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Artemis

Taking an Anti-Moon 2024 Position While Pretending Not To

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
May 30, 2019
Filed under ,
Taking an Anti-Moon 2024 Position While Pretending Not To

Moon 2024?, American Astronomical Society
“We have decided against taking an official position on NASA’s Artemis proposal at this time. It is still very early, and we do not think that the benefits of public opposition to an ill-defined and untested proposal outweigh the use of political capital, at least not yet. We are clearly opposed to the Pell Grant offset on principle, and we have serious concerns about the proposed transfer authority and the as-yet undefined scientific content of the proposed crewed Artemis lunar program.”
Keith’s note: Is is abundantly clear what the AAS thinks even if it is not official. So its sort of silly to say that no official position has been taken since an official blog post makes it clear what the current thinking is. Just sayin’ Oh yes: NASA noticed.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

10 responses to “Taking an Anti-Moon 2024 Position While Pretending Not To”

  1. TheBrett says:
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    Pretty much, and for understandable reasons. That transfer authority is dangerous – I could easily see them stripping funding from Earth Science and Planetary Science projects so they don’t have to ask Congress for as much of an increase in budget.

  2. William T Lloyd says:
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    “It is abundantly clear what the AAS thinks”
    What tipped you off?
    This: “an ill-defined and untested proposal”
    Or this: “the as-yet undefined scientific content” ?

  3. fcrary says:
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    This is what I’ve come to expect when a committee writes something. It’s pretty clear to me someone involved hated the whole idea and thought the AAS should say so. Someone else thought the AAS would be better off staying out of the whole thing. So you get a mixed message saying they’re staying out of the whole thing, which is, by the way, a bad idea.

  4. MAGA_Ken says:
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    It’s hard to believe that a group that calls itself an “Astronomical” society cannot think of any scientific information that can be gathered from humans landing on the Moon.

    Perhaps if they put their heads together they can offer some suggestions to NASA.

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      Don’t you know that the one true way to observe the universe is with your feet planted on terra firma?

      • cb450sc says:
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        When you consider the distances to the nearest stars (or god help you, galaxies), the Earth and Moon are in exactly the same location!

        • Jeff2Space says:
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          True. Space based telescopes can be placed above those nasty LEO satellites that the astronomers are currently complaining about. That would also get them away from cities, aircraft, and lots of other terrestrial sources of light pollution.

    • cb450sc says:
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      Because very little of modern astronomy has anything to do with the moon or planets – that spun off into it’s own discipline of “planetary science” many decades ago. The moon offers very little in terms of astrophysical astronomy – in particular it’s a terrible place to locate telescopes. In fact, all of astronomy spends a huge amount of effort studying this issue which gets packed into the decadal survey reports (which are separate for astronomy and planetary). Those ultimately wind up being the guidelines that dictate how the spending priorities are allocated.

    • fcrary says:
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      They didn’t say there was no scientific information that could be gathered. The said the scientific content of this particular idea (landing two people by 2024 and doing who knows what during a who knows how long surface stay) was “as-yet undefined.” The goal and the actual mission could ends up simply being planting a flag and leaving footprints in the dust. In that case, astronomers could easily and honestly feel that robotic landers would be a better idea for science.

  5. Tom Billings says:
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    The AAS is an academic society, interested in fulfilling their *current* lines of research. With the 47 years gap since the Moon Landings ended, few of them are interested in the Moon, or any science to be done on the Moon. They certainly see no reason to endorse a human mission when any human missions, whether this is spoken or not, are about settlement far before they are about science, much less about employing academics on Earth for that lunar science.

    That the Pell Grant proposal also mangles a standard academic funding source, even if it is not used, makes academics certain that they are being pushed down the political totem pole as well. The fact that any substantive settlement of the Moon will result in vastly more lunar science data, at far higher rates, and over decades, at far lower costs per bit, is of little use to them, when there is no indication that academics, here on Earth, will get their usual 1/3rd cut of the budget that they get in robotic missions as well.

    The AAS is a part of Old Space, that benefited from funding for new telescopes *here* after Apollo revved up interest in general astronomy. They won’t be any more interested in this than Boeing will be in moving SLS funds to buy tickets on Starship/Super Heavy.