General Discussion

I haven't heard any legitimate commercial cases that can't be better accomplished here on Earth.

Science has made amazing progress the past 20 years in space exploration. Manned missions are basically a political glory trip and accomplish next to nothing. The huge advances have come through unmanned probes and much improved instrumentation like the Webb telescope.

I'm certainly not the best spokesperson for this progress, but here are a few tidbits from the last decade or two:

* Several of Einstein's more radical propositions, derived from mathematics, have been confirmed through direct observation
* We have undoubtedly increased our knowledge of the planets in our solar system 100-fold in the past 20 years
* We are now tracking tens of thousands (maybe even millions) of objects that might pose a grave threat to Earth
* We have been able to detect "red shift" in basically every galaxy we have looked at (thousands of them (maybe millions of them) and that has convinced the vast majority of astrophysicists that the universe is expanding, and we see nothing that might ever cause that to reverse, which raises deep questions about what came before the "big bang" and what does it mean for the universe to expand forever.
* Many, many other really big discoveries, most of which are beyond my comprehension

Regarding the moon, one of the barriers now is all the electronic pollution caused by Musk (and others) putting thousands of satellites into orbit. He just did it. No permission asked or granted. Certain instruments still work very well from the surface of the Earth, but many have reached their limits. The moon is locked into a rotation that is identical to its revolution around the earth. IOW, from our vantage point, we always see exactly the same half of the moon and never see the other half (except when we send missions that orbit the moon). What that means is that we could put instruments on the other side of the moon and they would be nearly completely shielded from the interference coming from Earth. In addition, the moon has no atmosphere that would interfere with visual measurements. This could allow us to "see" all the way to the edge of the expanding (visible) universe, but of course the signals we receive would be billions of Earth-years old.

There is great interest in this use of the moon.