After that, the exciting work will be in Starship making LEO and testing propellant transfer (a humanity first) [1] and Blue Origin testing its rocket and lunar lander [2], both scheduled for 2026, to enable Artemis II (EDIT: III), currently scheduled—optimistically, in my opinion—for next year.
Starship "making LEO" is not a significant challenge--the existing flights have explicitly targeted a (very slightly) suborbital trajectory. They could have done otherwise at any point, but for now it's more important to guarantee that the stage comes down immediately. None of their current objectives require more than ~1/2 of an orbit.
Starship v3 flying will be a significant leap, though. It's the first with the Raptor v3 engines and has many other improvements as well, such as updated grid fins and hot staging ring. It will be the first that achieves close to the intended capacity of ~100 tons.
Propellant transfer is indeed a significant challenge. They have already demonstrated internal transfers between tanks, but not between spacecraft.
> Starship "making LEO" is not a significant challenge
Of course it is. I say this as someone who sturdied astronautics.
You’re broadly correct, though. My point is the action shifts to Hawthorne and West Texas for the next year or so. Then pivots back to NASA for Artemis IV.
It’s not a significant challenge compared to what they’ve already done.
Each of those previous tests could have easily gone to LEO running the engines just a tiny bit longer.
OPs point is that they intentionally didn’t.
achieving LEO means you need a relight to have a controlled reentry. You don’t want that if you want to avoid countries being mad at you while you iron out those controls
> It’s not a significant challenge compared to what they’ve already done
I don't know an aersospace engineer, within SpaceX or without, who would agree. When you increase speeds you increase energies faster. That has an effect on everything from pump performance to re-entry physics.
> Each of those previous tests could have easily gone to LEO running the engines just a tiny bit longer
Which risks recovery. Given they were replacing their Raptors in the next refresh, pushing an already-obsolete engine for shits and giggles doesn't make sense when you can get good data on e.g. skin performance.
> achieving LEO means you need a relight to have a controlled reentry. You don’t want that if you want to avoid countries being mad at you while you iron out those control
There is zero indication diplomatic pressure has been a constraint on the U.S. space programmes in the last couple years.
They didn't have to increase speeds, they already achieved orbital velocity. To circularize all they need to do is relight. Relighting an engine is very difficult for an engine like Raptor, but they've already demonstrated relight.
> They didn't have to increase speeds, they already achieved orbital velocity
My undertstanding is Starship didn't hit 17,000 mph [1]. LEO orbits tend to be 17,500 mph and up.
Like, I'm not arguing that SpaceX couldn't have circularised on previous tests. But it would have added material risk without any reward. And taking a ship, particularly a re-usable one, particularly a novel one, into its first orbital flight is always exhausting and novel.
Odd. As a side note, your comment was posted [dead]. I vouched it to restore it back to life.
This is the second time I’ve seen such insta-dead comments. (One was my own, and I thought I did something wrong. Now it looks like there’s some kind of bug in HN that’s killing on-topic comments when they’re posted.)
Your comment wasn’t deep or insightful, but not every comment should be. A simple rejection of a premise is certainly on-topic. So it’s hard to argue that your comment was “bad”. That narrows the possibilities down to a bug in the algorithm. Maybe the mods are experimenting with ML auto classifying whether new comments should be killed or not.
Nothing. Now that I’ve seen it once for me and once for you, both on comments that seemed lightweight-but-harmless, I’m convinced there’s some sort of bug. So don’t take it personally.
Also HN != YC. They’re separate organizations, iirc. When Sam Altman was running YC one of the first things he did was “refactor” HN so that it has editorial independence.
Either way, it would be hard to imagine someone from YC telling Dan “you should boost so-and-so” and him going along with it unless it directly benefitted the HN community.
How do they hope to make prop transfer work without a working heat shield to enable reuse of the tankers? Unless SpaceX pulls a hat trick, Starship is borderline useless.
Their objectives keep shifting and starship is far behind schedule. Sure, it's a success if you keep objectives small. They could have tried for LEO ages ago but didn't. Each launch should maximize learning and having small objectives is anathema to that. And very wasteful.
> Judging by the fact it's 2026 you must be writing this from the Mars base
SpaceX was started in 2001. It announced Falcon 9 and messaged its reusability ambitions in 2005.
Falcon 1 wasn’t going anywhere because making rockets is too hard. Falcons 5 and 9 weren’t going anywhere because medium lift is a different ball game. Falcon Heavy wasn’t going anywhere because timing that many engines impossible. Reuse is impossible. (The kerosene will clog everything.) Then, after refly: the total launch market will never be more than $5bn, so reuse is useless.
More recently stainless steel can’t work. Now it’s shifted to reuse and refurbishment being too difficult, or refueling being impossible because of boil-off. Because keeping shit from boiling, apparently, is just unsolved engineering. ಠ_ಠ
Not everything SpaceX does is genius the first time. But they’re ridiculously good at not persisting with stupid. The idea that a dozen rapid depot launches is somehow a gating concern, again, as a tech demo, we’re building the depot eventually, is just such a weirdly small and big concern.
I dunno, the fact that nobody can say how many fuel launches a moonshot is going to take, but at least 12? And that the lunar orbit chosen due to available energy makes rapid extraction impossible?
If they get less performance or more mission payload, they can add tanker launches. If they get more performance or less mission payload, they can remove tanker launches.
People ran into "the design is 10% heavier than planned for unexpected engineering reasons and now we have to make hard choices" on space missions far less complex than a literal Moon landing. SpaceX has externalized the "hard choices" into the tanker count, pre-emptively.
The lunar orbit of Artemis is defined mainly by SLS/Orion's performance, or lack of thereof. The specific NRHO was a Gateway choice, and might now be dead alongside it, but by itself, Orion can't get to low Lunar orbit. Which drives some peculiar design choices.
> the fact that nobody can say how many fuel launches a moonshot is going to take, but at least 12?
Nobody has ever done in-orbit propellant transfer or storage. We’re building it to see what those numbers shake out to, and how the propellant gets lost. (Boil off? Leaks? Incomplete transfer? Weird, unexpected degradation because space? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.)
If it works, it dramatically reduces the cost of lunar and deep-space access. You’re saying that isn’t worth it because it isn’t certain? This is spaceflight. Nothing is certain. We have to weigh risks and payoffs. And then mitigate them. The time for mitigating this risk is this (and probably next) year. If the refuelling is dumb, the plan changes—Blue Origin is testing its own approach on the same timeline.
Like, in Apollo 11 we fucked up the lander’s fuel budget. The astronauts were literally running out of fuel because a foreseeable problem, the surface being bumpier than expected, wasn’t contingency planned for over ten preceding missions. And we’re trying to do better than just retreading Apollo, because Apollo—strategically—failed as a platform for further manned spaceflight.
> the lunar orbit chosen due to available energy makes rapid extraction impossible
Isn’t NRHO an Orion limitation? Can Orion circularise on its own?
Also, rapid extraction hasn’t been a requirement for the Moon since ever? If you want rapid extraction, plant a ship that can motor off the Moon home in one shot as an emergency-egress option down the road. In the meantime, you’re days away from help under ideal circumstances; realistically, we don’t have rescue options.
Starship might be crap. But the bets look good, and the project is on the whole no more ambitious than the original Apollo missions. The criticisms you’re raising are either fundamental to the mission architecture because it’s developing a new spacefaring capability (refueling and rapid relaunch) or cost-cutting choices irrelevant to HLS (Orion’s second stages being efficient but underpowered).
Ughhh, Elon Moosk amirite? Such a fraud, because [???]
I don't really understand why these kinds of comments persist except as some pathological cope when confronted with a world that doesn't work the way you want it to.
It's not convincing, it immediately outs you as a zealot, it's counterproductive in every single way. Why keep doing it?
> don't really understand why these kinds of comments persist
One, you can make money criticizing Elon on the internet.
Two, controversy is catnip to the man. DOGE was a disaster. X and xAI look like aborted disasters. And he’s clearly gotten bored with Tesla. It isn’t hard to project that on SpaceX if you don’t know the heritage.
just saying: he is good at vaporware on a large scale and kind of a fucked up person. It's not weird people are skeptical. But he also has basically an endless money supply so he can throw money at problems and make them go away eventually. But his timelines are basically all lies used to get venture and retail money into the game.
Which is weird, because "X", "10", "XI", "XII", "12", "XIII", "13" are all unambiguous, while "11" could be read as "II" = 2 depending on the font. In other words, they switched exactly as to maximise ambiguity.
Starship is just obscene. The thing is never going to work for its designed purpose once you understand what the mission looks like (basically insane amount of refuel dockings while the thing is in orbit)
> insane amount of refuel dockings while the thing is in orbit
What's wrong with this? Lots of launches is fine until we build the scale required to make a proper depot worthwhile. (Which, by the way, is part of Artemis's plans. Though currently it looks like a bunch of glued-together Starship tankers.)
Also all those missions can be unmanned. If you want to get good at something then you do it a lot.
The only question is whether the cost of flying all those missions would be prohibitive: by the stated goals, starship should be able to do the refueling missions cheaper then an SLS launch.
Obviously if it can't then it's failed, but the point of it is cheap heavy lift to LEO which is very obviously quite valuable.
Building a big specialty rocket to get to the moon is waste.
If you're thinking of passenger service, perhaps it is a bit unattractive in the short term. No good launching and landing spots.
But for military use - think logistics. Rapid delivery of equipment to unusual places. This applies to civilian purposes as well. All kinds of use-cases for speeding up cargo.
The entire economics of Starship and rapid reusability was presented at the beginning of the Starbase work, way back when Hoppy was a thing. He's been sticking to the plan since then. You might want it to be fiction, but he's been very good at figuring out business plans to leverage his ultimate goals.
> But for military use - think logistics. Rapid delivery of equipment to unusual places.
Surely it's too fragile/explodey for military use - the whole thing's a very volatile fuel tank - could it survive being shot at, even a single high-powered rifle bullet (during landing, or even post-landing) without going boom?
I will be watching the launch from Europe, so it will be not earlier than half past midnight for us. My kids (9 and 10) are sleeping on the couch in front of the projection screen, so that they do not even have to get up when I wake them up at midnight, which I promised.
Just wanted to add my grain of positivity here. Godspeed Artemis 2!
Even though you could question the whole Artemis concept, it's still extremely exciting watching the countdown with my son. I just missed the original Apollo flights and had assumed I would never see a moon landing in my lifetime. We may well not have a landing for quite some time yet, but it's still cool to see a Moon bound rocket standing on the launchpad...
I don't know if it's feasible for you, but if you can, try to take your kid to see a live rocket launch. The TV is grossly unable to display how awesome these things are in person.
Concur. My kids and watched a “small” Falcon 9 launch from the mainland park nearest the pad at Cape Canaveral. The noise alone was astonishing; bring binoculars to see detail.
It is one of the things I regret not ever getting to see a shuttle launch. The closest I ever got was when I flew over Florida while a shuttle was on the pad.
I was wondering how the zoom was so clear. However, I'm familiar with the struggle of shooting that way. I don't have a phone mount for my telescope, but with enough struggle, I can get a decent pic from the viewfinder on my phone. So don't play it off as cheating. It was a bit of skill to get both the binocs and the phone steady and aligned enough to get it.
Either way, it's a shot not everyone is going to have posted to their socials.
That's what I thought standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon. Pictures just do not do it justice. Same thing with Starship. My brain knows it's massive, yet feels underwhelmed looking at it on video. Musk should let his ego build replica Saturn V and a Shuttle next the Starship launch pad so there will be proper perspective available
Have you been to the rocket garden at KSC? The Saturn V isn't vertical, but they've got almost everything from the Redstone and later vertical. I was in Florida in 2018 and I think they were getting ready to display a pair of SRBs. They did have Atlantis inside, too. And of course a horizontal Saturn V.
I saw that Saturn V as a child once, too. I think that the Saturn V really made me the person that I am today. Seeing something so huge, that is literally engineered down to every last tenth of a millimeter - that was profound for a young child. I could not believe how detailed that rocket was, yet so huge. There should be an engineering term for the size of a machine divided by the smallest critical engineered component of the machine. I don't think any machine would have beat that in the Saturn V's day - maybe some ocean liners?
I've never been to KSC. I've been to Houston a few times. I couldn't imagine trying to have a Saturn V permanently standing would be an easy feat with both locations susceptible to hurricanes and tornadoes. Walking the length of it is still pretty impressive.
I come from a construction family, so I'd put some of the famous sky scrapers in that category too. Especially thinking about the crazy beam walkers like that famous photo of the guys riding the I-beam up eating their lunch on the way up.
A few years ago Spacex did a homage to that photo, with the crew working on the Starship. One of those amazing Human For Scale photos that emphasize just how huge that rocket is.
I lived in Port Orange FL until i was 12, during night launches my dad would take the family to New Smyrna Beach or some where a short drive South where we watched the shuttles come up over the water somehow. I can't remember the details it was a lonnnng time ago haha. I do remember the launches sounding like popcorn popping.
I live in Dallas now and will be turning 50 soon, i want to catch the next Starship launch live but would have to time it perfectly to get time off of work ahead of time.
You probably watched from the Florida side of the intercoastal waterway between the main part of Florida and Cape Canaveral. Because of the 3-mile minimum and Patrick AFB it is pretty hard to find a good watching place that is actually on the cape.
80 miles for me! I was a Space Shuttle era kid though. Saw the Challenger disaster during my lunchtime. And then on perpetual replay for the rest of the week on WESH/WCPX/WFTV most likely. Even still, just knowing we were launching all those people into space was awe-inspiring.
It's even more exciting when you realize that the last crewed mission beyond Low Earth Orbit was 1972 and each person on that spacecraft today are younger than that.
Minutes after launch they reached "ten thousand miles per hour". That's 2.78 miles per second. Nuts. No doubt the speeds go even higher later too.
I'm sure people here are already familiar with the speeds these things go, but that's the first time I've confronted a fact like that and it blew me away.
Escape velocity is 25,020 mph (6.95 mps), so not completely surprising.
Note that escape velocity applies to a situation without continued propulsion and also without air resistance, but still you can imagine that the order of magnitude is similar.
Maybe you’ll like this too: The Earth’s speed around the sun is around 67,000 mph. So it moves significantly faster than the rocket, though not orders of magnitude. The solar system itself moves at 43,000 mph relative to its local neighborhood.
But speed is always just relative to some frame of reference. Acceleration, on the other hand, is absolute, and so might be the more interesting thing to look at here.
Acceleration is change in speed, so it is, by its very nature, relative just like speed is.
If I fall, I might accelerate at G meters per second, relative to the earth, but I don't absolutely accelerate. If the earth decelerates at the same time, I'm now both accelerating an decelerating. It's relative.
It’s absolute in the sense that you can determine your acceleration without any external reference. You feel a certain force (like what you feel in an elevator). That’s your acceleration. You don’t accelerate relative to Earth, or relative to anything else. You accelerate relative to when you wouldn’t be accelerating (your inertial rest frame, a state of free fall).
If you are in space accelerating and the Earth would decelerate (which is just an acceleration in the other direction), you would still feel exactly the same force (minus Earth’s gravity, to the small extent you’d still feel it), and people on the Earth would feel the Earth’s acceleration. (For them it would feel like “down” isn’t perpendicular to the Earth’s surface anymore, or as if the Earth’s surface was tilted.)
