Should we even bother going back to the moon?

No one talks about it much, but NASA dodged a bullet last time we sent people to the moon. Right in between two of the Apollo missions, the sun belched a massive cloud of radiation that struck the lunar surface. If Neil Armstrong’s Giant Leap for Mankind was happening then, he’d have been hit with so much of the fallout he’d probably have puked in his suit. With this level of radiation sickness, and without treatment, even death couldn’t be ruled out. The human body is not designed for space travel.

It’s a thought to keep in mind as NASA prepares for the first launch of its next moonshot – the Artemis program. The goal is to have American moonboots back on the surface by 2025, and the first stage in the program is the launch of Artemis I.

The NASA moon rocket at the Kennedy Space Centre before the Artemis 1 mission to orbit the moon at the Kennedy Space Centre.Credit: AP Photo/Brynn Anderson

Luck hasn’t been on NASA’s side with this though: there have been two aborted blast-off attempts so far and their engineers are currently trying to solve a fuel leak problem.

While this maiden voyage will go to the moon, it will not land – it’ll just be a few orbits and then back home to Earth. But even on a journey like this the space capsule will be exposed to the sun’s radiation wrath. If our fiery orb does let loose, the crew on board would be exposed. Although on Artemis I there is no drama as the crew are mannequins. They’ll be fitted with all sorts of equipment and sensors, like souped up crash test dummies, and among other things, will measure the radiation levels human crews will be exposed to on the trip. That way, hopefully, NASA can come up with good protections for both the journey and on the lunar surface.

But it does beg the question of why we’re sending puny humans anyway. We are so much more high maintenance than robots. They are less vulnerable to radiation than we are, plus they don’t need food, water or life-support systems. Also, they’re expendable: if, say, a spacecraft blew up on landing, no tears would be shed – we’d simply send another crew of bots.

Buzz Aldrin walks on the moon during the first human landing in 1969. Fellow astronaut Neil Armstrong the first to set foot on the moon, is seen reflected in Aldrin’s helmet glass.Credit: NASA

And keep in mind that artificial intelligence and robotics are advancing very rapidly these days: we’ll have highly sophisticated machines in the coming years.

The robots would be low maintenance financially too. Add these figures up. In 1997, NASA sent the first robotic rover to Mars – Sojourner – for a quarter of a billion dollars. That might sound high until you consider the price of human space travel. A single space shuttle flight was four times that – one billion dollars. And that’s just one mission – 137 were flown. For that total cost, many, many robotic craft could have been dispersed throughout the solar system to explore. And Sojourner went on a 50 million kilometre journey – and to another planet; the space shuttles merely travelled 600 kilometres above our heads.

Even if you don’t see going to the moon as little more than a boys’ own adventure, but with girls allowed this time, it’s hard to see how the economics work. If we’re going back to the moon to mine it for, say, rare helium-3 to use in our future fusion reactors, or to build a giant telescope on the dark side as some astronomers want to do, both tasks could be done by the robots we’ll have available in the coming years.

Now, there is no doubt that human space travel is awe-inspiring. I wagged primary school for the day to watch Neil Armstrong’s famous steps. And those images a few years ago of astronauts floating in space repairing the Hubble space telescope were breathtaking – proof that humanity had truly entered the space age. But while certainly inspirational, what about the cost? When you crunch the numbers, we could have had a few new Hubble telescopes for the price of those repairs.

Make no mistake, there is a big space future ahead, but I’m guessing astronauts will be joining the string of professions that will lose their jobs to the robots.

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