By all rights, this should be something I am deeply passionate about. I’ve been in tech/engineering my entire adult life and was obsessed with NASA as a kid. I even live on the east coast of Florida and can sometimes see the launches/landings over the ocean. But I just… don’t care at all. I’m not suffering from depression or any other malaise, and generally things are fine. But I haven’t clicked on a single link or looked at a single image. I know this has not been the case for many, many people, so I’m wondering what might be different about this launch (or really the whole program in general), and curious if anyone else has found themselves feeling the same.
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Whitey On The Moon by Gil Scott-Heron comes to mind. Planet is burning and they’re sending money to space.
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon
Her face and arms began to swell
And whitey’s on the moon
I can’t pay no doctor bills
But whitey’s on the moon
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still
While whitey’s on the moon
The man just upped my rent last night
Cause whitey’s on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But whitey’s on the moon
I wonder why he’s upping me?
Cause whitey’s on the moon?
Well I was already giving him fifty a week
With whitey on the moon
Taxes taking my whole damn check
Junkies making me a nervous wreck
The price of food is going up
And as if all that crap wasn’t enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon
Her face and arm began to swell
And whitey’s on the moon
Was all that money I made last year
For whitey on the moon?
How come I ain’t got no money here?
Hmm! Whitey’s on the moon
Y’know I just 'bout had my fill
Of whitey on the moon
I think I’ll send these doctor bills
Airmail special
To whitey on the moonThey aren’t doing anything new, we have already been around the moon.
We can’t even wipe our own asses without jihading or reinstating a cool new kind of slavery with extra steps. What are we going to do with a new frontier?
I’m betting a corporate slavery jihad of environmental degradation.
I mean, that tracks historically
The Expanse sheds one I believe to be a plausible picture of our future, although it seems optimistic on some fronts.
I disagree.
Its slightly firmer science than star trek, but it still makes a lot of license IMO.
I dont think the cost of sending humans to Mars or to do asteroid mining will ever be justified. Bots, and not humanoid ones will explore the frontier of space, and collect the minerals we need.
If you think about all the stuff humans need to survive for any length of time it just doesn’t make any sense to send a human.
This is why the moon is critical. Going to mars or wherever will be insanely expensive compared to the little moon trip. To make it at all affordable, you don’t just need one of the new reusable launch vehicles but you need to use local resources as much as possible. Let’s prove our ice mining and habitat construction
Consider spending tens of billions of dollars just sending water to mars, and hope you don’t screw up the schedule when an “emergency” resupply is nine months. Same for air. And food. So much more for fuel. No one is going to spend that. But if you can use local resources for fuel, water, air, radiation shielding, and grow at least some of your own food, you’re more resilient and much much cheaper.
The mining isn’t likely to be useful for sending anything back to earth - way too expensive. Space mining is all about making space affordable, and we’re talking about really fundamental things to mine.
I agree that moon stuff is a critical first step to doing anything in space, but my point is that I don’t think sending humans will ever be the best way to do anything.
Bots are just so cheap and effective and disposable by comparison.
How many decades more research and development before we can safely establish a permanent base on mars, and in that time how much more effective and reliable and deployable will bots become?
Eventually the calculation will be: we can afford to do a manned return trip to Mars, or we can afford to solve cold fusion by doing whatever thing with a bot, or something similarly amazing.
I love space and discovery. I also dont super care about this because what is even the point of it? We did a fly around of a rock in our backyard we know super well already. Give me more JWST, not this
Yep, I am definitely more excited by space science news. I’d say I’m just more mature now and interested in more grounded “pure” science, but it wasn’t too long ago that I was giggling like an idiot as we watched the 2 falcon heavy boosters landing back on their dual pads at KSC, so I don’t think it’s entirely just a loss of child-like wonder (though it’s wearing thin these days, gotta admit).
Yeah, but the point is to test the technology which will eventually get people back onto the moon, set up permanent off-Earth habitation, etc. Which in turn will/could be part of future steps for further-reaching exploration. I still think it has value as a building block.
But we already had the technology to get to the moon, take pictures, and get off it. Nothing against the crew, im glad they got this once in a life experience, but theres nothing new to this.
We had it, yes, but we lost it - I believe that many of the technical plans from Apollo have been lost over the years, so some of this is pretty much reinventing the wheel to get us back to where we were before.
Not so much lost but, its an entirely new tech stack. So any solutions we might have had in the past are no longer appropriate solutions.
What part of reinventing the wheel is slashing NASA’s budget to shreds? This is just the last public test flight before space is walled off as a playground for the rich. They’ll get their tourist flights and luxury colonies and nice vacations from the boiling toxic hell they turned earth into.
