Favorable no, possible yes. Oil companies work at profit margin that most would consider to be ridiculous yet they still pull in billions every year. If it can be confirmed that there is profit to be had then there will be people willing to do the job.Briganna

Taking and running with the oil analogy here, to set up the same level of equipment on the moon would be akin to trying to get the first oil derricks set up on the ocean floor (like many are today) only using the technology of the time. I have no doubt one day He-3 mining on any number of interstellar bodies will be as commonplace as Chevron's today, but the technology gap is still very large. Though now it seems we're just talking in circles, so go team redundancy team.

Automated facilities are nice, but if earth history so far is any indication boom towns or at least settlements will spring up around any natural resource. This infrastructure, even if it is decades since abandoned, would be pivotal in any future space exploration and could actually encourage it given that the groundwork has been laid out.Briganna

A key difference between boom towns in say California circa 1849 and the moon would be a little thing called atmosphere and about 233,000 miles. Now, that's not to say some private company could perhaps gather the funds to set up He-3 mining on the moon on their own, but the staggering level of funding and equipment required to do such a thing leaves me skeptical at best.

NASA's current orbiters are 30 years old and absolutely need to be retired. Having to rely on Russians or the EU to get our astronauts into space is meeting resistance I'm guessing based purely on American pride and if that's the case I don't care in the slightest. However I haven't read a study yet comparing what such a partnership would cost us vs developing a new generation of shuttles. This would go doubly true for any private sector equivalent since it would be highly subsidized by the government anyway.Briganna

Mostly yes, American pride and politicians needing something to blame Obama for…again. Cue massive truckloads of salt. That said, new shuttles have been in "development" both government and private sponsored for years. Not many of them get past drawing board stage mostly due to capital limitations and the fact that getting something to space and back is fucking hard if you care what it looks like when it gets back (i.e. not on fire). There are lots of ideas floating around but gravity is pretty much a dick when it comes to bending the rules and the amount of energy required to get something of x kg off the planet never changes.

People will throw around Moore's law (which isn't actually a law) saying that robots will eventually be able to do anything humans can do, but it's simply not true.Briganna

At least not for a very very long time and I won't be around to worry about appeasing our new Synthetic Overlords.

*lots of stuff about human ingenuity all of which true but this post is getting TL;DR already.*Briganna

A common occurrence in technology advancement is human pioneering followed rapidly by robotic replacement and efficiency improvement. We've been to the moon, several times in fact. We're already aware of most of the challenges and have risen to meet them. Now is the time for those "situational better" to take over, i.e. specifically programmed bots. The latest of the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity were launched in 2003. 7 years later, Spirit is stuck in some soft soil but still functioning as stationary research platform and Opportunity is still functional. Their predicted operational window was 90 martian days. Opportunity has exceeded that by a factor of 25.


As I said previously we're basically talking in circles now, you pointing out human ingenuity has figured out a way around every problem so far and me pointing out already figured out how to do it we just don't have the toolset yet. NASA's funding is being increased for exactly that reason, research into a "toolset" that will take us a step further in space exploration. If we can get enough people to get over the romance of having actual people in space for the photo ops for a while.