When you sit on a chair on Earth, the pressure you feel on your butt is your acceleration upwards. If there was no chair and no ground (and no air), so that you’d be in free fall, that’s when you’d have zero acceleration. Your inertial rest frame is the trajectory you’d take in free fall. When you’re sitting on a chair, or lying in bed, or standing on the ground, you’re accelerating upwards relative to that rest frame, and that’s the pressure you feel on your butt, or on your body, or under your feet.
I am in a gravitational field. I have no idea what my acceleration is, I just know that I feel 1G (I could be falling in a stronger gravity and only feel 1G, or I could be climbing in a weaker gravity and feel 1G). The only way of determining it is to see if I'm moving relative to the stuff around me. Even then, that's not definite - I could be in an elevator and everything around me is also accelerating.
I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just pointing out that there are circumstances where "you can determine your acceleration without any external reference" isn't true. You might even say that this is relative to your circumstances ;)
According to general relativity, you (and the ground) are accelerating at 1g, and feel weight because your inertia resists that acceleration. If you jump off a cliff, you'll stop accelerating for a bit, until the ground hits you.
Edit to reply:
> I am standing on the ground. I feel 1G acceleration. My speed is not changing. How much am I accelerating?
You are accelerating at 1g through curved spacetime. Newtonian "speed" behaves strangely in curved spacetime.
> According to general relativity, you (and the ground) are accelerating at 1g
I don't believe this is correct. If I lock two rockets in opposition to each other, they aren't accelerating. They're pushing at each other. And their propellant is accelarating away. But their displacement and orientation are unchanging, which means their velocity is zero which means acceleration isn't happening.
Similarly, the normal force resists your gravitational force to produce zero net acceleration. (An object at rest in a gravity well is its own local frame.)
> If you jump off a cliff, you'll stop accelerating for a bit, until the ground hits you
I don't believe this is correct. In GR, free fall is still inertial motion. You're just free of fictitious forces and thus following the curvature of spacetime.
As I understand it, in GR acceleration is indistinguishable* from gravity, so while you're on the ground feeling 1 gee, you're being accelerated up at 1 gee, and so is the ground.
When you're in free-fall, that's when you're in a non-accelerating frame, even though a non-relativistic description** would say that you are, in fact, accelerating.
Caveat: I only do physics as a hobby, neither academically nor professionally, so take with appropriate degree of doubt.
It is correct, and you're also right that two rockets tethered to each other would not feel acceleration. The acceleration we feel in Earth's gravitational field is affecting our speed, though - it's slowing down the speed at which we move towards the future.
You say later that you think gravity and acceleration look the same but cannot be the same , which is funny since that’s exactly what relativity says: if two things are indistinguishable from each other even in principle, then they must be the same. Which is what led Einstein to realize that gravity really is just a curvature in space time. Hard to wrap your head around that! But if you study relativity, you eventually understand what being relative actually means.
You need to take into account your entire 4-vector for speed. You don't just have a speed in the 3 spatial coordinates, you're also moving thorough the "time" coordinate, and that is happening at a slower pace near a large mass like the Earth than it would of you were far away from here.
Not really, no. The ground isn't moving. I'm not moving. I get that if the ground wasn't there, I would be moving, but that's not the same thing, I think?
Like I said in another response, I have always been told that acceleration is change in velocity over time. If my velocity is not changing, I don't understand how I'm accelerating?
I do understand that gravity exerts a force that is indistinguishable from acceleration, which was my original point. But that doesn't mean it is acceleration.
You can always hold an accelerometer in your hand. If you did so now, assuming you're on Earth's surface, it'd register approximately 9.8m/s/s pointing in the upward direction.
You could also perform one of many historical experiments, such as dropping an object from an elevated height with careful timing, or rolling a round ball down a gently sloped track, and so on.
I don't think I understand the difference. I have always been told that acceleration is change in velocity over time. Is that wrong? Are there other types of acceleration?
Thank you for that precision "without continued propulsion", because when talking about rockets, physics teachers always talk about escape velocity, as if it was an absolutely necessary condition to escape earth's gravity.
But can't you escape gravity slower, just by going higher and higher at lower speed? Like a plane? (ie not vertically, but at an angle)
That seems wrong. If you have a way to maintain enough propulsion for long enough you can escape the gravity well at any arbitrarily low speed. You "just" need to maintain that speed long enough for the escape velocity from the gravity well to go below it as it diminishes with distance from the mass.
Artemis II won't fly by the moon until Day 6, but it only took Apollo 8 to Day 4 to get to the moon. Looking at the wiki for Apollo 8, it shows the moon was 218k miles at launch while they said the moon is currently 240k, so it still looks like Apollo was moving faster than Artemis.
My understanding is Artemis II orbits earth for 23.5 hours before heading to the moon while Apollo 8 did so for under 3 hours, so that accounts for some of the difference.
That would account for some of it. I was surprised the TLI burn wasn't until tomorrow, but I guess we didn't get the Apollo 2-7 tests of the system either, so maybe those are getting compressed into the additional time in earth orbit before TLI???
It's kind of said that we are having to do all of this repeated work just to get to where we've already been even if we are doing it on a much more accelerated schedule.
Apollo put a lot more burden on the Service Module than Artemis plans to put on the Orion. Apollo put the CSM/LM into a low lunar orbit while Artemis plans to put Orion into a high lunar orbit and make the Starship carry a lot more delta-V to land from a much higher velocity (and then accelerate back up to that velocity when coming back).
On top of that there weren’t really solar panels in the 1960s so the Service Module had to carry tons of chemicals to produce electricity, as well as extra fuel for all of that weight. As a result it was massively overbuilt compared to anything we’d try today and even so had to take an expedited flight path to the moon of 3 days in order to conserve operational lifetime. Artemis does not have nearly as severe constraints on either the Orion or the future Starship and so can afford to take a more fuel efficient 5 day coast up to the Moon and make the design tradeoffs on Orion that that entails.
Yup, that's how long it takes. There are a bunch of competing requirements and 9 minutes to orbit is the sweet spot, you can't change it much in either direction. If you go slower you waste all of your fuel just holding yourself up against gravity ("gravity drag" which is a bit of a tongue in cheek engineering term) If you go much faster you're accelerating too hard for your passengers or your structure.
To understand gravity drag think about the rocket firing just hard enough to hover 1 meter above the pad, you burn out all your fuel in 10 or 15 minutes and go nowhere...
In the other direction if you want to accelerate harder you need to make your structure stronger so you need to burn more fuel per second and have to displace some fuel in exchange for more structure and you keep doing that until you're so heavy you can't produce any more acceleration and you're all engine and structure and no fuel.
The acceleration of a rocket is slower than a normal car at lift off. It's pulling about 1.2G, but 1G of that is fighting gravity, so effective acceleration is only 0.2G. Almost any car can do that at low speeds.
But a car's acceleration slows almost instantly. The rocket just keeps accelerating faster as the tank empties and it gets lighter. By main engine cut off it might be pulling 5G.
One fact that I found unintuitive (while we're at cars doing things they can't):
If you could drive your car straight up vertically, you'd have to cruise just for an hour or so at 100 km/h (<65 mph) until you reached space. It's not that far.
Well, notions of speed are a little tricky for spaceships, but yeah, Artemis's top speed is going to be right when it starts reentry: about 25,000 MPH.
It is a bit chilling to watch these astronaut profiles having just read yesterday about the heat shield issues observed on the prior mission, and that this will be the first time we can test the heat shield in the actual pressures and temperatures that it will have to endure.
I've heard it feels a lot bigger once you're in freefall. Imagine if you could use all of your room's surfaces as floor space. I would think your room would feel a lot bigger.
You don't get it. Your 400sqft apartment needs to be shrunk by a factor of 6 to have the same area as the Orion. Try living in an 8x8 foot square for a couple weeks.
Not in a storm you can't! Granted I didn't do ten days. But I was with two other people for close to a week and it was...fine. We're old friends. There were moments it got annoying. But it was never boring or restrictive. We just played games, drank, looked out of the portholes, cursed hangovers and talked the one person who occasionally wanted to call it.
Starlink uses phased arrays pointed at the ground but lasers between satellites. So it wouldn’t be impossible to spin one around and have it bounce traffic to earth through the swarm pointing down.
But these satellites are very close to earth compared to the moon. It wouldn’t only save 0.3% transmit power vs just sending right to the surface. It’s very unlikely the consumer antennas could manage hitting an earth satellite from the moon.
> in the same way that you'll probably survive one round of Russian roulette
Is that with or without spinning the chamber between rounds? The odds are worse if you spin each time. They get worse as the game goes on if you don't spin.
I didn't think of the gun getting passed around. To me, "one round" is pulling the trigger once after spinning the cylinder with one bullet. 1-in-6 chance of dying, you'll probably live. That's how I feel about this mission, I think they'll probably live, but man I'm nervous.
Not parent, but I am genuinely curious: is there a Hacker News browser extension you'd recommend? The text is so small by default that even though I'd like to read on my desktop, I typically only browse it via the Hacki android app.
I vibe-coded one using one of the web-based tools (I think Replit?) maybe a year and a half ago. Just added vote tracking by username, tagging, colored usernames, that sort of thing. Only took a on average 1-2 prompts per feature, I did it in under an hour start to finish.
The event itself was a few years before my time, but after reading about it and eventually watching the historical news footage, the phrase "go at throttle up" also seared itself into my brain, and ever since I flinch when I hear it.
Yes, a robot car that drives on its own will be a better driver than most humans who text and drive, or have 400ms reaction times.
But making a machine that can beat a 110ms reaction time human with 2SD+ IQ, and the ability to override the ground controllers with human curiosity is much harder. Humans have high dexterity, are extremely capable of switching roles fast, are surprisingly efficient, and force us to return back home.
So in terms of total science return, one Apollo mission did more for lunar science and discovery than 53 years of robots on the surface and in orbit.
Because many small steps are required before every giant leap.
I would like to point out that the current misadventure in the ME has cost at least $38,035,856,006 in 32 days. And that won't receive half of the "this is a waste of money" critiques this mission will. And there are a ton of people who are against that excursion.
Most people who will come across this will react with either extreme negativity or indifference. Very few people will react positively. This thread itself is evidence of that. This is a nerdy community filled with people who are deeply positive about space exploration and excluding my comments, the straw poll was,
When I see numbers like that ($38 billion) thrown around I always wonder: Where did that money go? In the best case, it stayed in the economy in the form of salaries and such. In the worst case, it goes directly into an offshore pile of mega-wealth where it won't benefit the economy and likely won't even be taxed. Is there any way to determine where on this continuum this program stands? I'm guessing the 1960s space program, while incredibly expensive, was firmly on the "money stays in the economy" side.
That kind of money, even if it goes to a single person, doesn't get taken out of the economy. No one puts it under the mattress. It's invested, so it's basically given to other people in exchange for a promise of equity / future returns.
It might not be the allocation of capital we like, but it doesn't disappear.
> No one puts it under the mattress. It's invested, so it's basically given to other people in exchange for a promise of equity / future returns.
You make wealth concentration sound like a good thing somehow. This was publicly collected tax money, that will go on to enrich some already rich douchebag.
Well, there is a financial 'sink' - stockpiles and ammunition or other non-reusable military gear are basically the definition of money 'destroyed'. Their political value is almost non-existent actual money. If any, at all.
> stockpiles and ammunition or other non-reusable military gear are basically the definition of money 'destroyed'
Goods like longer-lasting food, medical supplies or a strategic oil reserve are not wasted. The money that went into supplying them has gone back into the economy, and they serve a more strategic purpose than the market participants could have borne (i.e. societal insurance policies). The same could also be said of military stockpiles, and continuing to buy them sustains a capability that is hard to get back once lost.
Only in the last few minutes, the livestream actually covered various goals this mission - explicitly a test mission - is meant to achieve. For example, one they just mentioned is they're going to be doing some docking maneuvers practice.
This is not just training the current flight crew and ground crews, but is also generally testing the entire system - including operations and hardware too, with feedback important to logistics and component manufacturers, etc. With possible exception of Falcon 9 launches, space missions are still infrequent enough that each of them is providing knowledge and experience meaningfully relevant to all work in and adjacent to space exploration and space industry.
Not just yet. Give it a few more years for AI (haha, another thing yielding stupid amount of value to everyone, that people are totally oblivious of - your antibiotics comparison in another subthread kinda applies too) - but for now, having actual people with full sensory capabilities, able to look at stuff on-site (and hear, and smell), is something we can't fully cover with computers and sensors. We can recover that and more data later, but it's a delayed, after-the-fact analysis. There's value in immediate feedback and immediate decisions.
> for now, having actual people with full sensory capabilities, able to look at stuff on-site (and hear, and smell), is something we can't fully cover with computers and sensors
Is this really helpful for a tech validation flight? We can put those sensors onboard.
> We can recover that and more data later, but it's a delayed, after-the-fact analysis. There's value in immediate feedback and immediate decisions
To a degree. We’ve validated vehicles remotely for LEO enough times that I’m sceptical we need humans for that. (Again, we do for ground-crew interaction training.)
> Apollo was over three orders of magnitude more efficient in producing scientific papers per day of fieldwork than are the MERs. This is essentially the same as Squyres’ (2005) intuitive estimate given above, and is consistent with the more quantitative analogue fieldwork tests reported by Snook et al. (2007).
Scientific papers are a pretty poor measure of productivity so here's another one. We know about the existence of He-3 thanks to samples brought back from astronauts on the moon. Astronauts setup fiddly UV telescope experiments on the moon, trying to set up a gravimeter to measure gravitational waves, digging into the soil to put explosive charges at different ranges for seismic measurement of the moon's subsurface... They were extremely productive. Most of what we know about the moon happened thanks to the 12 days spent on the lunar surface.
If your goal is to save money, just ignore the moon. This is not the west indies to be exploited, at least not yet. These are scientific missions, not economic missions.
The philosopher Randall Munroe once wrote:
> The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.
Because the goal of the program is to return humans to the moon. Artemis I was the unmanned test. This is the first manned test, and what they learn will support the subsequent missions that eventually land humans on the moon.
This is the same way that all manned spaceflight programs are conducted. You iterate and learn a little bit at a time. "Move fast and break things" doesn't work here. :)
If you can fly people around the moon, then landing people on the moon is a more reasonable next step.
I agree that it may not be entirely logical, but keeping public and funding opinion positive & invested _is_ important.
edit: I thought RocketLab flew their elecron rocket around the moon a few years ago? So it's definitely doable... so again I think it's about the optics.
Money being fungible and all, the rest can pretend their tax money is going exclusively to their favorite programs, whether that's healthcare or environment or building roads or starting wars or funding more startups or whatever.
> That we probably could have developed without the space program for a fraction of the cost, if we're being honest
I don't think so. Some people are good at small tasks and stewardship. Some people want to ambitiouslyl build. If there isn't a space program, the engineers who were inspired to join NASA cannot be assumed to have gone into semiconductors or material science. They probably wound up, in the alternate timeline, bureaucrats or financiers.
> If there isn't a space program, the engineers who were inspired to join NASA [...] probably wound up, in the alternate timeline, bureaucrats or financiers.
I guess this is why in this timeline, all engineers in the world are at NASA working on sending humans to space, and everybody else in the world is a bureaucrat.
Do you actually know any kind of engineering that is not happening at NASA? Because it may explain your bias here.
They did say "or financiers". There's an old quote:
Finance literally bids rocket scientists away from the satellite industry. The result is that erstwhile scientists, people who in another age dreamt of curing cancer or flying to Mars, today dream of becoming hedge fund managers.
