NASA astronauts begin journey home having collected eagerly awaited images of impact craters and ridges
Nasa’s Artemis II astronauts have described the powerful emotion they felt while soaring over the moon as they photographed impact craters, cracks and ridges and began their long journey home.
Among the eagerly awaited images captured by the crew, who worked in pairs at the Orion capsule windows, are those of the Earth rising from behind the moon, a solar eclipse and parts of the 590-mile (950km) wide Orientale impact basin that have never been observed with the naked eye.
Further images are expected to shed light on the brown, green and orange hues the astronauts reported on the greyish landscape, and possibly faint layers of moondust that may have been visible during the Earthrise.
I mean they literally did the same thing and more in the 1960s… We barely even had computers then! This isn’t that impressive.
I feel like we have more important things to do back on earth than spending trillions on a space empire on the moon that will exclusively benefit billionaires… But that’s what you get when you have a world run buy billionaires.
I would argue that what has been accomplished with the Artemis missions so far has been a parallel evolution to Apollo, and not any kind of competition.
Of course technology has advanced since the late 1960s and 1970s. But the challenges of traveling safely to the moon and back again as humans are still just as treacherous. Doing something that has never been done before in the history of humanity is incredibly impressive. Doing it repeatedly, decades apart, with vastly different people and technology proves that we can continue to accomplish this task and perhaps beyond. That is equally impressive in my book.
The innovations created by the needs of space travel have regularly and constantly improved our everyday lives. There are absolutely more important things to focus on at home, but for some reason we tend to focus on the destructive actions, rather than the constructive alternatives. Space travel by public agencies like NASA have historically been a unifying force that have consistently driven positive technologies to the human species, and not just the privileged few.