NASA has an “Artemis mission” planned. The goal is to establish a permanent moon base. But I don’t see what we can do there that we can’t do with robots. We’d have to provide space for people to live, and food, and water, and all that stuff. Not even mentioning 1/6 gravity isn’t exactly healthy.
I’d rather we just send robots to the moon and do what we need to do there until we can easily build huge habitats for people.
There’s several financial incentives. There’s the advertising value , helium 3, (a rare isotope on earth, which can cost more than $15,000 per gram, used in a ton for physics experiments, airport security systems also need large amounts of it and the supply on earth is limited. Given the vastly larger concentrations of helium 3 on the moon, it eventually will make sense to mine for it.
And there’s tons of other stuff there too, like look at the 4% titanium dioxide percentage in the maria there
if nothing else its just generally cool to go to the moon
Robots cant do everything, and even if robots are going to do the majority of the work there, it makes sense for people to be involved. Like what if one of the robots breaks down.