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     It has often occurred to me that it’s strange that various countries want to put a man on the moon again. It seems as if it is a strange set of priorities. While I have followed the moon race for 50 years, I have never really seen the point. In today’s world it seems even more strange to want to spend billions of dollars to put a man on the moon when there’s so many other things that are obviously to me more important. Let’s delay putting men on the moon until we solve a few other issues. Would it not seem appropriate to solve homelessness first? It might be nice to cure cancer first. How about having roads fixed? How about getting clean water in every community across Canada.   Our federal government has been promising clean water for all communities, and especially for First Nations communities for decades but it still hasn’t been completed. Again, I see no point at all in putting a man on the moon. Like, what are you going to do when you get there? Everything has to be hauled there from earth.                   There is no food. There is no land to develop without an international space station style of accommodation. There may be some minerals but the last time I checked, we have lots of minerals. There’s no way you can live on the moon and the question remains why would you want to? An internet check tells us “The Apollo 11 Moon landing in July 1969 was a huge feat of human endeavour, engineering and science. It was a moment that the world had been waiting for. Apollo 11 was followed by six further trips to the Moon, five of which landed successfully. Twelve men walked on the lunar surface in total. But in 1970, future Apollo missions were cancelled. Apollo 17became the last crewed mission to the Moon for an indefinite amount of time. The main reason for this was money. The cost of getting to the Moon was, ironically, astronomical. “Yes, the cost is astronomical and how about the people who are very worried about the climate and global warming and using fossil fuels that theoretically heat up the atmosphere. I’d be interested to know just how many tons of fuel it takes to get a rocket to the moon and back again. I guess I’m just a stupid farm boy but I see no point in investing all this time and money and moon travel or moon living when we have bigger problems to solve than travelling to the moon. I checked on the Internet as what the cost would be to send a mission to the moon here’s what I found out: Most of all, there was development work, with each mission after the first costing only about $5-10 billion each. Right now, the major cost of sending humans to the Moon would also be development work. A human-rated lunar lander would take NASA about $10 billion to develop. Quite frankly I don’t care how cheap it becomes to send people to the moon. I don’t think it’s worth it at any price regardless of how low that price might become. Not when we have so many problems in every town every city across North America and around the world. I see no net return that is significant with moon travel. I think the moon is best serving us as in storybook purposes. The moon is lovely to look upon. Apparently, the moon controls the tides. It’s been said that the moon is a wonderful thing for young lovers to sit under as they dream about their wonderful future. The problem for young lovers today is that the future isn’t as bright as it was even 25 or 30 years today. Young people are faced with huge health care problems with drug addictions either directly or indirectly affecting them. Crime either directly or indirectly affects them and the cost of living is directly affecting everybody. If as a society, if as a government we spent the time, effort and money that goes into space travel, space stations and moon shots on things of real value and serious concern, I think our society would be much much better off. Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are the writer’s personal views and are not to be taken as being the view of the Banner & Press staff.