Artemis 1 rocket about to be launched to begin surveying for a permanent moon base.
Artemis 1 moon mission is ‘go’ for Saturday launch, NASA says
Artemis 1 will use a Space Launch System (SLS) rocket to send an uncrewed Orion capsule on a 37-day mission to lunar orbit and back. It will be the first mission for the SLS and for NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to establish a sustainable human presence on and around the moon by the late 2020s.
Sci Fi become reality
Be careful, don’t count your chickens before they hatch.
https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/science/nasa-ready-second-attempt-artemis-lunar-launch-2022-09-03/
CAPE (Kennedy) CANAVERAL, Fla., Sept 3 (Reuters) - For the second time in five days, NASA on Saturday halted a countdown in progress and postponed a planned attempt to launch the debut test flight of its giant, next-generation rocket, the first mission of the agency’s moon-to-Mars Artemis program.
The latest attempt to launch the 32-story-tall Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and its Orion capsule was scrubbed after repeated failed attempts by technicians to fix a leak of super-cooled liquid hydrogen propellant being pumped into the vehicle’s core-stage fuel tanks. …
All delays aside, I’m curious, why is it that ‘we’ want to go to the moon again?
Next window is Sept 5. Then it’s a 1 month wait
Wasn’t there something about “there’s a better place”, in there somewhere?
It’s pretty nice down here. At least my down here is still holding its own.
I had a curious thought walking Maddy today.
It’s pretty obvious that days are numbered for our wonderful modern global society and all its perks, jet travel, food from every corner of the world, etc. When the reservoirs run dry, and the electricity stops energizing the lines, it’s going to get rough and ugly and most of us won’t survive. But not everyone. Not everywhere! Not all at once! It’ll begin in places like Bangladesh but be sure it’ll grow out from there.
But, not everywhere, people will survive, and people are nothing if not resourceful, yesterday is fast forgotten and we get on with the reality of today.
After all hell breaks loose, the dust always settles, a new day comes and a different world is left behind, then, as previous generations of survivors, in their various scattered enclaves across this once cornucopia Earth starts adding up, there will be stories told of the Garden of Eden Earth that once was, before the warming, before human folly blew it away.
{Lausten, that’s another thing that an Evolutionary Appreciate does, it makes that scenarios as vivid as my grandson’s next birthday.}
Then I shook my head and though, well I got today and it’s another pretty good day at that.
I’m sure you could find an official explanation somewhere. But my guess would be 1) for the resources, and 2) to establish a stable jumping off place for further exploration. The moon’s gravity is far less than earth, so I would imagine launching space vehicles from there directly would be much easier than from earth.
Well and I’m sure there are plenty of greedy pigs with dollar signs for eyeballs just salivating at ways the moon can be exploited for money.
Here’s an interesting recent video that looks at impacts on astronauts,
By Anton Petrov - Sep 11, 2022
1:00 Genetic changes from living in microgravity
2:42 How circulation change in space
4:05 Bacterial changes from living in space
7:10 Vision problem due to space travel
8:35 Brain changes from microgravity and space
11:08 How muscles are affected by space
13:08 Bone issues from living in space
I’ve heard it said that mining resources to return to Earth, whether it be from the moon or an asteroid, is really not viable, at least with the technologies we have now.
But of course it would be vastly useful for an established presence.
Don’t worry fusion is just around the corner, energy will be so plentiful, they won’t have to meter it and we’ll be able to manufacture anything we want. At least our supply chain to the moon won’t have to deal with that pesky global warming thing. 
Have you noticed, or it seems to me …
Aliens / Sci-Fi/Space movies:
It seems that many of the aliens with super-high tech are pretty wimpy and/or vulnerable without their machines.
War of the Worlds
Daleks
“Roswell bodies”
Independence Day
While Low-Tech aliens are pretty brutal.
Alien comes to mind, but also many of the flora and fauna of inhabited worlds humans have come across.
Maybe after a few generations is space a gene sequence will flip to “On” and humans can evolve to be more adaptable to low G.
Does this confirm that sensitivity to gravitational or magnetic waves in microtubules is instrumental in navigation of migrating birds?
I think if they go around saying, “Exterminate!” and then disintegrating people, they are pretty brutal and hardly wimpey. However, they were tiny wimps without the machines they rode around in. Brutal with their machines and wimps without them. So maybe you’re right, now that I reread what you wrote.
Now the Enterprise… Always treat her like a lady and she’ll always bring you home. Now that’s my kind of ship. Heck, I’ll even take Deanna driving, because she managed to land the ship on a crash course without a massive loss of life. The ship may have still crashed, but she managed to still land it, crash course or not, without a losing the whole crew, if any. Spot even survived. That’s what I’m talking about.