> guess this is why in this timeline, all engineers in the world are at NASA
How does this follow? Are you arguing the Moon programs didn’t increase American engagement in STEM?
The point is the people who worked on a partial solution to a terrestrial problem because they were working on space may not be inspired—or incentivized—to work on that problem directly. We’re willing, as a society, to spend big on the Moon. Spending big on creek maintenance and desal, comparatively, is boring. Yet both benefit from the first.
> you actually know any kind of engineering that is not happening at NASA?
Yes. Have you done any heavy engineering?
> it may explain your bias here
Do tell me, someone who has never worked at or particularly close to NASA, what my bias is here.
> Are you arguing the Moon programs didn’t increase American engagement in STEM?
Nope. You are arguing that without a space program, people don't go into STEM and instead become "bureaucrats or financiers". I am saying that this is preposterous.
> We’re willing, as a society, to spend big on the Moon.
No. Society doesn't have a say in how that money is being spent, that's my original point.
I will guess that farm subsidies go to... well, farming. Doesn't sound completely ridiculous at first sight.
> you're mad about space exploration?
Exploration? It's not exploration at all: it's sending 4 humans for a 10 days trip around the Moon. I wish they used the money for actual space exploration, though.
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
The amount of my taxes that went toward people flying on this trip is so small to be not worth considering.
I'm much more concerned about my tax dollars going toward the US military, especially with Trump wanting another $200B so he can murder more people in Iran while making the world and the US measurably less safe.
Independent of how scientifically awesome this is, this is probably the most cost effective long term propaganda. Why waste money on posters when you can orbit the moon.
It is a test of the spacecraft. They need people onboard to test all the human systems. But yes, if this was a purely scientific flyby and not part of a larger manned program, machines would do it fine.
Yeah. Doesn't really make sense. The entire mission could be done remotely.
Even with a goal of eventually putting humans on the moon, it'd be better to do an automated run, measure everything in the cockpit, and put in sandbags and/or something to consume O2 to make sure the CO2 scrubbers are working correctly. It's maybe cruel, but a few dogs would work fine for that sort of thing. A flame would be better, but it's pretty dangerous.
The first mission in decades doesn't need to have humans in it.
I mean, that's how these heat shields work. They aren't reusable, you can't test them and then use them again. Or do you mean the design? We already did Artemis I.
It says that it is not safe to fly. They are sending humans without having tested in real conditions that their design was sound, GIVEN that the first time they did that (without humans), it turned out that their design was unsafe.
An article written by a "Polish-American web developer, entrepreneur, speaker, and social critic" says it's not safe to fly. And? What do the astronauts flying on board with significantly more information say?
There is also an old article written by a professional bongo player about the Challenger explossion. He has other hobbies, but he was not a Rocket Scientist https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v2appf.htm
The takeaway, is that the software was fine, but other systems like the main engine used too much cutting edge technology and have a lot of unexpected failure modes and too many problems like partialy broken parts that should no get partialy broken. [For a weird coincidence, Artemis II uses the same engines.] He concluded that when you consider all the possible problems the failure rate was closer to 1/100, but management was underestimating them and the official value that was 1/100000. [Anyway, the engines didn't fail in Columbia, it was one of the other possible problems.]
The articles explain that the shield has problems but management is underestimating them again. Let's hope the mission goes fine, but in case of a explosion it would be like a deja vu.
Yes, I've also read material outside of that article from NASA's own staff and literature.
Statements like this:
"Put more simply, NASA is going to fly Artemis II based on vibes, hoping that whatever happened to the heat shield on Artemis I won’t get bad enough to harm the crew on Artemis II."
Are just so intellectually dishonest and completely ignore the extensive research and testing that's gone into qualifying this flight.
So did they! And they showed their work. So far you're just beating around the bush.
What would would help is if you said something like "Maceij says modeling a different entry approach on computers is no substitute for a bona fide re-entry testing a new design, but that's incorrect because _____."
That's not even remotely true. They talked in great detail about heat shield fragmentation Artemis I, it's failure modes, the prospect of it getting worse with new designs and a number of other things at much greater detail than you are. Your comments show a fraction of the effort and detail of the thing you're criticizing and you could have made your best argument five comments ago if you were ever actually going to instead of beating around the bush with these substance free drive bys.
Either theres a functional literacy issue here keeping you from understanding what it means to express a substantive thought or you overestimate other people's toleration for writing checks promising unmade arguments that never cash. You can't keep buying time with nothingburgers.
You are obviously very invested in the fact that someone who is going against the grain of the obviously bad, overly buerocratic government agency MUST be correct (otherwise, in the case you actually gave a fuck about the truth, you would be researching statements from NASA and comparing the reports)
If that is so, put your money where you mouth is and place a bet on polymarket. If you are too scared to do so, then admit it to yourself, and understand that you don't believe this shit anyway.
Because you being a cuck for a contrarian for the sole reason that he is going against the grain is basically the same as Joe Rogan being anti-vaxx because its trendy and cool to think government=bad.
I don't think "you're being contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian" pairs particularly well with "if you're so convinced then just bet on in bro" as an argument.
They've changed the AVCOAT to be less permeable and altered the re-entry profile.
One of the findings of Artemis I is that lack of permeability led to trapped gas pockets which expanded and blew out pieces of heat shield. The reason for the change to be less permeable is to make it easier to perform ultrasonic testing, not to improve performance.
> Another chart which the Artemis Tiger Team did not intend to show on Jan. 8th, was the figure showing the spallation events as a function of time during the skip entry heating profiles (Figure 6.0-4 of NESC Report TI-23-0189 Vol. 1). In this figure, it was quite clear that the Program narrative they were feeding to the press, that it was the dwell time during the skip which allowed the gases generated to build up and cause the delta pressures which caused most of the spallation was, again, patently false. In fact, during the first heat pulse (t ≈ 0 to 240 sec), approximately 40-45% of all the medium to large chunks of ablator spalled off the Artemis I heatshield.
> Hence, varying the trajectory would do little to prevent spallation during Artemis II. I was never shown the new, modified trajectory at the Jan. 8th meeting.
I suppose "this will be the first time we can test this slightly modified heat shield in the slightly different pressures and temperatures that it will have to endure." isn't quite as eye catching.
Sort of. At a certain threshold, everything is untested. I’d put this closer to modified than untested—the general config was tested in Artemis I and the specific configuration in a variety of ground tests.
Artemis II is scheduled for re-entry to Earth on April 10th. That is when the heat shield issue will be the most dangerous.
If it fails and the mission fails with loss of life while knowing it went ahead despite the IG report about the heat shield... It might be the end of NASA.
I mean, sure. But that's like equipping a sub with a screen door and claiming that in the grand scheme of things, it's a slightly different door with slightly different permeability characteristics.
We already did Artemis I and the heat shield lost a lot more material than it was supposed to on that flight. "Specifically, portions of the char layer wore away differently than NASA engineers predicted, cracking and breaking off the spacecraft in fragments that created a trail of debris rather than melting away as designed. The unexpected behavior of the Avcoat creates a risk that the heat shield may not sufficiently protect the capsule’s systems and crew from the extreme heat of reentry on future missions."
Fixes have been made to the design, but they haven't been tested in flight.
Also the fixes weren’t made on this capsule, since it was already built with the old design.
So that means this capsule will fly a different re-entry profile to attempt to avoid the issue and Artemis IV will fly with untested fixes for lunar return.
And the different re-entry profile has more velocity and temperature stress. So if their reasoning is wrong (that the failure was due to do lower pressure during the skip) it will very likely fail.
We're commenting on NASA's live stream that exists to get us pumped up about the tens of billions of dollars we overpaid for this launch.
I'm probably much more happy than the next guy about getting to see a flyby of the moon this week even if I really wish we'd gotten here another way, but the accusation is a bit funny in this thread in particular.
You could just re-use the studio where they faked the Apollo 11 landing except it was in 7 WTC which was destroyed in a controlled demolition to hide the evidence.
Of course it's not "safe"! We put a ton of explosives into a huge can, put a small can with humans on top of it, set it on fire and try to control what happens and get the humans into space, and then we try to drop the same can from the space, while it's traveling at miles per second, and land it on the ground. It's not "safe" and won't likely be "safe" in our lifetimes, there's always big risk, that's why astronauts get so much respect - they take a lot of risks. These risks become smaller with time, but still they are quite serious. And of course anything that reduces risks - while not disabling the whole program - is good, but I don't think "safe" is the word that is justified when talking about those things.
There is a LOC (Loss of Crew) number that is typically calculated for these missions. I'm curious what that is? Early Apollo missions were on the order of 4%.
Before the Apollo launch, von Braun was asked what the reliability of the rocket was. He asked 6 of his lieutenants if it was ready to fly. Each replied "nein". Von Braun reported that it had six nines of reliability.
The joke that made the rounds of NASA was that the Saturn V had a reliability rating of .9999. In the story, a group from headquarters goes down to Marshall and asks Wernher von Braun how reliable the Saturn is going to be. Von Braun turns to four of his lieutenants and asks, "Is there any reason why it won't work?" to which they answer: "Nein." "Nein." "Nein." "Nein." Von Braun then says to the men from headquarters, "Gentlemen, I have a reliability of four nines."
In 2014 an independent safety panel estimated 1:75, but I think it's slightly better now. The shuttle program officially had a limit of 1:90 but in practice achieved 1:67.
In the early days of the Shuttle program, the probability was supposedly estimated as low as 1:100,000. Challenger brought on a more realistic approach.
After spending years as a kid seeing footage of these things on TV outside living outside of America, I finally got to see it live!
Brought my camera and got a few good pics too! Very invested in this entire mission!
Someone behind me kept whisper crying "That's it! Go baby, go baby go" like it was his child and was encouraging them on. Very emotional, loved it.
Also when that engine sparked it really hit me just how many hours of deep thought and technical innovation goes not only into getting us as humanity to that point, but also the crews at NASA planning, building and executing these missions
On your parenthetical point, I also agree: some really weird camera selections, and frustrating dropouts, during the crucial moments of the launch.
Nevertheless, a real triumph, and I particularly enjoyed the "full send" remark from (I think) the commander. I also really enjoy the fact that the livestream is relatively light on commentary and that most of what you hear is from mission control and the crew.
I was cussing at the director of that video stream during that. It was a totally useless shot as well that they lingered on that already had me bothered, and then to cut back to the SRBs fully separated had me in full contempt. Nothing to see here and everything to miss. It's like music videos showing the singer doing nothing while the guitarist is shredding a solo. Like WTF. You have one job, and you totally botched the hell out of it. You get what you pay for I guess. Lowest bidding contractor???
It was probably deemed a relatively high-risk moment which they did not want to broadcast in case of failure like it was when the Challenger mission exploded.
NASA had another feed that was just the view of the launch from Kennedy Space Center, no commentary. It was a few seconds ahead of the main broadcast, so it seems they already had a delay built in for the masses.
I certainly missed that one. Is it available somewhere recorded? If it is, can you please send a link to it? I'm sorry if I'm asking something stupid, it's just that I can't find anything like that and I also want to see this badly.
Still an odd choice. It is what it is. It’s a fairly risky mission and they chose to go ahead with that. Yet they avert their eyes, like a child watching a scary scene in a movie. Like it’s somehow ok to actually risk lives of four people, but not ok to televise that.
sending people to the moon was never useful. We can get more done with robots, both cheaper and safer. There are plenty of more useful things we can do instead.
okay what is more useful is a matter of opinion. you can disagree, but I stand by it
I've never understood this hyper-utilitarian perspective. It just seems divorced from what emotionally inspires most people.
Most of what people find inspiring doesn't directly provide a lot of objective utility, and is often quite dangerous for the individuals who choose to participate. Reaching the highest peaks in the last century, antarctic expeditions, pushing the limits of racing vehicles, attempting a sub two hour marathon, and athletes defining new tricks and styles in extreme sports are all objectively pretty useless in terms of their direct outputs -- and yet I find it all a whole lot more inspiring than my computer getting twice as fast, even if the latter is of way more objective utility to my life.
Min-maxing ROI in a spreadsheet just doesn't do it for me in the same way. There's absolutely a place for that and in a world of limited resources it should be how we spend most of our effort, and it is! The amount of money spent on efforts like this is _tiny_ at the scale of nations, and is certainly a much smaller and better use of funds than wars and corruption.
Then you are wrong (and maybe MAGA? to ignore facts like that). An estimated three orders of magnitude of more science was done in the 12 days astronauts were on the moon than if robots had done those missions. HSF costs about, but it returns a lot of results as well.
That’s fair but the amount of interest in this crewed mission vs. prior uncrewed and robotic moon missions shows that many people find manned missions more compelling.
We didn't have robots in 1969, and the Apollo missions resulted in many of the technologies that make modern robotics (and robotic space missions) possible.
I tuned in for 60 seconds, the presenter got everything wrong, and I just tuned out until liftoff.
She called the top of the ET (well, it's no longer an ET, but it's the stage that was the STS ET) the "upper stage". She said that the propellents are stored at thousands of degrees below zero. And so on. This is a NASA presenter?
You are not the target audience for this sort of presentation. Media directed at the laity is more about being directionally than quantifiably correct, and is full of metaphor and embellishment to capture the imagination rather than communicate something with precision.
People who want the actual details and numbers will read.
> She called the top of the ET (well, it's no longer an ET, but it's the stage that was the STS ET) the "upper stage". She said that the propellents are stored at thousands of degrees below zero. And so on. This is a NASA presenter?
To be fair to her, she seemed to explicitly refer to what sits on top of the core stage, it just wasn't in the diagram she was gesturing to the top of at the time.
To be fair to you, I think the cryogenic comment was worse and she actually said "thousands of degrees below Fahrenheit".
The problem is they're trying to run hours of programming leading up to this launch for some reason, but aren't willing to force the experts to come in to do the commentary. They should have given her a script.
Jesus! Why is there a presenter? Why isn't it just a livestream of the mission control radio chatter? That sort of shit belongs on some 24/7 news broadcast.
Same reason the livestream mentioned jobs about a dozen times in the 10 minutes I watched, NASA is in a fraught position and this is their way of fighting for some continued funding. A 'mass media' event captures more attention than a minimalist stream of chatter. (And a less cynical interpretation is also that getting the public interested in and engaged with space missions is part of their mandate.)
I feel like they really fumbled the video feeds, it was a mess. Rapid shifting of camera angles as it left the pad, black video, switching to a grainy video of the crowd during booster separation, and a hasty switch back well after they separated.
Come on guys. You're going to the moon. You couldn't plan the launch camera / video feed better? This is how the world sees it, gets excited about it.
Regardless of whether this particular mission is perfectly planned, this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement.
It is a noble endeavor - science, engineering and peaceful exploration hold the keys to our survival and prosperity.
It is also important psychologically to our survival - a reminder there is a bigger pie, that we can solve hard problems, that progress can be made, that competence and education counts, as does courage, and that we can work together for a common cause.
This is the best of America, and for a while we can be proud of the human race.
I think these space projects are great, can create much good will, and give people dangerous things to do that are worth risking the danger for. But war, inequality, and climate mismanagement are political problems that are not going to be solved (if they need to be solved) by science and engineering (the first two at least).
My personal take for a long time has been that the primary driver of most war today is boredom. War today is undertaken for entertainment. It's a special kind of entertainment that taps into deep brain stem circuits and provides a false but deeply resonating sense of purpose and meaning. When you hear that "people don't have a sense of meaning," it means their brain stem is not feeling the tribal loyalty emotions connected to warfare.
