Option #4 - This reads like Mr. Munroe is setting things up for another entertaining article/video/book topic.
The energies required to move the moon closer to the Earth would be staggering. Then there’s the gravitational impact to consider, and how fast it would need to be moving to keep a stable low-earth orbit; assuming that’s what we’re aiming for as a rendezvous. My guess is that, combined, this is close and fast enough to create mile-high tsunamis every day (maybe even all day), all over the planet. Meanwhile, our astronauts would be on the lunar surface watching the destruction from safety.
If you pull the Moon closer to the Earth, gravity will begin to disintegrate it and shred it into kwazillion asteroids that eventually become meteors which will bombard the Earth back to the lava age. Once that is done, the moon doesn’t exist and there’s no need to go to the moon ever again. Problem solved.
Because the main goal was to beat the Russians to the moon. They also came up with a plan to fly astronauts to the moon then later devise a way to get them back.
But I think Artemis 3 is slated to be the first human mission to the moon that actually lands, and that will be pre gateway station so presumably they don’t actually need the space station presumably they can just dock directly to the lander which makes you wonder why they’re even building the station.
The plan has come under a fair amount of criticism for being overly complicated while at the same time not really having any extra operational capacitys over Apollo. Mostly this seems to be a cluge for the fact that starship (the lander is basically just starship with mods) isn’t human rated and obviously NASA has no information on the timeline as to when that will happen, assuming it happens at all. Combined with the fact that Congress insisted that NASA reuse the shuttle engines presumably because they mistakenly assumed that would save money or something. So now they need to build a launcher.
Oh, and they only have enough shuttle engines for three or four SLS rockets anyway so the whole thing isn’t even particularly long lived.
it only depicts the means to reach the Moon, more suitable for robotic missions that are not required to return,^[racist comment implying that robots have no right to be repatriated]^
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