As I write this, four astronauts are on their way around the moon for the first time in 50 years. A lot us have asked ourselves just exactly why you’d send people out that far when the environment is so hostile and we have increasingly competent robots that could do the jobs in their place. If anything, that’s even more true now than it was back in the day of the Apollo program, when the remote operations capability was a lot more constrained. But having people, potentially in the near future, on the lunar surface remains qualitatively different.
I was recently re-watching some of the footage from Apollo 16 when the astronauts were driving around in the Lunar Roving Vehicle, and the discussions that they’re having about the lunar geology that they can see for the first…
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Source hackaday.com
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