It would be cheaper to solve resource shortages in almost any other way. I don't really buy that explanation, at least for most wars. I think most wars today have roots that are far less rational.
Note that this applies IMO to all participants on all sides insofar as they had any role in starting or sustaining the war.
I think the primary drivers of war come from the top--powerful people motivated by greed and ego. Those are the spark that starts wars.
Boredom works from the bottom, providing fuel for wars in the form of soldiers. More specifically, young men in particular are easily appealed to by offering them a part in some great heroic endeavor, and a promise to mold them into someone whose manhood and courage may never again be questioned.
Of course, as many former soldiers have found out, you usually receive none of those things. The endeavor was bullshit, you were only a cog, and there is no badge of honor in the world that exempts you from the human experience of being made to feel small.
Wildly disagree with that. I think the overwhelming majority of people want simple, peaceful existence, and that the 'lack of meaning' can be solved through deeper shared community goals and aspirations.
More prominent figures like Trump, Putin or al-Assad don't wage war out of boredom, but out of ego, or visions of a glorious future that only they can impart (which I guess is still ego).
I also think that the various regional conflicts in Africa are in no way driven by the fact that the various political groups are just sitting there with nothing to do.
That said, I do think that a 'common enemy' provides a great deal of focus to communities, as we're wired for it... but the definition of community (who is 'us') is largely malleable and entirely flexible. But it's only one way of providing that meaning.
I also think conflict is largely glorified through American media, which is aggressively pushed on a lot of the English speaking world. The videos of the SF soldiers talking about killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how cool it was with no remorse for the taking of life in a conflict that none of the local population asked for. Of the people I've talked to that have been through armed conflict (specifically Angola, and Serbia), and so strongly against conflict that the reactions are almost scary.
So no, I don't think conflicts are started or sustained out of a sense of boredom.
When one communities deeply shared goals and aspirations conflict with another's (or subgroups) is when you get war and violence. The eras of relative peace is when you have one empire imposing its will.
The expanse future isn't that bad - even at the start of the series we've already made it to the asteroid belt and Jupiter moons, and the civilization consists of several sovereign self-governed entities with individual entrepreneurship and private enterprise allowed. It means we didn't annihilate ourself in a nuclear war, nor our civilization collapsed into allways-fully-connected ant colony (or one global fascist/communist/religious regime).
Agreed it’s a tolerable vision, it could be worse. But it’s also a vision of humanity mostly living in enormous disenfranchised structural underclasses - corporate-authoritarianism in the asteroids and subsistence-UBI for all those unnecessary humans on Earth.
It’s a vision of incredible technological progress without any growth in our ability to justly and humanely govern ourselves or move past violent conflict.
I agree with GP this is our current trajectory. I’d live in that world and hope I’d get lucky, but what a disappointment if that’s all we can manage.
I don't know that there was a lot wrong with Earth under the Expanse though.
The problems there were kind of organic: they just didn't need that many people, but they did have UBI, but even if you wanted to better yourself and were exceptional at your job... You could still be 50,001 in the queue of the 50,000 they needed.
Earth in the expanse desperately needed places to expand too and send people, but the solar system just wasn't that habitable.
uh I would argue that at the beginning of The Expanse things are middling to bad and at the end things are pretty fucking bad. The epilogue of the final book is the only thing that's unabashedly optimistic.
The main series takes place over about 30 years during which several billion people die system-wide as a result of various wars and terrorist attacks, and uncountably many die in the immediate aftermath of the finale. I love it but it's not really a feel-good story!
> this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war
Just a reminder that even the Utopia of the 23rd century and beyond envisioned by Gene Roddenberry for Star Trek - the Federation and Starfleet are still at their core military institutions. Even war was very much still a thing in his utopic vision, despite the fact that scarcity basically no longer exists so what hell was everyone fighting over anyway?
Starfleet is only a few steps removed from the regime in Heinlen’s Starship Troopers. At least Heinlen didn’t pretend that they were enlightened post-imperialists. He was honest about what it was.
Wasn't war on Earth not the issue but war with other species in the galaxy the issue? Sure, there were some sympathizers trying to sabotage peace, but that's because they wanted to continue warring.
There is the Maquis which are basically insurrectionists/terrorists and Starfleet also has Section 31 for doing wet work.
Sisko poisoned a planet’s atmosphere, allowed political assassinations and even Picard did things that could be considered questionable once or twice, even Kirk.
Earth is peaceful because well…in a show about exploring space nobody really wants to see conflicts on Earth (there are a few exceptions where it worked though). And they have enough big guns and secret assassins to keep up appearances.
I hope so, but if this goes awry in any way, especially if – god forbid – they lose the crew, my fear is it’ll be a blow to the American hegemony that will be very hard to recover from. Orange man is bad, but I think something like that would add a whole other dimension to the US’s loss of face. I’m as anti-american as they come, but despite everything Pax Americana must be acknowledged and I shudder at the thought of it shattering.
> Pax Americana must be acknowledged and I shudder at the thought of it shattering.
Shudder away! We've already had both Carney and the finance minister of Singapore essentially declare Pax Americana to have ended. Everybody else is just being polite.
[EDIT: prime minister of Singapore, not finance minister]
When the US stops being the main topic on the internet then you'll know it's over. As it stands everyone is still fully obsessed with America. Their cultural dominance is far from over.
I'd expect the US to be the main topic on the English speaking internet far after its global dominance ends. I highly doubt that Canada or Australia (let alone the UK) are going to take English speaking dominance any time soon.
> this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement.
Is that irony or plain naiveness? historically and technically, conquest of space is inseparable from warfare. As for climate change, one can argue that technology is one of the primary driver: aviation alone is estimated to 4% of global temperature rise.
Energy use is the driver. Fossil fuels happen to be cheap. It's effectively a coincidence, nothing inherent to technological progress itself except insofar as something like aviation would never have been a commercial success without an exceedingly cheap, dense, and portable method of energy storage. Solar-syngas and solar-battery would have eventually gotten there but we'd all have been taking trains and ships for the past 80 years while riding electrified public transit.
I believe that folks in the US are, by a large margin, the most highly propagandized group of people in history. It's hard to watch stuff like this.
It's not that I don't understand that comparatively space exploration is small compared to the associated costs of the boots that might hit the ground today.
>Regardless of whether this particular mission is perfectly planned, this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement.
You watch too much Star Trek. This is precisely the kind of thing that will benefit the military industrial complex, enrich billionaires at the expense of everyone else, and justify the government raping natural resources like it's a little girl locked in a cage.
No one cares about space any more and no one engaging in space travel is doing so for science anymore. Those days, if they ever really existed, are over. NASA has been cleansed and gutted and purged of wrongthink and now only exists to further the cause of American propaganda and be parasitized by SpaceX and intelligence agencies.
We actually should. By "we" I mean just Americans, though.
Leave the hard science to cultures that still have an educated populace and a government that believes in it. Americans are going to need that money to fund the holy war in Iran over the next decade and to build out Trump's Epstein Memorial ballroom. All that gold filigree is expensive.
If I were a Real Scientist working for NASA I would have seen the writing on the wall and packed my bags for greener pastures once Elon let his pack of groyper skiddie goons slash the department's budget because there were too many brown people on the payroll.
The United States is no longer a serious nation worthy of scientific endeavor, and it won't be again for a very long time. The next person to set foot on the moon won't be an American. These are just the consequences of the choices the American voters have made.
Meh, sounds like you are not American so telling people in the US to just give up on everything is boring and self serving.
If you do have a vote in the US, then you have options to try to make things better. Complaining about pedophiles and people on ketamine in the government is a valid (but extremely small) form of affecting change, but the doom and gloom of everyone should just give up helps no one.
The key phrase is "kind of thing". It certainly does matter what kinds of things we focus our attention on as a species. I think you would have to be quite cynical to think that progress in spaceflight over the past 60+ years hasn't had a positive impact.
Global rates of poverty are 83% lower than they were in 1969 when we landed on the moon.
So actually, millions of lives have massively benefited from science and technology. To be cynical in the face of all that is a personal take, not a reflection of the facts.
Vaccines, Mobile Phones, Internet, GPS (How do you think container ships navigate), High yield seeds/fertilizers and the Green Revolution, Weather Satellites, I could go on.
It's really getting tiring repeating this stuff over and over again to the anti-space crowd.
You’re arguing against the misanthrops. To them, nothing humans could do would be good enough. We could end slavery in the West and they’d accuse us of not ending slavery enough.
You don't solve these problems in a single step, but notice how space imagery and analogies pop up every time people try to talk about peace, global problems, mutual empathy, understanding, etc. The Pale Blue Dot, images of Earth from orbit or the Moon, etc. Those are anchors in public consciousness, competing in memetic space with usual divisive, dystopian, hope-draining pictures and soundbites - we need more of them to improve on the big problems, and we absolutely would not have them if not for people actually flying to space.
Or, put differently, space exploration is one of the few things "feeding the right wolf" for humanity at large.
It's crazy to believe that people who believe in one holy book are killing people over another holy book in countries like (but certainly not limited to) Nigeria, while another country launches people to the moon.
But, alas, I agree with you. There's no way out but through I guess.
You seem to be forgetting that the country launching people to the moon is primarily of one holy book and is currently bombing the people of another holy book.
Nobody it'll say space exploration will alone solve those problems. But it helps, and can help more - much more, if we go all the way in and establish permanent economic activity and eventually settlements in the space near Earth and beyond.
> if we go all the way in and establish permanent economic activity and eventually settlements in the space near Earth and beyond.
Could you please explain exactly how these would help to stop war and inequality?
As far as I can tell, space exploration is going to exacerbate inequality, for example, by making Elon Musk even more obscenely wealthy than he already is.
That's part of a general meme shift. 60s tech was defined by a mix of fear, awe, and optimism. Apollo had elements of all three.
There was a confidence underlying all of them. From the New Deal to the late 60s, there was a public belief a better future was possible.
2020s tech is defined by fear, pessimism, and dystopia. The utopian edge has either gone or been replaced by horrific anti-utopian tech - surveillance, manipulation, exploitation, and irrationality.
Tech has become anti-science. Musk's DOGE cut around $1.5 of science funding, science education, and NASA exploration.
The naive sense that a better future is possible, and tech will make it happen, has almost disappeared.
> Is the problem inequality or rather poverty? Because those are not the same thing.
According to the OP, inequality: "Regardless of whether this particular mission is perfectly planned, this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement."
> What we've done in space has absolutely helped with poverty. It makes weather forecasts possible, which helps even the poorest farmers.
Are you talking about manned Moon missions or unmanned Earth-orbiting satellites? To use your own words, those are not the same thing.
In any case, poverty is a policy decision, a refusal to redistribute the wealth.
This is a policy decision insofar as the policy isn’t to liquidate entire groups of people over class and status resentment. “Just redistribute the wealth bro, it’ll work this time bro I swear let’s just do a redistribution”.
NASA may be cool, but the main reason SpaceX was able to undercut old launch providers was all the I Can't Believe It's Not Corruption of pork barrel spending by those old launch providers.
So SpaceX made space cheaper, was good value for the US taxpayer, and was also a money transfer scheme from the government to him. (Worse with Tesla, but this isn't about Musk just SpaceX).
That said, now there's questions about if Musk is corrupt with all those US government ties that result in suspicious direct pressure on non-US governments, including with Starlink which even if theoretically separate to SpaceX is obviously functionally inseparable at present.
I think that helping the less fortunate is cool, and launching people to the Moon is lighting money on fire for utopian and inevitably corrupt money transfer schemes.
> > The previous Moon missions certainly didn't accomplish that.
> Sparked the environmental movement, to name but one major impact.
It...really didn't. There was a new wave with a different political orientation (less conservative/elite) in the environmental movement roughly contemporary to the space program from—the 1950s through the 1970s—but it was driven by a variety of human driven (nuclear testing, oil spills, etc.) environmental disasters combined with more modern media coverage that occurred in that time than by the space program itself.
I know there are people who try to ignore all that and pretend that the whole thing was just the Earthrise photo in 1968 but much of the development of the new character of the movement happened before Earthrise, and even what happened after generally clearly had other more important causes.
Regardless of what you think of those first shots from Apollo 8, you have to admit they put things into a different perspective for a lot of people. Seeing the whole of the Earth like that moved a lot of people into realizing this planet is worth saving. That one image was a significant moment causing such a spike in people paying attention that it can be forgiven for being confused as the thing. It's not like John Muir needed to see the Blue Marble image to start his movement. It's just so many more people did
Disagree about the change. Even the fact that you know and care enough to argue this on-line is a change that can be attributed to space missions - and it's even more true about the overall global conversation about climate situation, and all activities taken to help with it.
> Regardless of whether this particular mission is perfectly planned, this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement.
More likely, it is precisely the kind of thing that will be managed specifically to keep people distracted, so that the people who have a near term benefit from the dark age of war, inequality, and climate mismanagement can continue realizing that benefit without interruption by people taking action right up until there is no one left to distract or benefit.
Found a stream on YouTube earlier (which presumably wasn't an official one because it disappeared 15 minutes later after a claim by "FUBO TV") and it had a poll attached: "Will the Artemis astronauts land on the moon?"
40% of people had voted yes. Which is somewhat worrying given the mission plan and hardware.
Does anyone know of a good status tracker for the mission? I'm watching the official feed on Youtube and it's great for commentary but I'd love a live Kerbal-style UI I could poke around.
Unfortunately the UI seems pretty busted. The tour is trying to point out a bunch of UI elements that don't exist and the mouse interaction just doesn't work at all.
but it's not accurate. it claims TLI (trans lunar injection burn) happens two hours after launch when in reality that is going to happen about a day after launch
I desperately hope so too. It will be absolutely terrible if there were to be an issue, and moreso if people can say “We knew about it beforehand but still went ahead”.
As someone who watched the Apollo 11 launch live on TV, this is no less awe-inspiring. This transcends nations, languages, and politics. This is of and by all humanity.
(If anyone managed to get the perfect shot of the spark-filled separation feed, please share. That was... incredible.)
I do hope the doomers who think that the entire US government has been completely gutted will take note of this. The government workforce is in a bad spot for sure, SLS is far from a perfect program, but this still demonstrates that we are doing some real work still.
Take note of a project that’s about 15 years behind schedule and many multiples over budget finally progressed because we lowered safety standards to just launch?
I’m not sure how that’s proof the government isn’t gutted. Let me know what our schedule is for the next one and how that timeline has changed. Ignoring the projects that have been outright canceled…
You’re currently the guy saying “ya, all you haters that said I’d lose my house if I stopped paying my mortgage, who’s laughing now?” - one month into not paying your mortgage.
We’ll still be dealing with the after effects of doge 20 years from now.
Aren’t they still well above anything in the history of human space flight?
We keep treating these systems in popular discourse as airliners. They’re not. They’re experimental craft. With mass production maybe SpaceX can bring launch closer to general aviation. But the notion that any loss of life is intolerable is (a) unsustainably expensive and (b) not a view shared by the lives actually at risk.
The main critique of the handling of heat shields also happened at NASA in 2022-2024 and the project continued on. Artemis is largely a product of congress.
Remember when DOGE tried to cut out the inefficiencies and failed miserably? The "inefficiencies" and "bloated budgets" are there for a reason.
If Elon ran this project "without bloat", there is probably a 70% chance that the vehicle would have exploded, much in the way of his Starship and early Falcon vehicles.
Indeed. The GSA with 10k employees is going to fall apart without the 40k unused winzip licences DOGE so cruelly took away from them in their senseless spree of madness.
