/sci/ - Science & Math

>>12085794
More than enough. A trillion dollars is a fuckton of money.

>>12085803
is it enough to build a self suffiecient city that can comfortably house 2000 people?

>>12085809
i needs to know

bump

>>12085794
Apollo cost $100 Billion. Starship costs $10 Billion to develop (Pessimistic value Elon have). If Starship costs $100 Million per flight, you could buy 10,000 flights of her.

>>12085794
With a trillion you might as well give people a UBI

>>12085809
>comfortably house 2000 people
yes
>self suffiecient
eh, probably not. Building a closed system that has no need for regular resupply missions from Earth is a waste of time.

>>12085809
all the apollo missions cost $120 billion and that's just 6 trips with 12 people.
$1 trillion is actually peanuts for moon exploration and colonization, you need to prepare several times that if youre looking to build a base or cities on the moon like $40 trillion budget or something. mining will cost several times more, due to the shitloads of stuff you got to pull and accelerate, prob close to $100 trillion

space is never cheap and never will be if rocket propulsion is all we got.

>>12085864
There are a lot of variables you're not even cognizant of.
You are sitting on a shitload of money, you're lucky because this is a day and age where commercial space flight means you don't have to spend the money developing a way to get to space like >>12087914 mentions. You're not reinventing the wheel, you're hiring a freight company.
But, now you are going to hit a wall, because sure we've got a self sufficient city for 2k people, thats a plan. But who is going to build it? There's not a lot of people with experience building structures in low gravity and hard vacuum. Also lunar dust is going to be nasty stuff for any kind of mechanical linkages you have, so you'll need to redesign every piece of heavy equipment that's on the surface. Research and design is expensive as hell, and its an easy place to get strung along down dead end paths by lazy greedy contractors.
Also the problem with "self sufficient habitats" is that we can't even do those on earth. The one large experiment I know of was biosphere 2 out in arizona (?) and it didn't fly so good. So again, more expensive R&D.
So yes. You can build a city on the moon by pouring money into it. And honesty if you had "a trillion dollars" it would make money all on its own, and create industries around building Lunar City One, which would drastically reduce costs and labor for building Tycho-Town, and so on.

>>12087972
It makes a big difference if there is fuel waiting at the other end.

>>12087972
techno-socialist says: liquidate apple and funnel its money, people and tech into rockets

>>12085794
Muh moonbase so i can play LoL on the moon.

>>12085794
That's nothin to the government...if they want it, they got it...

>>12085794
Better to explore floating platforms for food production for that money...

>>12088425
like farms on ships?

>>12085794
1 trillion is a lot of money that would be better suited stopping issue on earth, like Racism, poverty and starvation FYI
>inb4 muh racist reason for space exploration
Human lives are more important than a white supremacists wet dream

>>12088517
(any) food production that doesn't involve land and is sustainable.

>>12085794
>What are the possibilities that a trillion dollars can do to lunar exploration?
Still not enough to get SLS off the pad.

>>12085794
That just sounds like a military budget increase with extra steps

>>12085794
1 trillion isnt that much for mars either

Just enough for Huntsville, Alabama to develop a lander prototype over 20 years.

>>12088652
If we stopped poverty, we will relatively all become poor. You don't know how normalization works, do you?

>>12089838
I would rather everybody be equal, than some be super rich, and most be horribly poor, have a heart you loser

>>12088425
We literally burn ~40% of our corn production every year via ethanol; get more people driving electric cars and you could free up huge amounts of farmland for other purposes. Likewise getting Africa up to even Brazilian level agricultural productivity would massively boost world food production - corn yields per acre are five times higher in Brazil than Africa for example. Either of those would make more sense than farms on boats.

>>12088652
Giving people money does not stop poverty. Productivity is what drives standards of living/the global economy upwards. That's why there were monstrous jumps in both in the agricultural and industrial revolutions. The next big one will be mass automation. A moon mission is more likely to drive tech that will help in that area, though maybe not the best investment. Giving poor people money will certainly do nothing and is a net negative for humanity.

>>12087972
The thing with the Apollo missions is that they had to do a ton of novel R&D, and then they ended tossing away all their expensive hardware during the mission. Plus they were in a race to beat the Soviets, and were not bothering to optimise the design for lower costs.

If you can build a vehicle that you can reuse with minimal refurbishment, and doesn't have a mess of cost+ contractors building each part, then your costs go massively down. Ol'Musky has stated that they have the internal marginal cost of a Falcon 9 flight down to $15 million, and that is with throwing away the top stage. Their goal with Starship is a marginal cost of low millions per flight. If they reach even the higher ends of that, then the cost of putting 100 tons on the moon (which will need multiple tanker flights to top off the lander) drops to only $100 million or so. That makes setting up a moon colony reasonable on a trillion dollar budget. Spend $100 billion to drop off 100,000 tons of stuff, then use the other $900 billion to develop and buy said stuff.

If you need trillions to start space colonization, then conviently there trillions in asteroid mining to be made.
The other factor is that as tech advances the prospect of colonization becomes cheaper and cheaper.

Why would you waste trillions of dollars on that

>>12089962
Friendly reminder, a Falcon heavy in expandable mode can launch an Orion stack to the moon, and potentially do it for 1/10th to 1/20th the price of SLS

>>12085794
>Let's limit ourselves with artificial phenomenon (money)

Humans are truly retarded, they invent rules to punish themselves because reason

>>12089838
What's wrong with people not crying themselves to sleep because they don't know how they're going to pay for food?
What's the point of progress?

>>12085794
>1 trillion dollars for moon ex(..)
>pushuing for more maginary money
America doesnt need moon bases

>>12089962
>>12091408

So why is SpaceX going to use Starship instead of Falcon Heavy for a lunar return? And what's going to happen to Old space once Starship finally starts putting cartoonish payloads on the lunar surface?

>>12085794
Look, I'm gonna ask first: Do you have them?
Because it's kinda pointless to ask when it's like the entire US budget and then some, given Covid.

>>12085794
Look a Trillion dollar is impossible.
What you must ask yourself is why the fuck didn't all army branch colonize the Solar system by now, given their budget?

>>12094976
Falcon Heavy can't do a Lunar return.
A lunar Flyby at most.

>>12089891
Wow, it's someone that actually knows what they're talking about on this board.

>>12095264
Well, there's like only 100 people on all boards, so don't get your hopes up.

>>12087941
Wow, so like give every American 25 dollars a month for 10 years? Woah dude..... Woah, that's like an amazing UBI.

We need that trillion for them programs

>>12095228
If only you knew...

But in reality, there's just no real value in it for them. If there were mining bases to protect, maybe, but their goals are entirely near Earth for now.

>>12095333
Maybe, half-satan, but also maybe SpaceX will just land on Mars, only to discover a USAF base out there.

>>12089856
But if we have trillionaires, there's a chance one day you could be one too! If you made people more equal, you'd have to settle for things that might actually happen.

>>12095342
>Trillionaire
I don't think that's been achieved yet.
But just look at that Bezos pussy.
He's not even able to deliver engines to ULA.

>>12085809
Self sufficiency with current technology will take at least several millions of people.

>>12095329
Kek

>>12085794
life restoring bump