If you think any resources are going to trickle down to us earth peasants, I’ve got a moon base to sell you.
Thats a weird take.
Literally everything that just went to the moon and back is “new”.
Yes, we have been to the moon before but that doesn’t mean that all the cool stuff we just did is not an amazing achievement.
what is even the point of it?
No one’s been on this spacecraft design while it’s in space before, and it’s got some kinks that need to be worked out (like the issues with the toilet); it’s a shakedown flight to figure out what goes wrong when people are actually on board. That’s not really all that sexy compared to a moon landing, but testing your support systems in practice really needs to happen before you do more ambitious things with the craft.
Yeah I’ve been thinking maybe this is it – it’s still technically impressive and I have nothing but admiration for the teams who have pored their sweat and tears into making sure it’s safe and reliable, but it’s kind of a ‘so what?’ moment.
Telescopes and geology have always been the cool part of space, not that humans are in it.
If they landed and did stuff that was more complex than we can send robots to do it would have been pretty awesome!
This flyby is a necessary precursor to landing and doing those cool things.
They need to take tiny incremental steps because the cost of a fuckup is so great.
If the public has to watch someone expire in space due to a malfunction the existing candle flame of support for these endeavours would be snuffed out.
With only two seconds of ping they can work from Earth with robots. Sending people is just a dick contest.
I’m finding it hard to be happy about any of the positives coming from the US government these days. A couple of bright spots don’t really outshine the depressing everything else.
It also wasnt even really a bright spot because it was being actively used as a propaganda story for Trump.
The “positives” don’t usually translate to any sort of benefit for the average person. Yes, I am aware that there are exceptions to this.
Spaceflight creates jobs.
Jobs that keep supporting and propping up the system we live in.
oddly enough i had a discussion with somebody just today that AI is bad because it reduces jobs. now you’re telling me that spaceflight is bad because it creates jobs?
It’s almost as if you’re speaking with different people with different views.
I for example would have told you that AI reducing jobs is amazing and ideally all jobs should be automated, so that everyone can choose to do exactly what they like at all times.
For me it’s the pace. I know it’s not that simple, but we’ve been to the moon already. The first unmanned Artemis mission was almost 4 years ago, and now this one, and the next one - which will include landing on the moon…again…won’t be for another 2 years at least. We won’t even begin to build a base until the 2030s.
Even the moon base is just a “stepping stone” to Mars, and we already know that long-term colonization on Mars is unrealistic, given current tech. We don’t yet know how to even survive on Mars (or the moon, for that matter) for more than a few days.
And even if we solve these problems…then what? We also know that even if we figure out how to keep a few people alive for just a few years on Mars, there’s just no reason to try to keep a large number of people on Mars. It’s just too damn hostile.
I don’t know. I agree that this doesn’t have the same romantic feeling of awe and discovery and exploration that I feel like I’m “supposed to” have.
Same. Part of it for me, I think, is that is an enormous expenditure that goes mostly to Elmo. The Apollo missions were more in-house, with lots of cool innovations, and it feels like the privatization of a great and inspiring heritage.
Nothing on that flight was from SpaceX
Future ones will be, future money will be largely SpaceX, because if they get starship to work it promises to be much much cheaper than anything else
I remember when I was in China, didn’t even have internet.
My parents bought me a children’s book about planets and stuff… I still remember it called 十万个为什么 (Literally: 100 Thousand Whys)
I was so intrigued.
I remember I had not much things to read and I kept reading that over and over again. I remember still having it when I was in 2nd grade in the US… like that’s my last “artifact” of my pre-US life…
I remember just putting it in my bookbag and bringing it to school cuz… idk why… maybe I just felt nostalgic about it and thought it’d be cool to bring a book nobody else in the school would be able to read… sort of like a special ancient text made for me xD
Sadly the binding on that book is garbage and it fell apart and I no longer have that book…
(I don’t remember NASA being mentioned btw)
Later I remember constantly googling space stuff once we had internet access at home…
I think its:
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Childhood… like space is a big concept… so it feels like this “big thing” and I get obsessed about it… like many kids probably do. You go from being in a tiny apartment at home to suddenly knowing about very big empty space… Mind Blowing…
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Humanity already been on the moon… meh… not that exciting… especially not after a few decades and interests fade… like omg someone sailed across the ocean… boo boring… already done…
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this song describes perfectly why I couldn’t give a fuck about space colonization anymore.
after covid, Ukraine, Palestine, Iran, Sudan, etc. and the sheer number of genocides the governments around the globe managed to squeeze in in just a short 6 year period, I stopped caring about the progress and democracy fetish they’re trying to force feed us.
if we wanna make the world a better place, we gotta stop relying on them. i know now they’re gonna use those space launches to perfect their genocidal weapons, that’s why I could enjoy NASA before I knew the military industrial complex
I thought that before i read your post.