Don't confuse bureaucracy with "gutted." The federal government is bigger than at most any point in US history. Arguably that fact is -why- it's 15 years behind schedule.
That's per 100k (which just says it's mostly flat per 100k), net spending of the federal government is more than ever, and actual workforce is bigger than ever. Federal spending as a percentage of GDP is stubbornly high despite us being in "peace time," and not recession spending.
If you all don't think bureaucracy is the main driver of government delays...well you clearly have never worked with or in and around government. I try to live in reality.
No, it's a plain headcount. Your first link is a chart of non-inflation adjusted spending. Your second link is all government, not just federal employees so it's not really germane to the discussion, and your third link includes things like Social Security, and frankly...good. Without the government stabilizing spending the economy would be even more of a dumpster fire of random investor panics.
I'm close to a number of people in the public sector. They're brilliant, they do great work and they aren't paid what they're worth. I've also worked for a long time in a mega-corp. It was frequently just as bureaucratic and wasteful, if not more so, than the government.
> They're brilliant, they do great work and they aren't paid what they're worth
The headcount of such wonderful people you are describing has been reduced but then replaced by 3x+ times the rates Gov is paying for the contractors that were hired (I am one of them). so this headcount being low is a nothing more than political smokescreen that will probably be used in campaigns leading up to November election (not probably, certainly cause there is nothing else to run if you are member of the ruling party)
I am willing to concede that it would be more financially responsible for the United States to greatly increase the size of the permanent federal workforce, and to stop making its size a political football.
Have you talked to any actual NASA employees (not just contractors) that work in science?
For what it’s worth, I watched today’s Artemis II launch with them. While proud of the mission, they’re likely in your “Doomer” category after a year being devastated and demoralized by having their science budgets slashed, grants/projects cancelled, having been forced to fire good contractors of 10+ years and then watching some of the most knowledgeable/skilled folks take early retirement. Don’t let the awe or Artemis fool you — NASA, especially when it comes to science, has been gutted and functionally degraded. For what it’s worth, they’re not focused on earth/climate science.
Yep, I work with them every day, since I am myself a NASA contractor. I'm curious what you think the major distinction is between a contractor and a civil servant in the first place. I work directly as part of a division (used to be "on site" before 2020, but now I'm remote so that doesn't quite fit) doing 80% the same job as any of my civil servant colleagues. I really don't think the range of opinions is all that different on either side of the fence.
I'll repeat that there are a lot of problems, but it's not nearly as bad as some people on the internet make it out to be.
Fair question—I probably overly delineated the two as I currently only know people on the civil servant side at NASA. Decades ago (!) I worked in the DC, hung out some folks, and often the ones who had strong opinions related to policy were the ones at risk of losing/keeping/winning a contract, not the government employees. That was probably in the back of my head when I made the distinction. I don’t really have a strong opinion either way now, but I felt it was only fair to answer you as best I could. Either way, I’ll try to be cognizant of that potential bias in future.
With that said, and while I haven’t had much exposure to what folks on the internet are saying, all I know is I’ve never seen this group of friends this worried or impacted. Most of them are also the type to just keep their heads down, focus on the mission, and wait for the winds shift.
I have a really hard time telling if this is despite the current administration’s best efforts, because the current administration’s policies, or just an artifact of government inertia.
Top level: Super excited to witness this in my lifetime.
Edit: Also, my 40 years of life leads me towards the latter category.
For sure this is 90% inertia, although like Bridenstein in the first administration, who turned out to actually be a pretty good administrator in the grand scheme of things, I'm cautiously optimistic that Isaacman is working in good faith to make NASA the best it can be. (Which isn't to say that I agree with him 100% mind you.)
NASA has been well treated by both parties in general, with their budget rising faster than inflation most years. This administration also appointed Isaacman to be the NASA administrator which I think is a 10/10 choice for that job.
I’d argue that NASA should not have ever got into studying climate science, it should be a responsibility of NOAA. NASA should be focusing on NEP, atmospheric satellites, better aircraft, making life interplanetary and astronomy.
It’s not that simple. Trump admin requested a massive cut to NASA’s budget, which after much delay Congress finally rejected. Isaacman’s path to NASA administrator was also, erm, circuitous. Having a competent and knowledgeable NASA head was not really Trump admin’s priority.
While the current administration has multiple areas of improvement and isnt really taking feedback in an adult manner, the federal workforce has some of the most competent people working for it inside certain parts of the organization. im thinking especially of NASA and NASA JPL.
This is true, but a lot of the top positions are being replaced with unqualified loyalists. It's only a matter of time, if this continues, that the competent workforce gets eroded
JPL has been strangled by both parties. They had huge staff cuts in 2024, and then more in 2025. They've gone from ~6,500 to ~4,500. Trump closed their research library[1].
Of course this is a drop in the bucket, the entire science research apparatus of the United States is being burned to the ground[2]. This administration is doing to the future of scientific research what the Mongols did to Baghdad.
NASA also has some of the most incompetent people working for it, and a lot of them are responsible for overseeing SLS and Orion. JPL hasn’t been doing to well lately either (Mars Return?).
Not entirely a doomer, but I would wait to grandstand until after the crew is returned safely, considering the allegations regarding the capsule heat shield.
> The mission's objectives are to conduct tests in low Earth orbit with one or both commercially developed lunar landers—SpaceX's Starship HLS and Blue Origin's Blue Moon—and the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) space suit.
> Orion that’s dodgy as fuck not the booster. I.e the new thing
I mean, newly shaped and partly reformulated.
Avcoat was “originally created…for the Apollo program” [1]. (“A reformulated version was used for the initial Orion heat shield and later for a redesigned Orion heat shield.”) The new things are Orion’s size and weight and the size of the tiles. All of which has precedented flight in Artemis I.
At the end of the day, I’m going to trust the astronauts. This issue was openly discussed, despite NASA’s original—and fair to criticize—instinct to cover it up. While any manned reëntry is a nail biter, I don’t think this one is especially so.
Aren't astronauts by definition bat shit crazy? We have people lining up for one-way missions to Mars. Not to say this is a bad thing, but their ROI calculations are not normal.
By poetic definition, e.g. “Here’s to the Crazy Ones,” yes. Clinically and technically, no. They’re paragons of human explorers, and exploration is a fundamentally human trait.
> We have people lining up for one-way missions to Mars
Part of me finds it inappropriate to do the two things at once. Advancement in scientific knowledge being somewhat at odds with blowing up one of the oldest civilizations in the World.
I certainly hope the mission goes as planned but it does feel like SLS is the wrong approach in the time of reusable rockets, even if this specific mission profile would probably have demanded the booster be expendable. Using the Shuttle main engines - designed and made to be 'refurbishable' rather than 'reusable' but still dumped into the ocean after each mission - and the SRBs (solid boosters) still gives the impression of the booster design being dictated (at least in part) to accommodate the needs of former Shuttle contractors. If either Starship+Superheavy or some other fully reusable heavy left vehicle comes on-line it will be hard for NASA to justify spending billions of $ on, well, a flying pork barrel. Sure, it has been proven time and time again that canned pigs can in fact fly but that does not make them the go-to transport.
I'm having trouble finding a simple tracker of whereabouts the craft is at in terms of the path to the moon? Might just be me but the fancy 3-d rendering thing on the NASA page just shows me a close-up of the craft and not much else?
The camera work was just terrible. They really need to learn from SpaceX how to do this right. Minus the obnoxious cheering.
SpaceX does these beautiful drone shots and live telemetry so well. Considering that each SLS launch costs in the billions it would be nice to do a little better on production
I felt the commentary during the launch also wasn't good. And I am not too interested in hearing from some Hollywood people before the launch
I thought the same thing - hopefully by the time Artemis III launches they'll remember the gaps and blank screens from this launch. Even the live telemetry model at the core stage separation seemed to not match what the on-board cameras showed. Artemis I's camera work was better. Why???
Out of curiosity, why do you see this as a worthwhile endeavor?
My personal perspective is that the resources are better used for other purposes, but it's possible that I just haven't encountered some compelling reason yet.
Do you watch sports, football, the Olympics? If not I'm sure you know someone who does. Same category as this. Each of the 32 NFL team is worth about the cost of 1-2 Artemis launches. The entire league could fund the whole Artemis program nearly twice. Hosting the Olympics is worth about 3-10 launches.
Like sports, the objective is ultimately useless except as a showcase of what humanity has to offer, and people like to see that.
I think in general space exploration is a great use of taxpayer money, but the artemis program doesn't seem great from either a "science per dollar" or "novel accomplishment per dollar" standpoint.
If the goal was just to flex on the rest of the world I would've much rather we focused on going somewhere new or returning to the moon in a more sustainable way
Each Artemis launch costs something like $4b (that's the incremental cost of a new rocket, it's much higher if you amortize the design costs).
IMO the program is not optimized for cost or sustainability, it's optimized for creating jobs in various congressional districts. Of course that provides a certain amount of political sustainability to the so-called Senate Launch System.
I just don't see a future where NASA can afford multiple SLS launches per year to maintain a continuous Lunar presence
I think that is the point, but whether this mission will actually do that is rather unconvincing.
After (and if) Artemis III lands on the moon and brings home the astronauts there seems to be very little planned on how we actually get to the moon base which NASA is claiming this will lead to, let alone the manned Mars mission that is also supposed to follow.
In other words, I think NASA is greatly exaggerating, and possibly lying, about the utility of this mission.
> there seems to be very little planned on how we actually get to the moon base
There is a lot of research going into in situ construction methods and even nuclear power plants on the moon [1]. (Which would be necessary to bootstrap eventual indigenous panel production [2].)
To me it’s encouraging to see this fundamental work being attacked than an endless sea of renderings. The reason you aren’t seeing heavy detailing, despite construction slated to begin with Artemis V, is we’re waiting for the launch vehicles. (“Any exploration program which "just happens" to include a new launch vehicle is, de facto, a launch vehicle program” [3].)
> This effort ensures the United States leads the world in space exploration and commerce.
> “History shows that when American science and innovation come together, from the Manhattan Project to the Apollo Mission, our nation leads the world to reach new frontiers once thought impossible,”
> Under President Trump’s national space policy
I smell politics and American exceptionalism, not science. There are a lot of could-bes in these statements as well, I have serious suspicions that these goals are not serious engineering. I am 99.999% certain that NASA will not build a nuclear reactor on the moon this decade, nor even the next decade. NASA is not giving me any signals they are capable of that.
> I am 99.999% certain that NASA will not build a nuclear reactor on the moon this decade, nor even the next decade. NASA is not giving me any signals they are capable of that
You don’t think NASA and the DOE, together with Lockheed and Westinghouse, can build a reactor? Why? The major technical issues were largely de-risked with the 2022 solicitation.
Even if you think Space travel is worth the money (which I personally do), adding humans to the mix makes projects incredibly more expensive. Even in the realm of space travel and research, sending humans is a questionable use of the money.
The most important (if not entertaining) things you can do in space don't involve humans. Telescopes, communications, earth observation, sending probes to distant bodies, etc.
It's nice that we can send humans to space and it's good to keep that capability going so that the knowledge doesn't die. But the unmanned missions tend to pull the weight of actually accomplishing useful things. Humans just get in the way.
I think there is a major difference though. Sports events are not pretending to be anything else. The Artemis mission claims to be advancing science and claims to be a stepping stone for an eventual moon base and a manned mission to Mars. I personally have serious questions about all of these.
The fact that we hope to get some new tech with this whereas sports aims for nothing is just icing on the cake. I think big space missions are worth it every now and then on a humanitarian level; even if no new discoveries are made, a new generation of engineers will become fluent in what we have already discovered. Humanity's education is not "done" when the last fact is written in a book, it needs to be constantly refreshed or it will disappear.
Even in sports you do not get "nothing", it has certainty helped advance the field of medicine.
> a new generation of engineers will become fluent in what we have already discovered.
We seem to have lost the technology of going to the moon we gained from Apollo. So without an actual follow-up and a tangible long term plan I suspect the exact same will happen this time around.
Or, more likely, it is an indication that manned moon missions are simply not that important, that this technology is simply not worth the cost of maintaining.
In contrast, we kept the technology of doing robotic missions in space, on the moon, and even on other planets and even asteroids (the latter two have much to improve upon though).
Do you really disagree that it’s advancing science? Surely actually testing hardware, building knowledge on how to run this type of mission, learning to use lunar resources, figuring out how to keep people alive, etc. will teach us things we couldn’t learn any other way.
Fwiw do share your concerns about the methods (sending humans on this specific mission is questionable, SLS is questionable compared to SpaceX approach).
It's not science, it's engineering. I don't think it's advancing science in a way that wouldn't be possible with a fraction of the cost without sending humans there.
Do you think we will learn more from Artemis or the Asteroid Redirect Mission? Because that's a concrete example of how funding this mission caused other experiments to be cancelled.
Fair point, but that’s an argument about prioritization within NASA’s budget (and its size relative to other spending), not the scientific value of the mission.
There's never non-zero value to any challenging engineering problem. The question is whether the finite resources spent to solve it are best spent on it versus other projects.
And in this mission in particular, you can't divorce science from politics. NASA's budget was reined in by Trump 45 and his admin picked Artemis because a manned mission to the moon invokes a particular feeling and memory, not because it benefits science. The moon is a known quantity, and going there is not more valuable than the other projects the government could have spent $100 billion on.
Keep in mind, this is one of the most expensive single launches in history while there is a partial government shutdown and the rest of the federal government that does real research has been gutted by this same administration. So it's tough to talk about "scientific value" when it's obvious that this mission is doing little science at the same time the government has decreed it won't be in the business of paying for science.
The moon isn’t a known quantity, we sent a handful of people there for a combined few days half a century ago. There’s immense scientific and engineering value in keeping a generation of engineers fluent in deep space operations.
If you’re angry about this dumpster fire of an administration wasting money and gutting research (I am too), the answer is to fight for better funding across the board, not to tear down one of the few ambitious programs left that’s actually pushing the boundaries on what we can do. NASA’s budget amounts to a rounding error and isn’t zero sum with the rest of federal science funding, these are separate appropriations.
Mars pushes the frontier (even if no one might survive the trip due to human body deteriorating), going around the Moon is meh - we were there ~57 years ago multiple times so what's the point?
Whether a moon base is needed or even beneficial is a question I have not heard a convincing answer in favor. And even if moon base is indeed needed and/or beneficial to future space exploration / resource extraction why robots cannot more efficiently build (or assemble) such a moon base is another question I need an answer to.
We are sending humans to (or around) the moon now, but it may just turn out to be a wasted effort, done solely for the opulence (or more cynically bragging rights / nationalist propaganda).
> Whether a moon base is needed or even beneficial is a question I have not heard a convincing answer in favor
If we want to go to Mars, the Moon is a good place to learn. Simple things like how to do trauma medicine in low g; how to accommodate a variety of human shapes, sizes and fitness levels; how to do in situ manufacturing; all the way to more-speculative science like how to gestate a mammal. These are easier to do on the Moon than Mars. And the data are more meaningful than simulating it in LEO. If we get ISRU going, doing it on the Moon should actually be cheaper.
If we don’t want to colonize space, the Moon is mostly a vanity mission. That said, the forcing function of developing semi-closed ecologies almost certainly has sustainability side effects on the ground.
I think I mostly agree with the other comment by runarberg—Earth is the place to be. But it is also worth noting that even if we do end up colonizing space, Mars is still really pointless. Mars is not significantly more habitable than orbit.
