I don't really get this argument. If this is a blocker I'd assume Nasa to be smart enough to understand it and propose an adequate solution...
this is not the problem
This has kept crewed spaceflight stuck in a rut in terms of cost and risk. It's like if progress on the design of commercial aircraft suddenly slowed to a crawl in the late 1940s, putting us at mid-60s adjacent aircraft design in 2024.
Now, that science is done.
Using TTLs seems less interesting in general(?). It is nice to be able to send computers into space. NASA should just use computers instead of TTL, if for no other reason than that keeping the infrastructure for those sorts of computers well funded is valuable.
Do you think establishing a human base on the moon has value?
> Now, that science is done.
That said, building a base on the moon is pretty pointless, and I think we shouldn’t do it. If we’re going to become a spacefaring species, we’re going to have to learn how to live in space. The conditions on each planet, moon, whatever, are all pretty different, so we’ll probably need different bespoke solutions on each one.
We should perfect the art of building self-sustaining orbital habitats, because those aren’t redesigned from scratch every time. Let’s iterate on the space-station.
Energetically going downwell is a big cost. The only reason to go onto a planet is to get resources that aren’t already present in less energetically disadvantageous locations.
In order to get to a planet in the first place, you’ll have to have a ship that can fly through space without the occupants getting irradiated. The biggest problem will be convincing them to get off the ship I think.
* Humans evolved to live on Earth
* In many cases there were people to trade with or steal already tended land from
We could look at Arctic expeditions I guess. They mostly didn’t colonize for some reason (despite the region being wildly more hospitable than anywhere off Earth).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41570028
Colonizing the moon makes as much sense as swimming out to a rock a bunch of times, to prepare for piloting a cargo ship.
We have less data about the moon then any even half way interesting cave on earth.
We know, and they knew at the time, that the achievement of getting to the Moon was just a cherry on top of the technological development required to do it.
Should not redo that work. The current strategy of using higher-tech components and less brute force is more scientifically interesting.
I also think going back to the moon is stupid, but I elaborated on that a bunch the other branch, so I’m not going to bother doing it again. But if we have to go back again, we should follow their spirit rather than their actions and use the most advanced systems available. Not a bunch of TTLs. The value is in testing our ability to manufacture complex devices to work in a hostile environment.
There's no need to spend billions on spending three or four people there to get scientific returns.
Getting humans to have long term sustainability and mobility on the moon and having tools and robotic support is long term.
The same architecture can then be reused for Mars.
On earth, most caves are explored with humans. Most science is not done by robotics only.
If you want layers of failsafe and redundancy (as we would do it today), it requires higher level abstractions, e.g. writing in at least C if not C++ or Rust, instead of hand-coded assembler like they did back then.
So yes simple got us there, but it's not useful to repeat the exercise like that again.
I suggest that maybe the key to success is limiting ourselves to simpler TTL logic and make up for it by adding 10% additional material. Immediately somebody responds that TTL logic is the old way and can't be as good as modern C, let alone Rust.
So now instead of a few hundred large, durable transistors and relays which shrug off radiation and heat and voltage spikes and a have few enough states that they can be formally proved correct, we need delicate 30+ MHz microprocessors which need special radiation hardening and which will go up in smoke if their signal lines transiently exceed 10 volts, and runs a couple million lines of code.
The arguments here for Rust aren't even wrong, which is the problem. In theory Rust would be better than TTL logic in every way: easier, cheaper, lighter, more capable, more logging, updatable. Professionally TTL is an argument which can't be won and is therefore career limiting to make, so finesse wins out.
Yet large projects of every type keep 'mysteriously' failing due to "unforeseen difficulties".
Low risk tolerance isn't a really problem.
High-tech is actually good and these mythical cheap heavy designs don't actually exist. SpaceX is building Starship and Raptor not SeaDragon. This is just the old 'Soviet tanks are cheaper nonsense repackaged for Space'.
The 4th is a problem, but not actually the biggest problem.
The real issue is that NASA doesn't get a goal and money. Each program is individually controlled by congress, budget is strictly allocated to certain program.
When a former NASA administrator even suggested to do something that would hurt a important program, and make it much cheaper he was instantly threatened with firing and told if he continued to publicly talk about it, he would be removed. He in fact suggested he should just resign.
And this suggested change wasn't even a very hard attack compared to what NASA SHOULD actually have done.
If you spend 30 years and 60 billion $ achieving basically nothing and congress is incredibly happy with the program, you know you have a totally broken system.
Chips are plenty save in space, this isn't that big of a problem and doing all this logic in TTL wouldn't make sense.
Somehow that managed to vastly exceed their planned missions, proving the worth of that mode of exploration for future missions.
Why would we ever revert to old expensive, heavy TTL logic systems that virtually nobody alive understands when the better bet is designing systems with hardware you can buy on AliExpress?
For space to be more accessible we should be iterating with regular “stuff” and not crazy one-off designs. Sure some parts of each mission require crazy, like the propellers on ingenuity but that’s the whole point. Spend your budget on the crazy stuff that actually needs to be crazy.
- We don't spend enough money
- We have a low tolerance for risk
- We choose high-tech, finessed designs over simpler, heavier designs
- The project is designed and built by international committee
It sounds like a recipe for failure to me. I'm skeptical that the USA will ever again land humans on the moon because the USA seems unable to spend enough to succeed by brute force and the supposedly cheaper finely engineered designs don't seem up to the rigours. For example, putting computer everywhere is common engineering practice these days, but modern computer chips (even the space hardened varieties) cannot be as robust as TTL logic from the 60s. Yet it sounds like a career ending event to suggest that the critical computation be done (and limited to what can be done!) purely in TTL logic.