The fact that we hope to get some new tech with this whereas sports aims for nothing is just icing on the cake. I think big space missions are worth it every now and then on a humanitarian level; even if no new discoveries are made, a new generation of engineers will become fluent in what we have already discovered. Humanity's education is not "done" when the last fact is written in a book, it needs to be constantly refreshed or it will disappear.

Even in sports you do not get "nothing", it has certainty helped advance the field of medicine.

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runarberg 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> a new generation of engineers will become fluent in what we have already discovered.

We seem to have lost the technology of going to the moon we gained from Apollo. So without an actual follow-up and a tangible long term plan I suspect the exact same will happen this time around.

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JumpCrisscross 8 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> We seem to have lost the technology of going to the moon we gained from Apollo

Some of it. Much for good reason. What are you referring to that we’ve lost that we would want?

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nancyminusone an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, that's probably an indication that we waited too long.

	▲	runarberg 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Or, more likely, it is an indication that manned moon missions are simply not that important, that this technology is simply not worth the cost of maintaining. In contrast, we kept the technology of doing robotic missions in space, on the moon, and even on other planets and even asteroids (the latter two have much to improve upon though).