There’s some gravity: the wrong amount. In space, you can at least get 1G with centripetal force.
In orbit, you are halfway to anywhere. On Mars, you’ve gone back down the well. Make sure to bring enough gas to get out again…
Mars is just a bunch of irradiated rocks. Bring your own ecosystem, and wait a couple thousand years while it installs.
The only thing Mars has going for it is that it’s really far away, so we can still pretend to entertain sci-fi plans about colonizing it. The practical next step for space colonies would be large investments in additional space stations, a step so imminently possible that the only way to take it seriously would be to do it.
> Earth is the place to be. But it is also worth noting that even if we do end up colonizing space, Mars is still really pointless. Mars is not significantly more habitable than orbit
I’m not pitching a specific destination. And I’m not pitching exploration to the masses. Most people on the planet never have and never will leave their home country.
If we want to go to space, we probably want a lunar base.
> There’s some gravity: the wrong amount. In space, you can at least get 1G with centripetal force
Maybe this is important. Maybe it’s not. We need physiological experiments.
> In orbit, you are halfway to anywhere. On Mars, you’ve gone back down the well
In orbit you’re perpetually nowhere. On a surface you have in situ resources.
> Mars is just a bunch of irradiated rocks. Bring your own ecosystem, and wait a couple thousand years while it installs
Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s moving from New York to Wyoming. Maybe those are the same thing. But I’m more of a red Mars advocate today than I was when I read Robinson’s trilogy in my twenties.
> only thing Mars has going for it is that it’s really far away, so we can still pretend to entertain sci-fi plans about colonizing it
It’s mass and an atmosphere. That’s a lot to what Earth has going for us.
> practical next step for space colonies would be large investments in additional space stations
Practical next steps are lots of experiments in centrifuges and micro and low gravity. To fund and focus that you need a goal.
We don‘t want to colonize space. Colonizing space is science fiction, not a serious goal for humanity, and certainly not an engineering challenge. There is no reason for humans to live anywhere other then on Earth. We have more reasons to live on Antarctica or the deep ocean then on the Moon, Mars or Alpha Centauri.
What I really want is for us to send a lander and a launcher to Mars capable of returning to earth the the capsules Perseverance has been collecting. I would love for geologists on earth to examine Mars rock under a microscope. I would want them to take detailed pictures of an exoplanet using the Sun as a gravitational lens. And I would love it if they could send probes to Alpha Proxima using solar sails to get there within a couple of decades.
None of these would benefit from having a moon base. In fact this moon base seems to be diverting funds away from missions with more chance of success and more scientific value.
I do. Plenty of people do. Plenty of people also think exoplanet science is useless. I disagree with them. It the arguments are symmetric to those against human spaceflight.
> certainly not an engineering challenge
…how? We don’t have the technology to do this.
> There is no reason for humans to live anywhere other then on Earth. We have more reasons to live on Antarctica or the deep ocean then on the Moon, Mars or Alpha Centauri
> None of these would benefit from having a moon base
Of course it does. ISRU (and baseload launch demand) decreases costs of access to deep space.
> diverting funds away from missions with more chance of success and more scientific value
The science slakes our curiosity. The engineering slakes our needs. And they both benefit from each other. Claiming Starship and in-orbit refueling won’t benefit scientific missions is myopic.
We are nowhere near the capability to launch robots to the moon that can autonomously build or assemble a moon base for any useful definition of moon base.
> We are sending humans to (or around) the moon now, but it may just turn out to be a wasted effort, done solely for the opulence
My 4 year old is extremely excited to watch the launch tonight because it’s manned. I’d say a few billion is worth it if all it does is inspire a new generation of astronauts, engineers, and scientists.
And neither are we anywhere near the capability to lunch construction workers to the moon which can build or assemble an equivalent moon base with their human labor. So this answer does not satisfy me one bit.
> inspire a new generation of astronauts, engineers, and scientists
This is a good point. And I would like it to be true. However when you have to lie about (or exaggerate) the scientific value of the mission, that is not exactly inspiring is it. Your 4 year old could be equally inspired by the amazing photos James Webb has given us, and unlike Artemis, James Webb is providing us with unique data which is inspiring all sorts of new science.
> And neither are we anywhere near the capability to lunch construction workers to the moon which can build or assemble an equivalent moon base with their human labor. So this answer does not satisfy me one bit.
We have the capability to do that. We don’t have the will to do it, but we have the technology. We don’t even have autonomous robots that are capable of building a moon base on earth.
> Your 4 year old could be equally inspired by the amazing photos James Webb has given us, and unlike Artemis, James Webb is providing us with unique data which is inspiring all sorts of new science.
He’s not though. People gather around as a family and watch manned space missions. It’s exciting in a way that a telescope or a probe isn’t.
Indeed, in 1969, as a small child, I watched the Moon landing together with my parents, in Europe, like also the following missions, in the next years.
They have certainly contributed to my formation as a future engineer.
The key here is “could be”. But most four (or in my case, six) year olds can’t really grasp the abstract concepts of what JWST is or the data it’s sending back. For that matter most 40 year olds can’t.
A manned mission on the other hand is tangible in a way a probe isn’t. “See the big round thing in the night sky? There are four people going around it in a spacecraft”.
It isn’t a _complete_ argument in favour of manned missions- that has to account for the risk of the endeavour and reward of the science potential of having people there to react in ways robots can’t. But it’s hard to pretend that the inspiration pretty much everyone feels when they see manned missions is somehow achievable purely by robotic ones.
> neither are we anywhere near the capability to lunch construction workers to the moon which can build or assemble an equivalent moon base with their human labor
Why do you say this? What is the bottleneck you feel we are more than half a decade from?
The moon has about the same make up as the Earth when it comes to distribution of elements in the crust. If it's anywhere near 8% like Earth then it makes sense to mine aluminum and other metals on the moon in order to build megastructures in orbit. Since the moon has no atmosphere you can accelerate things using mechanical mass drivers. Basically rail systems. At 5,300 mph you hit escape velocity and can then move payload somewhere with no rockets. It would keep us from polluting Earth too. This is the precursor to O'Neil cylinder type structures. AI robots will probably be the play but you still want a transportation system that works and frankly building a landing zone would improve overall outcomes regardless.
The rocks at the surface of the Moon are richer in metals than the crust of the Earth. They are especially richer in iron and titanium.
Without oxidizing air, it is easier to extract metals from the Moon rocks.
There is little doubt that it would be possible to build big spaceships on the Moon.
However, what is missing on the Moon is fuel. For interplanetary spacecraft, nuclear reactors would be preferable anyway, which could be assembled there from parts shipped from Earth, but for propulsion those still need a large amount of some working gas,to be heated and ejected.
It remains to be seen if there is any useful amount of water at the poles, but I doubt that there is enough for a long term exploitation.
I imagine a foundry would use solar power and lasers to heat up the material. No atmosphere means less heat energy wasted. My thinking has been how to get enough actual build material to build something like an O'Neill cylinder. Well you'd need really thick metal plates. And then you'd want to get them into orbit without rockets. And these stations would likely be at the same orbit as Earth or nearby. Mainly because of how much sun energy you get around here. Going out to the outer solar system is a different beast all together.
This argument comes up a lot, about whether a space program is “worth it” in some sense. One problem I’ve found is that these discussions often treat this in the abstract. And then we get into the nature of human endeavor, the economic benefits of that R&D, etc.
Let’s talk about this in terms of practicalities. The NASA budget for 2026, per Wikipedia, is $24.4B. I often find it hard to really reason about the size of federal budgets, and the impact on tax payers, but I have a thought experiment that I think helps put it into perspective. Suppose we decided to pay for the NASA budget with a new tax, just for funding NASA. And we did that in the simplest (and most unfair) possible way: a flat rate. Every working adult in the US has to pay some fixed monthly rate (so excluding children and retirees). Again, per Wikipedia, that’s around 170M people. Take the NASA budget, divide by 170M, and you get … $11.96/month.
Obviously, there’s lots of flaws in this. That’s not we pay for NASA, we have income tax as a percentage with different tax brackets. But it is a helpful way to frame how much a country is spending, normalized by population. And I think it puts a lot of things in perspective. $11.96/month is comparable to a streaming service. And we talk a lot about whether NASAs budget is better used for other purposes, but we don’t do the same thing for a streaming service.
Hell, look at US consumer spending: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm (note that that spending is in dollars per “consumer unit,” which is I think is equivalent to an adult US worker, but there might be some caveats). Based on that, the average US consumer spends around $26.17/month on “tobacco products and smoking supplies”. I just feel it’s a little silly to worry about the NASA budget when the US consumer spends twice that on what is objectively a luxury good. At least NASA won’t give you cancer.
> And we talk a lot about whether NASAs budget is better used for other purposes, but we don’t do the same thing for a streaming service.
Actually, we do. I just cancelled two of mine in the last hour, and I know many people who are serial join/cancel subscribers because they "talk a lot about whether the [monthly fee] is better used for other purposes".
NASA isn't expensive. The science parts and the job creation parts almost certainly return a significant economic multiplier. The spend is very good value for around 0.5% of the federal budget.
That doesn't mean Moon shots are the best possible use of that budget. There are strong arguments for creating more space stations first, and then using them as staging for other projects.
Mars and the Moon are ridiculously hostile environments. Hollywood (and Elon Musk) have sold a fantasy of land-unpack-build. There aren't enough words to describe how utterly unrealistic that is.
Current strategy is muddled, because it contains elements of patriotic Cold War PR fumes, contractor pork, and more than a hint of covert militarisation. Science and engineering are buried somewhere in the middle of that.
I would like to watch a new Moon landing, but in my opinion more useful would be to build a space station with artificial gravity.
At some point it may become cheaper to build a spacecraft on the Moon and launch it in interplanetary missions than to do it from Earth. It might also be useful to build some bigger telescopes on the Moon than it is practical to launch from Earth, because due to the pollution of the sky extraterrestrial telescopes become more and more necessary.
Despite the fact that there may be some uses for bases on the Moon, it is likely that those bases should be mostly automated and humans should stay in such bases only for a limited time, much like staying on the ISS. The reason is that it is very likely that the gravity of the Moon is still too low to avoid health deterioration. According to the experiments done on mice in the ISS, two thirds of the terrestrial gravity were required to avoid health issues and one third of the terrestrial gravity provided a partial mitigation.
So even the gravity of Mars is only barely enough to avoid the more severe health problems, but not sufficient.
For long term missions, there is no real alternative to the use of a rotating space station, to ensure adequate gravity.
While with underground bases on Moon or on Mars it would be much easier to provide radiation protection, there remains the problem of insufficient gravity. It may be necessary to also build a rotating underground base, at least for a part where humans spend most of the time.
That’s a very fair point. Frankly I don’t know enough about the Artemis mission and general path, and would like to learn more. I’m certainly open to the argument that NASA’s budget isn’t properly allocated to the right priorities. I was responding just to the classic argument of “why spend money on NASA when we could be spending on …”
> Out of curiosity, why do you see this as a worthwhile endeavor?
to me it's inspiring and gives people something to cheer for. It also keeps a lot of people employed, productive, and at least has the possibility for new innovation. When looking at the mountains and mountains of wasted taxpayer dollars I dislike these the least.
The moonshot is a halo program that, when executed in a non-profit form, ends up benefiting society as a whole due to smart people being cornered and forced to solve hard problems that typically have applicability elsewhere on Earth.
Edit: remember the Kennedy speech — We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.
That remains to be seen. By giving Musk the prominence to set up DOGE and destroy USAID, they've indirectly led to the deaths of almost a million people.
By launching starlink, they're also increasing the amount of aluminum in the upper atmosphere, which may have catastrophic effects on the ozone layer.
The problem is the amount of aluminum. Government non-profit spacecraft do not use very much aluminum, because they don't launch thousands of LEO satellites per year. By building the first megaconstellation and kicking off competition, SpaceX is exposing humanity to different risks, namely ozone depletion and new mechanisms of climate change:
You seem to be saying that non-profit entities are incapable of killing people? Or that it's fine if non-profit entities do kill people?
> Besides, why can't other non-profit governments pick up the aid?
I think you're being obtuse. An analogy: "Sure I turned off the circuit breaker that was powering the life support machines, but why couldn't someone else bring in a UPS and plug them in to that?"
To your last point, because DOGE shut down programs in a such a way as to make that impossible, to the point they chose to let food rot, let medicines go bad, and stranded Americans overseas working on the projects without a way home.
That's debatable. Musk bought his way into politics and shut down USAID very specifically because USAID was investigating him [1]. Oh, and he used his position in DOGE to assist in making sure that government contracts went to his companies, or licensing out his SpaceX workers when his idiocy led to a shortage of air traffic controllers [2], which was very obviously a publicity stunt if nothing else.
So it's a product that was bought and used to enrich a single person. Sure seems like a for-profit to me, at least in this administration.
Specific innovations tend to be protected via IP when they are developed privately and, as a result, “butterfly effect” developments in a completely different field from cross-pollination are less likely to occur later down the line.
Maybe ... depends on the net net ... some people have internet access and can throw some satellites into space ... on the other hand, wealth and influence accrues to a specific kind of destabilising wanker
Because humans are destined to colonize space, and this is just an early step in a journey that will take hundreds or thousands of years.
More importantly, challenges like space exploration help drive knowledge and our economy; and are critical for national prestigue.
(And, most people don't focus on this, space exploration is a way for the US to demonstrate its military technology in a non-antagonistic way. There's a lot of overlap in space exploration technology and miliary technology.)
It is great to advance of what is humanly possible. Sending a robot? Great! Good data. If it dies, who cares, it does not live anyway. All abstract.
But sending a human? That feels more real. If we have the power to go alive to the moon, we also have the power to go even further. And we lost it, now we are reclaiming it.
And it doesn't matter to me what I think of the US government - this is progress for all of humanity. Also the comment section on the youtube stream is interesting - lot's of different flags are posted, sending good wishes from all around the world, low effort comments otherwise of course, but largely positive. (Very rare I think)
So, more rockets into space please and less on earth.
> My personal perspective is that the resources are better used for other purposes, but it's possible that I just haven't encountered some compelling reason yet.
Well, people are often obsessed with rationality, and seek reasons to do something, but there is one reason that works almost for anything: just because. If we want to go forward, we'd better try a lot of things, including those that do not look very promising. We don't know the future, the only way to uncover it is to try. Did you hear about gradient descent? It is an algo for finding local maxima and to do its work it needs to calculate partial derivatives to choose where to go next. In reality doing things and measuring things are sometimes indistinguishable. So society would better try to move in all directions at once.
A lot of people believe that to fly to the Moon is a good idea. Maybe they believe it due to emotional reasons, but it is good enough for me, because it allows to concentrate enough resources to do it.
> the resources are better used for other purposes
It is much better use for $$$ than the war with Iran. I believe that the war have eaten more then Artemis already, and... Voltaire said "perfect is an enemy of good". The Moon maybe not the perfect way to use resources, but it is good at least.
I want humanity to continue to be explorers. The Moon is a good next thing, then asteroid mining, humans on Mars and Venus, and eventually colonizing the Milky Way.
Because one day, far far in the future, the humanity would reach out to the stars, and these are the first tiny steps to enable this. There's always the question of directing the resources, and this program is not that expensive, really - around $100bn. Given that fraud at COVID time alone is estimated to have cost the Treasury twice as much, seems like a worthy investment into the future.
It's quite telling that all the replies you're getting are about "hope" and "jobs" with no actual scientific reason. I guess we're taxing people for vanity space missions and jobs programs. Makes sense.
