Many Americans think NASA returning to the moon is a waste of time and it should prioritize asteroid hunting instead, a poll shows::Americans like NASA, but don’t support their funding going towards moon missions, according to new polls.
Who the heck did they survey that had this contradictory thought? 69% of dem and 70% of repub dissaprove of moon mission but 62% overall want more space travel??? How do they think we plan to have more space travel without a moon base?
Maybe they are bad ay data, cause that would be 31% Dem and 30% rep approve so add them together and round up a little and boom 62% approval
A ‘no take, only throw’ mentality.
Many Americans are anti-intellectual science deniers.
I do not hold in high esteem opinions based on woo-woo.
We should have NASA’s priorities determined by poll results from bar trivia machines.
If you want to hunt asteroids, go to the moon.
You read that right. What “many Americans” aren’t thinking about is that we are at the bottom of a very big gravity well here on Earth. Launching anything into space, like an asteroid destroyer, takes enormous energy to accomplish.
If instead we could launch from the moon, we’d be able to get bigger things into space faster and cheaper and more often. But to do this we need a base and a way to manufacture fuel. The raw materials are there, but we don’t have any of the infrastructure built.
Eventually we HAVE to get to a point where we are mining, refueling, and building off-Earth. The only thing we should be launching from Earth is people.
The moon is our first stop on this evolutionary path.
Most americans don’t understand this, sadly
Happily, though, NASA isn’t run by internet poll 👍
It is ultimately run by elected representatives though. Popular opinions matter
I think they do occasionally toss a mission into the agenda because it will capture the popular imagination. NASA has it pretty well dialed in. They serve science so liberals are happy and they have big explodey rockets and a history of competing against enemies so conservatives are happy. You don’t get to half a percent of the national budget without a good sales pitch.
Asteroid hunting is simply tracking them. You do not need to be on the moon for that. Satellite telescopes would do just fine. Doing something about those asteroids? Having something on the moon could be helpful, sure but getting the necessary manufacturing on the moon to deflect a possible asteroid would be massive and likely not something that we would prioritize considering it would likely be a one off event.
I’m perfectly happy going back to the moon, BTW. I’d prefer Mars but I’ll settle for the moon. But NASA can walk and chew gum at the same time. They can hunt asteroids and go back to the moon.
Tracking them is tracking them. Hunting them is intercepting and interfering with them. Which requires launching an interceptor. Which is less fuel intensive if launched from the moon.
It’s true that getting infrastructure onto the moon is a huge effort, but it’s a gateway to everything else we might want to do. Including going to Mars. If you could refuel on the Moon, a Mars mission would be much more viable.
Yes but most Americans think asteroid hunting requires a rifle.
Hey that’s not fair. They just think that all asteroids would be safer if all asteroids had rifles.
I remember a TED talk that sold me on big science: For every dollar we spent on the moon shots, we made fourteen.
The thing is, going to the moon involved doing a lot of development, and this time we’re going to the moon better and are going to do more things.
At some point we’ll want to put a colony up there, and will need still more development to make it work.
A lot of the technology that we use today was developed thanks to the space race. In fact, when the USSR was taking its victory laps for Sputnik, Eisenhower freaked out, signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act and then extended a grant to Fairchild Semiconductor which started the digital revolution in Silicon Valley, eventually propelling us into the cyberpunk dystopia of smart refrigerators and zombie bot-nets that we know today.
And wa- was that a good thing?
I’m glad that science isn’t a democracy.
However, I’m not so glad about NASA having to follow the current US Congress’ whims all the time.
Note the use of “many Americans” in the headline. If it was most they’d’ve said most. Clickbait headlines are the worst.
Why can’t we have both
A massive amount of Americans are idiots so I would not trust what they have to say. To get our selves to the outer planets we need to perfect the tools that will allow us to reach planets. The moon is a great place to perfect those tools.
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The only reason it would make sense to return to the moon is to establish a base for exploration of Mars. I go really back and forth on space exploration. On one hand it is a giant money pit. On another, the research that has come out of space exploration has been beneficial to life here on earth.
The technologies we invent along the way are worth the investment, in my opinion. Look at everything that came out of the original space race.
Nah. If we go back to the Moon, we are going to need more than “new technologies”, but an actual purpose.
Right now, Helium-3, rare earth metals, and a slingshot to the rest of the solar system are good reasons to colonize the Moon if we can figure out how to do it cheaply.
like ICBMs and freeze dried ice cream sandwiches!
The technological breakthroughs aside, the first company that returns with mined goods from space is gonna be worth trillions.
this may be an asinine fear based on my rudimentary knowledge, but I hope they never drill the moon, because human greed can’t be contained and some dumb ass will just see $$$ signs like some looney toons cartoon shit in their eyes and want to mine the whole thing up. Then there goes a ton of shit that we depend on the moons gravity for. Pretty similar to the rick and morty episode about pluto except the moon instead of our own planet.
The moon is a fourth the size of Earth. Even if we had the infrastructure and technology (spoiler, we don’t), we can’t even make a tiny tiny tiny tiny dent in the moon, at least in the next hundred years or so. Heck, nuking the moon with every nuke humanity has won’t even make a noticeable dent in the moon!
Where do these oddballs (who approve of space programs, but not moon missions) think those asteroid mining missions are going to launch from?
Lagrange point station would be neat.
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Since when did we need to flip a coin on issues like this? Spoiler: We don’t! There are plenty of resources to go around.
If anything was a waste of time, it was this poll. Go home, Pew Research, you’re drunk.
