> walking on the moon in only 66 years.

Yet it has been 53 years since we have been able to send a manned mission to the moon . No other program has or likely to come close in the next 13 years including the current US one. By 2038 the moon landings would be closer to Wright brothers than future us.

The curve of progress is only smooth and exponential when you squint hard .

It is a narrow few decades of exponential growth hardly can reasonably be expected to last for 100+ years .

It is for the same reason you cannot keep doubling grains on a chess board just because you did it 10-20 steps quickly.

Fusion power, quantum computing are all always two decades away for a reason despite the money being spent . AI has gone through 3-4 golden ages in living memory and yet too many keep believing this one would last.

Reality is when the conditions are right, I.e. all the ground work has been done for decades or centuries before there can be rapid innovation for a short(few decades at best) time

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decimalenough 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

> No other program has or likely to come close in the next 13 years including the current US one.

The Chinese are planning manned lunar landings in 2029-2030, and this is not a pipe dream, they've been systematically working at this for several decades now. They have already completed 6 out of 8 preparatory missions plus placed comms satellites in lunar orbit, and the final two are scheduled for 2026 and 2028.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Prog...

	▲	manquer 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		It does not look like CMSA is planning any human orbital missions or a human lander(lanyue) return flight test before attempting to land with humans in 2030 just two missions from now, that is very ambitious. Perhaps milestones are being set to be competing with Artemis. When NASA gets delayed or reduced in scope, CNSA might reset to more achievable date. That is just engineering risk on dates, there are other class of risks in geopolitics or economics etc. Bottom line I am skeptical that a successful landing and return can be attempted in 2030. 2035 is a more realistic target I think.

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Nevermark 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Yet it has been 53 years since we have been able to send a manned mission to the moon

A near total lack of demand explains that impressive stall.

Even if the shuttle had worked out as well as its designers hoped, was envisioned as a major retreat, while sucking all the dollars out of the room.

And today, the market for lunar landings is still very small.

I think what it shows is that many technologies might have come earlier from a research and development standpoint, if we had enough money to burn. But that was an unusual situation.

	▲	manquer 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, Economics is a key factor for innovation. However it alone is not sufficient. At times you simply need other foundational breakthroughs to happen and they will have to be in sequence, i.e. one breakthrough has to happen and become widespread before work on next one can progress, before you can achieve meaningful progress on the end goal. It is not like Fusion or Quantum Computing has lacked serious or continuous funding over the last 20-30 years. Foundational model development is a classic current example. The returns are diminishing significantly, despite the tens of billions each quarter being thrown at the problem. No other R&D effort in our history has this much resources being allocated to it, perhaps including even the Moon landings. However the ability to allocate resources has limits. Big tech can spend few hundred billion a year a number that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago, but even they cannot spend few trillion dollars a year.