Because it is good for humans to have a thing to do. Not sure why this is not considered a valid reason. A lot of these 'it would be better to do X' assumes everyone has the same psychological profile as you. They don't. Many people are driven to explore and would go mad otherwise.
Man I’m tired of people only caring about money when it comes to space. Meanwhile they lose their shit when someone suggests that tax payers shouldn’t pay for people’s Coca-Cola.
I do much better with things to look forward to, or when I have a feeling that progress can be made. An interesting movie coming out, new music coming out. Or even better reminding me what humans are capable of above just grinding to get by or grinding to exploit others. Haven't been many moments of feeling progress lately.
Hopefully, in a few years we will figure out that hydrogen rockets can not reliably launch on time and we'll switch to less leaky fuels. Then maybe we won't need to pull 40 year old engines out of museums to dump in the ocean.
I'm all for human spaceflight, but the Senate Launch System seems the best argument for shutting down human spaceflight programs.
Well, we should have figured that out with the STS. That's what the STS was for - figuring out what technologies made for inexpensive, rapid spaceflight and which technologies don't.
Then the senate mandates the new rocket to use specifically the most expensive, problematic, least reliable technology. Completely designed to fail.
But they need to convince the people that it's worth the money, and the people are more excited when humans risk their lives, even if it is for nothing.
Is anybody aware of audio-only coverage of this mission? I'd have loved to just tuned into most of the launch like radio, rather than having my unwatched youtube running.
The politicization of everything and constant doomerish on here sure has echoes of early 2000s Slashdot. That's not a compliment. Reading the comments here is actually depressing. Human progress is never all at once, we can't even celebrate this triumph? Life is almost never "one or the other," the program could be scrapped to a junk yard and that wouldn't solve global hunger or global conflicts. Setting human eyes forward is good.
I pray to never reach a point of cynicism where my response to watching humans leave the planet on a rocket is immediately "meh, whatever, here's my political complaint of the week"
Global hunger's a great example. When we last left the moon (1972) 35% of the global population was undernourished. Today it's ~8%. Optimism is a choice, and generally a more rational one. That doesn't mean we don't have real issues.
Wish them all the best and safe travels. I’ll be tuning in as you never know when the next crewed mission will be, probably not another 50 years if advancements in space travel happen.
> “the expert evidence we have heard strongly suggests that the use of autonomous robots alone will very significantly limit what can be learned about our nearest potentially habitable planet” (Close et al. (2005; paragraph 70).
>
> Putting it more bluntly, Steve Squyres, the Principal Investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, has written:
>
> “[t]he unfortunate truth is that most things our rovers can do in a perfect sol [i.e. a martian day] a human explorer could do in less than a minute” (Squyres, 2005, pp. 234-5).
Yes, a robot car that drives on its own will be a better driver than most humans who text and drive, or have 400ms reaction times.
But making a machine that can beat a 110ms reaction time human with 2SD+ IQ – and the ability to override the ground controllers with human curiosity – for exploration is much harder. Healthy, smart humans have high dexterity, are extremely capable of switching roles fast, are surprisingly efficient, and force us to return back home.
So in terms of total science return, one Apollo mission did more for lunar science and discovery than 53 years of robots on the surface and in orbit.
They are not going to land on the Moon! They are just going to sit in a can for two weeks and take photos. (OK. Tthe can is on top of a lot of burning explosive material and if they don't aim correctly they will get in a weird trajectory that will kill them. Not for the faint of heart.)
I'm not sure if they can override the commands send from Earth, but turning on and off the engines like in the Apollo XIII movie is like 100 times less accurate than the automatic orders. It's not 1969, now computer can play chess and aim to go around the Moon better than us.
Also, there is still Artemis III to test the live support equipment with humans inside, before Artemis IV that is spouse to attempt landing on the Moon.
The SpaceX cameras of live launches are way better. This NASA stream is mostly all computer generated art after the initial pad launch. Hardly any live space feeds from the ship.
Just listened on the radio driving the kids to swim class! I'm curious, does anyone think the show For All Mankind provided any peer pressure or influence to help propel NASA to this moment?
It’s a fun idea to consider, but I suspect the true push is due to how capable China is proving to be in spaceflight. They’ve got plans for a manned mission to the moon and are eyeing the same craters at the Lunar South Pole as we are.
While the outer space treaty forbids claiming territory in space, it doesn’t forbid building a base and putting a “Keep Out” sign on the airlock.
As a huge fan of Ron D. Moore’s shows, and especially For All Mankind, I don’t see how it could possibly have (or have had) any meaningful impact on NASA or NASA-adjacent efforts. Especially Artemis.
Is there any website that gives me updates mirroring the livestream but in plain text? I won't be able to tune in for the launch but this is exciting and I'd like to follow the developments! I'm sure the answer is "Twitter" but I don't understand how that platform works.
This is the first live launch I've seen on TV (well, YouTube in this case) since the Challenger disaster. Was a nice relief to see this one go so smoothly.
You never watched any of the SpaceX launches? The first landing attempts? The massive explosions or 'RUD' - rapid unscheduled disassembly - events? The epic launch and synchronous landing of the twin Falcon Heavy side boosters?
Why not? Maybe you're not interested in space launches, in that case I understand. Otherwise I wonder why you did not follow SpaceX in its path to reusable rocketry.
Really it’s all the primes and sub contractors. NASA is more like a management layer. The difference between this and what commercial space companies do comes down to who’s paying and what’s the penalty for poor performance.
Not much motivation to get things done in a timely manner with cost-plus programs.
I'm just SO HAPPY we can talk about something that doesn't involve the Iran war, ICE etc. This is a really historic moment, I hope that the current and future administrations continue investing in space exploration. I've waited my whole life for this as the entire "action" happened before I was born. Hubble/James Webb/ISS are cool but Artemis is something else!
I get that not everyone, even on HN, thinks crewed-spaceflight is worth doing. And I certainly get that launching people to the moon doesn't makes up for the latest crap thing Trump is doing to the world.
But I really think that space exploration could be the thing that unites everyone, and the more unified we are--the more we feel like we have a common purpose--the easier it will be to solve our other problems.
I for one pledge to support space exploration (crewed or uncrewed) regardless of who is running the government. I will cheer Artemis II even though I voted against Trump. I will cheer if/when China sends people to the moon. I will even cheer if Russia does something cool in space.
What’s the margin of error on a free return orbit burn though? Isn’t there a scenario of being pointed slightly in the wrong direction or burning for too long throwing them off?
It is very disconcerting to see so many completely disregarding incredible technological innovation because other problems exist, especially on HN.
If we were not allowed to progress technology until everybody is 100% free of suffering, we'd never be able to create technological that may potentially lead to the alleviation of suffering. It all feels very crabs in a bucket - "I don't feel happy so nobody else should, and nothing should happen unless it is things that directly, immediately do things I want and solve problems I care about."
Its true that innovation isn't clearly shown in this mission; we also haven't flown humans out that far in more than 50 years either and while we have memories of it, our ability to even execute something like this must be built again. I'd rather see us doing this and 'pick up from where we were last time', than giving up on it or just using a stack that's not currently set to do this.
What Artemis is doing is not impeding innovation: its building our muscle back to work on such things; the discipline, rigor, scale, and attitude needed to execute such missions is unimaginable and orthogonal to the technical innovation and stack used. I also believe that its completely fine to use a 2000s-era flight computer, if that suffices for this purpose. Somehow, for such critical missions, my mental model is to use at least 10 year old technology that has stood the test of time, before going into space. If there's a need for the latest technology - then yes, it should be leveraged.
Not impending innovation is IMHO debatable - Artemis has definitely potential to motivate a lot of lay population & young people to go do space stuff and tech in general.
On the other hand SLS and Orion have gobbled insane amount of money that could have been invested to other science missions or even more efficient human space flight.
> our ability to even execute something like this must be built again
Why? Because "dreams"? "Reach for the stars"?
You know what I remember from the shuttle launches as a kid? I remember my school not being able to afford textbooks but apparently we had enough to spend billions on putting people in space for no reason.
I really resonate with this. I remember watching Comic Relief with Whoopie Goldberg as a kid, the whole show focused on homelessness in America, andshe said somthing like "why are we spending billions launching shuttles when people are sleeping on the streets?" That hit me hard. Especially because I was also the kid who was obsessed with space. It felt like a contradiction I couldn't square - I wasn't homeless, I think my school had books, but who remembers...
What shifted my thinking over tim was the actual numbers. NASA's entire budget during the shuttle era was roughly 1% of federal spending [1]. We chose to de-institutionalize heathcare which really impacted homelessness. We didn't have to, but it was choice. And we could of done both. The failure was our leaders choosing not to, and that choice had nothing to do with NASA.
And the shuttle era, for all its problems, gave us Hubble. That single telescope showed us the universe is 13.8 billion years old, that expansion is accelerating, that nearly every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. The shuttle crews serviced it five times to keep it running. I think it's hard to overstate what that one instrument did for our understanding of the universe.
I don't think the instinct you had as a kid was wrong at all! - And thanks for helping me re-activate some neurons- Whoopi made a real impession on me came from a real place. But I think we're lucky enough to live in a world where people fight to fix things on the ground and also point telescopes at the sky.
Developing something like this would push the frontiers of human technology. Without the Apollo program, not to mention anything else, the personal computer boom in the 1970s might have been delayed by a long time.
The Space Shuttle’s technology is indeed quite old, but by today’s standards it is not exactly outdated. What matters is that we have lost the ability to carry out that technology — or even the ability to organize and coordinate a project like that. Otherwise, the price of the SLS as an “off-the-shelf product” would not be so outrageous, and it would not keep getting delayed again and again. Technology gets forgotten and capability is lost as people and suppliers disappear. The fact that we could build the Saturn V half a century ago does not mean we could still build it today; even the fact that we could build the F-22 twenty years ago does not mean we could still produce it now once the production lines are gone. Restoring that capability is always a good thing, considering the indirect effects.
Strange that SpaceX doesn’t seem to be suffering from that limitation. Could it be that the real problem is pork barrel spending and government wastefulness?
Why would they go to the moon? They’re far too busy doing things that actually matter, such as slashing launch costs by 80% or more, while achieving the highest reliability of any launch system ever.
What are you talking about? SLS is on the way to the Moon now. Starship is still in development. SpaceX only exists because of massive NASA subsidy. Any success from SpaceX is thanks to NASA.
>We're redoing things we did before most people in this thread were even born
oh really? show me a picture of the dark side of the moon then
not a reconstruction, not touched up crap based on data like that black hole pic that went viral a few years ago, an actual photograph taken by an astronaut of the dark side of the moon
If we're going to be idealists and say that the money that'd come out of space exploration would go into education, there is an awful lot more money being spent on the business of killing people that you could also say should go elsewhere.
Do you honestly believe that by repurposing money from missions like these would suddenly free up money for text books? That’s not how it works. Especially not in 2026.
I guess probably we should stop spaceflight until we can go back in time and buy you a textbook.
Spaceflight is cool. Its a awesome thing that people can exist outside our gravitational well. We don't need to solve every possible problem before we do anything cool.
Almost all of what makes spaceflight “cool” today is inherited excitement and nostalgia, most of it unearned by the current generation of space endeavors.
Apollo was a humanity-defining undertaking. Repeating the same 60 years later with outdated technology at outrageous costs for pork barrel spending, while far superior launch systems have been available for a decade, is about as far away from being “cool” as I can imagine.
The average ESA environmental observation satellite is a lot cooler (and a lot more important) than this launch.
> is no technological innovation in the Artemis stack
Scaling is still engineering.
And the environmental control system, laser-optical communication systems and block-construction heat shields are new. For Artemis III, in-obit propellant transfer will be new and transformational.
The block construction heat shield was new on Artemis I. Now we just know that it is an unfixed problem that will be done differently on future missions.
And Artemis III has nothing to do with in-orbit propellant transfer, that will be SpaceX and Blue Origin testing independently of Artemis III.
It isn't moving forward. It's an ill-conceived Apollo 1.5 with the MIC calling all the shots and a lander that is MIA. China is doing Apollo 2.0 which is fine considering this is their first attempt. The US needs a modular launch system with orbital booster tugs that can be mixed in various combinations for different mission profiles. One big booster with all of the risk stacked onto billion dollar launches is not the future we should be working toward.
All of this stuff is really great but it's not worth the cost that was spent on it.
The thing you have to keep asking yourself is "what could 100 billion dollars of non-pork barrel spending have bought instead of what we ended up with?"
> All of this stuff is really great but it's not worth the cost that was spent on it
It’s building towards a system. If we get Starship and in-orbit propellant depots and a lunar nuclear reactor and then kill the programme, it will probably be judged by history as a success.
> what could 100 billion dollars of non-pork barrel spending have bought instead of what we ended up with?
Rien. This is the system we have, and it’s unclear such a program could have survived sans pork.
It may be building towards a system. Or it could all be cancelled in 3-4 weeks after these four explorers burn up on reentry.
And then all these hopes and dreams that you have will be gone, like that $100 billion dollars just up in smoke.
I can tell that you're as passionate about space exploration and colonization as I am, but this isn't the way my friend.
This program is coming at the cost of the Aldrin Cyclers and Von Braun Wheels that you and I know could and should have existed decades ago and while you may think that those things will come from this program I think you should consider the fact that root cause of this program's dysfunction is what is denying us this reality of humanity spreading across the stars.
> it could all be cancelled in 3-4 weeks after these four explorers burn up
We’d have wasted money. But we’d still be ahead. Artemis has funded a lot of development.
> can tell that you're as passionate about space exploration and colonization as I am, but this isn't the way my friend
In a perfect world? No. Is it a legitimate way? Absolutely. We’re still moving forward.
> This program is coming at the cost of the Aldrin Cyclers and Von Braun Wheels
Nobody is funding these. We’re beating the Chinese to land. That clicks. That sells. Space-based infrastructure is hallucinated competition.
> that root cause of this program's dysfunction is what is denying us this reality
The alternative is we spend NASA’s Artemis budget on Medicaid billing at autism centers in Indiana.
I’d prefer the vision you painted. But I won’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. This program moves us forward and funds roads to alternatives. Starship, for example.
What a simultaneously cynical and boring and completely useless attitude. Is it your position that if this hadn't happened 100b of otherwise more important spending would have happened?
I think that $100 billion, spent effectively could have resulted in Von Braun Wheels in LEO. I think that it could have resulted in teleoperated lunar mining and smelting that would be allowing us to build human bases on Earth now instead of a single fly by that may end in the death of these four amazing explorers.
It's silly to say there's no innovation here. These aren't legos that you just snap together. I'm sure there are innovations up and down the whole thing, using the old technology they have easily available to them.
No, it's not the most modern Rocket Lab or SpaceX project but they have immense drag on their process that those companies don't have and they still got the dang thing up and headed toward the moon.
That old technology wasn't remotely "easy" and the reason the top minds aren't going to NASA is because nobody wants to work on tech selected for maximum pork.
It's not about the Orion unit specifically but the fact that this is happening in the first place. This is simply a precursor to future missions and the construction of the Artemis Base Camp.
IIRC there are some hydrogen powered APUs on the SLS core stage, replacing the Hydrazine powered ones used on Shuttle (both on orbiter & SRBs). The solar panel control on the Orion also seems coo and useful, not to mention having cameras on the arrays for self-inspections.
