NASA wants to spend $35 billion returning to the Moon. Is it worth it?

One year ago, NASA embarked upon a journey to send humans back to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo Program. At the direction of the White House, NASA seeks to land astronauts at the South Pole of the Moon by 2024. Only recently, in February, did the space agency put a price on this Artemis Moon plan—$35 billion over the next five years above its existing budget.

Since then, of course, the world has turned upside down. In the weeks after NASA released this cost estimate, the threat posed by COVID-19 has swamped space budget debates or policy concerns. Moreover, most of the space agency's major hardware development programs for the Moon landing are temporarily shuttered. And truth be told, no one knows what kind of economy or federal budget will emerge on the other side of this pandemic.

So during this pause in government spaceflight activity perhaps it is worth asking, is the Moon worth it? Certainly for much of the human spaceflight community, the Moon is the next logical step. It offers a nearby place to test our ability to fly humans beyond low-Earth orbit and the next frontier for human economic activity in space.

On the other hand, $35 billion over five years is a lot of money. Instead of accelerating a human landing on the Moon by a few years—and there is no guarantee that Artemis will succeed—NASA could accomplish other interesting and useful things.

To help find out just what we might do in space instead, I reached out to followers on Twitter and received hundreds of suggestions. From this, I broke these myriad proposals into 10 different "big ideas" that represent alternative approaches to exploration from NASA's mostly traditional Artemis Program. Under each category, for additional context, I've included links to individual suggestions that fall broadly into that area for additional context.

Find asteroids, then deflect or mine them

In survey after survey, protecting planet Earth from killer asteroids consistently ranks highest among public priorities for NASA. However, in recent years NASA has spent less than 1 percent of its budget tracking and characterizing hazardous objects in space, or about $150 million a year.

Recently, the space agency proposed building a $600 million space-based NEO-Surveillance Mission to detect 65 percent of the undiscovered asteroids 140 meters or larger near Earth within five years, and 90 percent of them within 10 years. With more funding, NASA could build a second space-based telescope and supplement it with ground-based observatories.

At the same time, the space agency could also do more missions like its Double Asteroid Redirection Test to study the deflection of potentially threatening asteroids.

Finding and deflecting hazardous asteroids for the next century would cost substantially less than $35 billion. With the extra money, NASA could fund more missions to see about extracting rare metals and other precious commodities from them, which it is already doing in a limited fashion with the OSIRIS-REx, Psyche, and Lucy planetary science missions. The rare metals on asteroids are valued in the trillions of dollars.

By better characterizing asteroids and conducting missions to test working on them, NASA could lay the groundwork for commercial development of asteroids and for building off-world mining industries. In doing so, the space agency could save Earth from strip mining and other activities harmful to the environment—in addition to averting a globally catastrophic impact.

(suggested by Gabriel Arisi, Bryan Veersteg, What About It?!, Kurt, Kevin DuPriest, Maurice Brown, jules)

Explore the Solar System

In recent decades, NASA has arguably gotten the biggest bang for its buck from a succession of planetary missions that have explored all of the planets in the Solar System and many of their Moons. Thanks to the Voyagers, Galileo, Cassini, New Horizons, half a dozen landers on Mars, and a fleet of other spacecraft, we have learned so much about the worlds around us.

Perhaps, then, NASA should double-down on these efforts to answer fundamental questions, such as whether life exists elsewhere in our Solar System today or whether it ever did in the past. With $35 billion, NASA could launch flagship missions to the planets Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and Venus, as well as intriguing moons in the outer Solar System, such as Triton, Titan, Enceladus, Europa, and more.

Alternatively, planetary scientist Doug Ellison suggested NASA could fund the dozens of Discovery- and New Frontiers-class missions that made it past the first round of competition but were ultimately not funded for flight due to limited resources. Even doing this, NASA would still have about $20 billion left over.

The bottom line is that instead of sending a few humans to the surface of the Moon, NASA could provide a comprehensive picture of our Solar System through the use of robotic explorers over the next two decades.

(submitted by Amanda Tess, Doug Ellison, Mario Billiani, Matthieu Prigent, Tiktaalik, Enrique, David Koelle, Mapperwocky, Alex Pertuz, John Christoph, Samuel Benjamin)

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