Why should the government pay for it? If there’s an economically viable reason to have a moon program, let private enterprise take that on.

That’s a great way to never expand the frontier of knowledge. We don’t know the returns on the investment of a Moon program ahead of time, but exploration drives human knowledge forward. If we only ever funded things that had a clear economically viable reason, we would have never progressed past steam technology.

Think of space exploration as basic research. It’s fundamental to moving human knowledge forward and that should be worth any price.

Private enterprise doesn’t advance advanced technology because they are constrained by profit requirement. It’s impossible for private enterprise to do so because of that. That’s why we rely on government to advance literal moonshot programs.

Space-X can’t even do this without government funding.

It is important to remember that the Space Race was a front of the Cold War, the "Why do we need a Moon program?" question was squarely answered by "Because we are at war."

Today we are not at war, at least not one that concerns space or the Moon. China is in a fierce self-imposed race to land on the Moon and Do The Other Things because it (probably correctly) views the West as an enemy to overcome. The US has not reciprocated that sentient, we've just shut them out of our space programs and then left them be.

For the US government to fund another Moon program we definitely need an answer to the question of Why. So far we don't have one other than THE PRESTIGE and OUR SCIENCE GRANTS as evidenced by many other threads on similar subject matter here. That's not going to convince the taxpayers.

It's important to remember that USA cannot fly men to the Moon.

USA had that ability some 50 years ago. Since then companies changed, technologies were replaced, knowledge transformed and people got interested with other things, not to mention that risk threshold grew a lot. As a result, right now USA can't fly men to the Moon.

US government, however, doesn't want to give China the ability to say "yes, we're on the Moon - and we're the only nation which can do it today". And because of that, we have a rather similar conditions today as we had some 60 years ago - US government can't really allow China to fly men to the Moon without showing that Americans are also doing that, at the very same time.

Taxpayers, of course, are and were different - somebody doesn't care, somebody else cares a lot. I doubt US government want to assume those who care aren't that important.

So far the American system has been for the government to fund basic research and private industry to commercialize it. This has worked stupendously well. We should be very cautious about moving away from this arrangement.

>So far the American system has been for the government to fund basic research and private industry to commercialize it.

In that case SLS definitely needs to be cancelled.

We are well beyond "basic research" into how a Moon program could be executed, private companies are already doing it and the only question left is how to commercialize it.

Sure, I agree, but the person I was responding to was not talking about SLS specifically. They said that a moon program should be strictly up to commercial interests to pursue and that the government shouldn't purse one at all.

I agree with that assessment, neither NASA nor the country has the money nor time to waste on another public Moon program. There is no justifiable reason for another Apollo.

Leave it to the commercial world, and if they can't figure out a sustainable business model then it simply isn't meant to be (yet?).

You not agreeing with the reasons is not the same as there being "no justifiable reason" for another moon program. There absolutely are justifiable reasons and those reasons have worked out very well for the U.S. in the past. And as to whether we have the money for it, the U.S. is the wealthiest it has ever been and certainly much wealthier than we were in the 60s.

>There absolutely are justifiable reasons and those reasons have worked out very well for the U.S. in the past.

Apollo quickly lost funding and popular support once the Cold War in space was effectively over. Space Shuttle ran on its fumes, and it had to be designed partially as a warplane in order to get additional funds from USAF that NASA couldn't get otherwise. SLS is an extension of that.

Also, we're living in 2025, not 1965. The reasons of the past do not translate perfectly to today.

>And as to whether we have the money for it, the U.S. is the wealthiest it has ever been and certainly much wealthier than we were in the 60s.

We are also literally many trillions in debt. There are many things we should be doing and arguably none of that involves another Moon program just for the sake of it. Been there, done that; we don't have the money.

In 2024 we spent $1.5T via Social Security so that 70 million people could be economically unproductive. We're a wealthy country that can afford many little dalliances to expand our understanding of the natural world (which so far has been a prerequisite to human flourishing).

So we can have corporations and shitty billionaires also own the moon? No fucking thanks.

This is just a variation on the broken window fallacy. There are any number of engineering projects one could embark on that would stimulate R&D and provide a productive output in their own right.