I find it pointless. We need to think about real sustainable progress in space but you just have to look at the earth to see how we are about sustainability. I firmly believe we have to work on sourcing space resources from space and that is what we should be most workin on. I mean if you look at it reusable rockets are the most impactful thing to happen to our space endeavours in this millenium and it was due to doing one thing. Being more sustainable.
for me its not only the glacier pace of progress… its also the lack of scientific motivation.
this didnt happen for science… its a political tool
fair… i grew up with the shuttle… we were constantly reminded about the science
even that sucked due to the politics… as i would later find out the shuttle was stupidly inefficient but profitable for some
And don’t forget that a big part of the shuttle sucking was caused by the military who forced nasa to make major design changes so that the shuttle could fulfill military tasks. Tasks which the shuttle never even wound up being used for because the military simply created their own separate rockets to do those tasks.
The Apollo program was also a political tool, but it was astounding (not that I know first-hand, just hearing what my folks have said, and even they were fairly young at the time). Artemis doesn’t have the same caché, I guess.
There are scientific targets and experiments being run
https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/artemis-ii-science/
100% there is a big political component to the effort, but there are also data that we can’t get without getting farther from Earth
I feel the same apathetic “whatever” response. I love rockets. I love space. I struggle to care about this.
The program is almost 2 decades late and using recycled technology. It is literally using spare parts from the shuttle. I don’t believe it will ever actually get to the boots on the ground phase. I am actually surprised they made it to this mission. After all the boondoggle from Boeing I really thought it would die a quiet death somewhere out of sight.
Not only do they have technical hurdles, we have seen normally safe agencies become political battle grounds. We see science becoming less and less important at every level of society. We are living through Idiocracy and they still act like we are the same country that went to the moon the last time.
If we see people on the moon in our lifetime I don’t believe they will arrive on a NASA mission.
It’s eclipsed (no pun intended) by the horrors of war, disease, and conservatism. It’s hard to be excited about the moon when there’s measles outbreaks and at least one genocide.
Do you feel science and tech is becoming tainted? Its no longer exciting. Its becoming a bane of existence. I don’t think its a direct link, but its a tenuous link.
A step forward for ma…whilst back here they are killing many many man. It leaves a sour taste.
It doesn’t help that a lot of people in power seem to take issue with objective realities.
It boils down to this: Going to the moon in the 60’s was political, though a massive technical feat.
Since then we’ve figured out how to send robots to fucking Mars to do the science we want to do, for a fraction of the cost (and none of the risk) of sending humans.
Artemis just isn’t where we should be spending money, never mind the political bullshit surrounding it, and the typical government vendors getting their hands in the cookie jar like they did for Apollo (looking at you, Boeing).
And I say all this as someone fascinated by Apollo, and as excited as anyone else by the prospect of humans on the moon. I just no longer see the cost/benefit of humans vs automation there.
We have remote rovers in the sea and on Mars. For the moon surely we could send all sorts of devices to do science there. It’s faster to reach, we have near real-time comms, it has a greater solar exposure so power is less of a problem. So where are those rovers?
We don’t have them because they would expose the pointlessness of sending humans.
Artemis just isn’t where we should be spending money
The warcry of a capitalist. It’s the justification for ending park services, museums, or anything that isn’t specifically generating a porfit.
Eh, yes you’re right but seriously what are we gaining from this mission? As far as I’ve heard there’s nothing really new that were gaining from it, just… Because?
To the ops point, there are a multitude of more beneficial projects that money could have gone toward instead in the same realm.
Well, I guess that depends on what you define as an achievement.
In terms of skills and expertise there’s only a handful living people with lunar experience and all of them are 60+ years old. It’s important to pass these skills down from person to person as training manuals and videos aren’t the same as an actual person passing on this wisdom. This one shouldn’t really need any explanation.
For dick-measuring newspaper headlines, we did just send some humans farther into space than we ever have before. That’s a tangible thing that’s measurable; anyone can understand it.
For raw, practical science, somone who’s a bigger nerd than me will have to tag in for that. What I do know and understand is we’re launching more advanced technology with a ship that’s both smaller in size with more interior space. We’ve got measurements of the astronauts in deep space and data on the far side of the moon. Regular people arguing over the importance of this data isn’t going to produce anything conclusive.
Most importantly we tested all new everything and it worked!
What are you blathering about?
You are too focused on the dollar amount.
