.