How does any of that matter for this mission, which will not be landing on the moon?

▲ areoform 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Because many small steps are required before every giant leap.

I would like to point out that the current misadventure in the ME has cost at least $38,035,856,006 in 32 days. And that won't receive half of the "this is a waste of money" critiques this mission will. And there are a ton of people who are against that excursion.

Most people who will come across this will react with either extreme negativity or indifference. Very few people will react positively. This thread itself is evidence of that. This is a nerdy community filled with people who are deeply positive about space exploration and excluding my comments, the straw poll was,

    ~81 positive (48%), ~43 negative (25%), ~45 neutral (27%).

Only a plurality of comments were positive. 88 comments were neutral or negative.

▲ JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> How does any of that matter for this mission

This is a fair question. The closest answer I can get is eyes and ears onboard complement sensors.

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TeMPOraL 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It's also rehearsing/testing/experience gathering for an eventual mission that will land people on the Moon again. Missions don't happen in isolation.

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JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Missions don't happen in isolation

True. I wasn’t thinking about training the ground crews.

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TeMPOraL 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Only in the last few minutes, the livestream actually covered various goals this mission - explicitly a test mission - is meant to achieve. For example, one they just mentioned is they're going to be doing some docking maneuvers practice.

This is not just training the current flight crew and ground crews, but is also generally testing the entire system - including operations and hardware too, with feedback important to logistics and component manufacturers, etc. With possible exception of Falcon 9 launches, space missions are still infrequent enough that each of them is providing knowledge and experience meaningfully relevant to all work in and adjacent to space exploration and space industry.

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JumpCrisscross an hour ago | parent [-]

> testing the entire system - including operations and hardware too, with feedback important to logistics and component manufacturers, etc.

This can be done autonomously. The human training cannot.

	▲	TeMPOraL an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Not just yet. Give it a few more years for AI (haha, another thing yielding stupid amount of value to everyone, that people are totally oblivious of - your antibiotics comparison in another subthread kinda applies too) - but for now, having actual people with full sensory capabilities, able to look at stuff on-site (and hear, and smell), is something we can't fully cover with computers and sensors. We can recover that and more data later, but it's a delayed, after-the-fact analysis. There's value in immediate feedback and immediate decisions.

▲ tekla 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

To test the stuff that will allow to land humans on the moon