50
Japan launches moon lander and X-ray observatory
(spacenews.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
50 points (100.0% liked)
Space
7242 readers
1 users here now
News and findings about our cosmos.
Subcommunity of Science
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
What's up with all the moon landings lately? Russia and India were just in the news last week about their attempts at Moon landings.
And don't forget the Japanese Hakuto-R crashing last December. And we'll start finding out soon if the new batch of American CLPS landers will work.
As far as why - I have no idea why there are so many all of the sudden. For some reason the US and China are working on crewed moon landing programs and making a platoon of non-crewed landers to go with them. And for some reason Japan, India, and Israel all want in? And Russia wants to try to be relevant? I don't get why, or why now, but at least it's exciting.
I'm pretty sure this has something to do with using the Moon as a jumping-off point to the rest of the solar system. Assuming we can get a functioning colony on the Moon, it will be significantly easier and cheaper to get to Mars and potentially other planets as well. This might just be something I heard from a friend of a friend though, so don't quote me on it.
It'll definitely help develop technology that'll be useful for outer solar system missions.
It doesn't make sense as a stop between the Earth and Mars. You have to slow down to enter orbit, then speed back up to leave it. That's a waste of fuel unless there's a good reason to stop there, like for fueling or assembly, but it makes more sense to do that in Earth orbit using distributed life.