First mission to bring back samples from the moon since 1976 started successfully

[Mnementh]

Ka-pi96 said:

Where's the positive news?

Billions of dollars wasted to get a piece of rock while millions of people around the world live in abject poverty? Even if there were any decent scientific progress made from this I'd have to question whether it was worth it. But I doubt there will be. Going to the moon is just for "bragging rights" and to me spending billions of dollars of tax payer money for "bragging rights" is a reprehensible thing to do.

Scientifically speaking most project certainly are bringing more than just bragging rights, although a lot of the science progress is not directly relevant for everyday life.

The engineering involved in this is certainly a different number. While we don't directly benefit from rocket technology, for space travel a lot of small technological developments have to be made, many of which flow back as experience into earthly tech.

And you can argue, that satellite technology already strongly impacts our lifes. The one person they have as guest for commenting said in the livecast, if we shut down space infrastructure for just one day, a lot of stuff would stop working, from communication over navigation to weather forecast and soil analysis. Now, a moon mission isn't bringing any satellites in earth orbit, that is true. But looking back, as the first satellites were shot into space, nobody thought about communication, navigation or earth observation satellites, yet they were a product of this. If we look into the future, we might be able to use moon resources like Helium-3 for energy production.

About the costs - I can't find anything for the budget of this mission, but I find that CNSA (Chinese National Space Administration) has an annual budget of 11 billion US$. That is certainly a lot, but dwarfed by military expenses which are 177 billion $ each year. For comparison, the NASA has a yearly budget of 22.6 billion $ and the USAF has one of 738 billion US$. So, if each country halves it's military, it would free resources that are way bigger than anything we pay for space travel. So I think Defund the Army is way more useful than Defund the Police.