Originally Posted by cmac2012

Tang! Oh dear God, imagine life w/o Tang!

Putting satellites into orbit is the only benefit I can see. That and robotic missions. Sending people back to the moon and oneday Mars strikes me as a huge waste of money.

Re the fever to go back to the moon, the moon is about the most unpleasant place that we know of for humans and human machines. Coated with abrasive dust from hell, I understand the damned stuff hangs in the air from static electricity. Is bad for rubber seals, it adheres to boots and every other part of space suits, will be brought back in the habitable spaces and find it's way into lungs. Stuff is microscopic razor blades, having never suffered erosion and degradation from water.

The chances of finding useful/recoverable minerals are about zero and the cost of getting them up and back to earth even if they were there in good quantity is enormous.

If one assumed that we still had the space shuttle program and further that it could land on and then take off from the moon (we don't/it couldn't), further if we assumed gold bricks were neatly stacked on the surface waiting to be loaded into the hold, the value of the gold would be similar to what we used to spend just putting a shuttle into orbit and getting it back again. I did the math once, don't want to do it again.