14 thoughts on “If You Start To Go To The South Pole”

  1. Taking Walt Faulconer’s reasoning to the extreme of what one would suffer from a serious motorcycle accident without a helmet.

    Wouldn’t it be far, far cheaper to just send SLS on a one way trip to the drink on the opposite side of the planet and create a studio set and stage at Warner Bros. and fake a return to the moon, using as props what some would say are leftovers from the 1960s?

    Hmm. I’m wondering where this spring water I’m drinking really came from… It should be safe, I drank it out of my tinfoil hat.

      1. Well returning the crew could be problematical in that case. I’d be pretty sure the astronauts members of SAG-AFTRA didn’t sign up for a one-way trip. Their AI survivors however… It’ll be interesting if new Hollywood contracts require actors to keep their deaths a secret?

  2. What Faulconer wants is to replicate Apollo 12’s visit to the Surveyor 3 site, right?

    If I remember correctly, the whole point of Apollo 12 was to demonstrate not only the ability to land successfully, but do so precisely enough that there could be no doubt about it being on exactly on target, by returning artifacts. Mission accomplished.

    Now all of the 20th Century landing sites, manned and robot, should be left alone. If at some point in the future, if there is a good reason to want or need artifacts from that time, one or two of those sites can be chosen for looting, with a minimal amount of disturbance.

    Maybe even a formal agreement among those planning landings to leave those historic sites alone would be useful. At least to see who doesn’t agree and/or who violates it first, and why.

  3. The compelling reason to go to the Apollo 11 site is to scoop up all the artifacts (including making a cast of the boot prints), return them to Earth, and sell them on eBay or some auction site.

    In fact, by simply taking Neil and Buzz’s boots, which were left on the moon to reduce the weight of the ascent module, we could make thousands of more Apollo boot prints; fresh, crisp ones that would command a premium price, even on the black market.

    And we need a black market in space hardware or we’re never going to have space pirates, and space is boring without pirates.

      1. Yes, but this time with women of color!

        But going back to the original idea, from an engineering perspective there’s nothing much useful to learn from seeing the original sites. Such a mission in 1970 to 1972 would have provided some useful knowledge, but now it’s been over 50 years, so what we’d learn is what a lunar site and lunar equipment look like after being abandoned for half a century. Why would an engineer want to know that, as we aren’t designed any equipment that needs to function on the moon after 50 years of abandonment? It would be like going to the Air Force bone yard to look at Vietnam era fighter planes to see how well they’re holding up in the desert. Other than perhaps satisfying some curiosity, it wouldn’t tell engineers anything particularly useful that needs to be applied to current production.

        1. To quote Tawny Newsome from Space Force:
          It’s good to be b[l]ack on the moon!

          I.e. that’s one small step for [a] woman….

          I gotta admit that normally I’m way ahead of a lot of TV dialog, but that one took me so much by surprise it actually got me to bust out laughing out loud.

  4. Typical NASA think: Spend Billions and Billions of taxpayer dollars, take a few selfies.

  5. Chandrayaan-3 could successfully land at south pole in August.
    And others could be going there before NASA orbits a crew around the Moon.
    So, NASA going down memory lane, could seem like a disappointment in such a context.

  6. Flags and footprints, but this time they can wipe out the evidence of the previous missions. Then they rewrite the textbooks.

    Ten years from now (assuming they ever actually go there), history will say that the first landing on the Moon was by a woman of color.
    This fits in with the “socially constructed reality” that many progressives want to appear to believe in.

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