I am sure there are more subtle innovations like this that would hopefully be useful on more sensible rockets and space vehicles in the future. :)
While that might be true, it is on course to the moon now. Starship hasn't really done anything close. So while cheaper might be on the way, it doesn't exist now. When Starship can do now, we can talk about if the Shuttle Leftover System is ready to be retired
Well what are they suppose to do other than continue where they left it? As far I understand purpose of Artemis mission it is to build a pernamently occupied base on the moon not to build better and better rockets now. I mean, it's not the best solution but it is proven to work and they perceive it as enough for now. I think it's very similar to some critical systems still running code written in cobol sixty years ago.
It’s interesting to compare to Apollo 8 (circumlunar Apollo mission). That mission culminated a year that saw escalation of the Vietnam War and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
It was a telegram, not a letter. As also immortalised at the end of the 1968 episode of ‘From The Earth To The Moon’, attributed there to an apparently fictitious person.
> It's much more popular to be doomer and a critic on the internet
Is it more popular? Or is it just easy? Dismissive “reads” are done by the picosecond; there is just much more to choose from than constructive thinking, which takes work.
That's true, most of these comments are just drive by pessimism by people who just skim headlines and don't really care to deeply understand the topics being discussed.
Why is pessimism, virtue signalling, doomerism, etc. so prevalent on the internet these days?
It wasn't always this way, was it? Am I misremembering "the golden years"?
Is it the failing economy? The K-shaped economy? The political and news cycle?
I'm excited for all of this stuff, and I can't imagine being downtrodden and pessimistic about our outlook. The only thing I'm down about are authoritarianism and monopolies, but those are outside of my control. Modern science and engineering rock.
Going to the moon is amazing. All this AI stuff is amazing. It feels like the future again.
I agree entirely. HN tends to be incredibly nitpicky and dystopian. I think it's because so many HNers work in dystopian software-only companies, not doing much in the physical world, away from the algorithms.
Incredible technological innovation is on the horizon. That's why we are not doomed this century. We can make it.
*hits 'reply', knowing there will be nitpicky comments because of course on HN these days, no positive point shall be left standing.
This is such a strawman argument because nobody expects nobody expects all wealth to be redistributed absolutely equally. What many of us would like however is a sufficient baseline.
I've recently seen a seris of Tiktoks from a 50 year old woman who lives in rural China on ~$1/day. She works in a shoe factory and makes ~$11/day. Her husband is a truck driver. Thing is, she has a house, a phone, an electric scooter, enough to eat, electricity and overall all her basic needs are met.
That's the baseline for modern China.
In the US, you'd end up homeless, eventually lose your car, find it impossible to keep your car, probably end up self-medicating with drugs, get harassed by police and ultimately your status will be criminalized and you'll end up being convict labor.
I don't need Jeff Bezos to have the same amount of money as everyone else but I do want, in the wealthiest country on Earth in particular, everyone to have secure housing health insurance, food, clothing and utilities.
There are other reasons too to criticize the SLS program: it's incredibly wasteful and is just another welfare program for defense contractors. The Artemis/SLS programs have cost ~$100 billion in the last 2 decades. That's staggeringly inefficient. Likewise, each Artemis mission costs ~$4 billion. That's ridiculous.
I, for one, would be much happier seeing these Moon missions if it wasn't such a giant scam to steal $100 billion from the government coffers.
Well said.
I find it interesting that a single proton-m total cost per launch is about 70 million. Of course its lift capacity is much smaller, but if the 4 billion figure is correct, it does seem like a ridiculous amount. But then again things are no different from the defense expenses.
How dare we want to fix the existential threats on the planet before we spend billions on a publicity stunt.
No, there's no possible way we "save humanity" with space exploration. The whole "eggs in more than one basket" thing is insane.
The resources required to establish a colony, get it self-sufficient, then able to grow, and then put enough people on it will take half a century and the planet is burning up today.
Do you think that had this not launched that it would have been spent on something else that would have "saved humanity" better?
US spends 4x as much on just nuclear bombs as the NASA budget for some perspective. Nuclear bombs are only 10% of the military budget, and as big as the military spending is, all of that is still only 15% of the federal budget.
It seems a bit ridiculous to be thinking NASA spending is in any way meaningfully holding us back from whatever "save humanity" spending we could be doing.
> the agency said it was confident that a change to the re-entry trajectory would be more than adequate to offset any spalling issues. Somewhat confusingly, they also announced their intention to switch to a new heat shield design, starting with Artemis III.
It's fine to be concerned, but this kind of take is why public agencies are damned no matter what they do. In the private sector, operating with the suboptimal resources you have while working on a better iteration is standard practice, even in industrial settings. But when you're a public organization, if anyone can find anything that is less than 100% optimal, the same people who complain about how slow the public sector is will complain that you're cutting corners, or that you're inept.
> the agency said it was confident that a change to the re-entry trajectory would be more than adequate to offset any spalling issues. Somewhat confusingly, they also announced their intention to switch to a new heat shield design, starting with Artemis III.
This is not confusing in the least. Engineers don't talk about safety in binary terms. It's not "safe" vs. "not safe". Instead, it's all about the probability of a bad outcome. At NASA, they compute the probability of Loss of Crew (LoC) and the probability of Loss of Mission (LoM).
For Artemis II, a change to the re-entry trajectory brings the LoC/LoM back to an acceptable level. For Artemis III, which a new shield design, they can get to the same LoC/LoM with a different trajectory (which gives them other benefits).
Stop thinking in terms binary terms. Everything is a probability.
Really hoping those of us who think NASA has jumped the shark won't have to keep ourselves from saying "I told you so" next week out of respect for the dead.
This is four people putting their lives at risk for poor engineering and bad project management.
The "right stuff" applies to the engineers too, but they've all unfortunately left Boeing and NASA.
This opinion may be unpopular here but it's hard to get excited about a colossal waste of taxpayer money after all the damage DOGE did. I don't understand how these NASA missions with questionable scientific value and obscene budgets get off the ground.
I mean I do understand, NASA funding is important to oligarchs. But still.
I personally find the grind easier when there also big things happening. You can't just cook the same, most basic, cheapest meal every day for your family and expect them to be happy. Who wants to join a club that doesn't do anything interesting? Same with society. It sometimes needs to dream, to aspire and inspire. To lift peoples head from the toil and look up.
Artemis was already set in stone well before DOGE came about and IMO if the federal government is going to set mountains of cash on fire I'd rather it be to NASA than half the crap the government wastes every year.
My point is that DOGE killed a bunch of government programs that help people while saving no money, yet this giant waste of money survived. Cancelling Artemis II alone in favor of III would save a billion dollars by itself.
Multiply by 1000. Then multiply by 10. And that is expenditure on another country but instead of for promoting equity (how can anyone be against DEI as it is properly defined???) it is spent on slaughter.
It was never intended to save money. It was about a crusade against remote work, eliminating civil servants who might be loyal to the Constitution rather than the president, and planting a seed of government dysfunction for later years.
That's your own thing. Think about it to applause the dedicated work of people who have spent their life building these missions and have to do this work through multiple different administrations.
What a sad, disappointing instinct. It completely divorced from reality to assume that "enjoy[ing] anything that comes from [the] USA" implies any sort of political allegiance to whoever happens to sit in the Oval office at that particular point in time.
There's no way you're "a big space fan" if the first thing you think of when you see a rocket launch that was announced 9 years is Donald Trump.
Finally something interesting. I'm familiar with dead Internet theory, the whole Lindy thing where culture died in the early 2010's etc. Economy stinks, global violence everywhere.
Going back to the moon is really acceptable distraction. I mean that seriously. I know it's technically not new but it will be amazing to see modern video and photographic pictures of the moon close up.
April 6: flyby
April 10: splashdown
After that, the exciting work will be in Starship making LEO and testing propellant transfer (a humanity first) [1] and Blue Origin testing its rocket and lunar lander [2], both scheduled for 2026, to enable Artemis II (EDIT: III), currently scheduled—optimistically, in my opinion—for next year.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starship_launches#Futu...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Moon_Pathfinder_Mission_1
Starship "making LEO" is not a significant challenge--the existing flights have explicitly targeted a (very slightly) suborbital trajectory. They could have done otherwise at any point, but for now it's more important to guarantee that the stage comes down immediately. None of their current objectives require more than ~1/2 of an orbit.
Starship v3 flying will be a significant leap, though. It's the first with the Raptor v3 engines and has many other improvements as well, such as updated grid fins and hot staging ring. It will be the first that achieves close to the intended capacity of ~100 tons.
Propellant transfer is indeed a significant challenge. They have already demonstrated internal transfers between tanks, but not between spacecraft.
Very exciting times ahead!
> Starship "making LEO" is not a significant challenge
Of course it is. I say this as someone who sturdied astronautics.
You’re broadly correct, though. My point is the action shifts to Hawthorne and West Texas for the next year or so. Then pivots back to NASA for Artemis IV.
It’s not a significant challenge compared to what they’ve already done.
Each of those previous tests could have easily gone to LEO running the engines just a tiny bit longer.
OPs point is that they intentionally didn’t.
achieving LEO means you need a relight to have a controlled reentry. You don’t want that if you want to avoid countries being mad at you while you iron out those controls
> It’s not a significant challenge compared to what they’ve already done
I don't know an aersospace engineer, within SpaceX or without, who would agree. When you increase speeds you increase energies faster. That has an effect on everything from pump performance to re-entry physics.
> Each of those previous tests could have easily gone to LEO running the engines just a tiny bit longer
Which risks recovery. Given they were replacing their Raptors in the next refresh, pushing an already-obsolete engine for shits and giggles doesn't make sense when you can get good data on e.g. skin performance.
> achieving LEO means you need a relight to have a controlled reentry. You don’t want that if you want to avoid countries being mad at you while you iron out those control
There is zero indication diplomatic pressure has been a constraint on the U.S. space programmes in the last couple years.
They didn't have to increase speeds, they already achieved orbital velocity. To circularize all they need to do is relight. Relighting an engine is very difficult for an engine like Raptor, but they've already demonstrated relight.
> They didn't have to increase speeds, they already achieved orbital velocity
My undertstanding is Starship didn't hit 17,000 mph [1]. LEO orbits tend to be 17,500 mph and up.
Like, I'm not arguing that SpaceX couldn't have circularised on previous tests. But it would have added material risk without any reward. And taking a ship, particularly a re-usable one, particularly a novel one, into its first orbital flight is always exhausting and novel.
[1] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4761/1#:~:text=As%20S...
Odd. As a side note, your comment was posted [dead]. I vouched it to restore it back to life.
This is the second time I’ve seen such insta-dead comments. (One was my own, and I thought I did something wrong. Now it looks like there’s some kind of bug in HN that’s killing on-topic comments when they’re posted.)
Your comment wasn’t deep or insightful, but not every comment should be. A simple rejection of a premise is certainly on-topic. So it’s hard to argue that your comment was “bad”. That narrows the possibilities down to a bug in the algorithm. Maybe the mods are experimenting with ML auto classifying whether new comments should be killed or not.
Aww. Thanks. Wonder what I did to piss of YC.
Nothing. Now that I’ve seen it once for me and once for you, both on comments that seemed lightweight-but-harmless, I’m convinced there’s some sort of bug. So don’t take it personally.
Also HN != YC. They’re separate organizations, iirc. When Sam Altman was running YC one of the first things he did was “refactor” HN so that it has editorial independence.
Either way, it would be hard to imagine someone from YC telling Dan “you should boost so-and-so” and him going along with it unless it directly benefitted the HN community.
"Project Gemini has entered the chat." Did I do that right? Anyway, what are we talking about?
> Did I do that right?
Unless you’re trying to make a reference to the Gemini programme. No.
How do they hope to make prop transfer work without a working heat shield to enable reuse of the tankers? Unless SpaceX pulls a hat trick, Starship is borderline useless.
I was asking this myself just an hour ago, thank you
Their objectives keep shifting and starship is far behind schedule. Sure, it's a success if you keep objectives small. They could have tried for LEO ages ago but didn't. Each launch should maximize learning and having small objectives is anathema to that. And very wasteful.
I think you meant Artemis III in your comment. Good info though, didn't realize they were relying on those two other projects for the next one.
HLS isn't going anywhere.
> HLS isn't going anywhere
I've been hearing this about every SpaceX project for the last twenty years.
Judging by the fact it's 2026 you must be writing this from the Mars base.
> Judging by the fact it's 2026 you must be writing this from the Mars base
SpaceX was started in 2001. It announced Falcon 9 and messaged its reusability ambitions in 2005.
Falcon 1 wasn’t going anywhere because making rockets is too hard. Falcons 5 and 9 weren’t going anywhere because medium lift is a different ball game. Falcon Heavy wasn’t going anywhere because timing that many engines impossible. Reuse is impossible. (The kerosene will clog everything.) Then, after refly: the total launch market will never be more than $5bn, so reuse is useless.
More recently stainless steel can’t work. Now it’s shifted to reuse and refurbishment being too difficult, or refueling being impossible because of boil-off. Because keeping shit from boiling, apparently, is just unsolved engineering. ಠ_ಠ
Not everything SpaceX does is genius the first time. But they’re ridiculously good at not persisting with stupid. The idea that a dozen rapid depot launches is somehow a gating concern, again, as a tech demo, we’re building the depot eventually, is just such a weirdly small and big concern.
> But they’re ridiculously good at not persisting with stupid.
They are persisting with HLS though.
> They are persisting with HLS though
Through what? What experimental data do you think renders this path foolish?
Because I’m seeing a rapid-reuse heavy lift system with a fuel depot being built.
I dunno, the fact that nobody can say how many fuel launches a moonshot is going to take, but at least 12? And that the lunar orbit chosen due to available energy makes rapid extraction impossible?
"How many fuel launches" is the error margin.
If they get less performance or more mission payload, they can add tanker launches. If they get more performance or less mission payload, they can remove tanker launches.
People ran into "the design is 10% heavier than planned for unexpected engineering reasons and now we have to make hard choices" on space missions far less complex than a literal Moon landing. SpaceX has externalized the "hard choices" into the tanker count, pre-emptively.
The lunar orbit of Artemis is defined mainly by SLS/Orion's performance, or lack of thereof. The specific NRHO was a Gateway choice, and might now be dead alongside it, but by itself, Orion can't get to low Lunar orbit. Which drives some peculiar design choices.
> the fact that nobody can say how many fuel launches a moonshot is going to take, but at least 12?
Nobody has ever done in-orbit propellant transfer or storage. We’re building it to see what those numbers shake out to, and how the propellant gets lost. (Boil off? Leaks? Incomplete transfer? Weird, unexpected degradation because space? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.)
If it works, it dramatically reduces the cost of lunar and deep-space access. You’re saying that isn’t worth it because it isn’t certain? This is spaceflight. Nothing is certain. We have to weigh risks and payoffs. And then mitigate them. The time for mitigating this risk is this (and probably next) year. If the refuelling is dumb, the plan changes—Blue Origin is testing its own approach on the same timeline.
Like, in Apollo 11 we fucked up the lander’s fuel budget. The astronauts were literally running out of fuel because a foreseeable problem, the surface being bumpier than expected, wasn’t contingency planned for over ten preceding missions. And we’re trying to do better than just retreading Apollo, because Apollo—strategically—failed as a platform for further manned spaceflight.
> the lunar orbit chosen due to available energy makes rapid extraction impossible
Isn’t NRHO an Orion limitation? Can Orion circularise on its own?
Also, rapid extraction hasn’t been a requirement for the Moon since ever? If you want rapid extraction, plant a ship that can motor off the Moon home in one shot as an emergency-egress option down the road. In the meantime, you’re days away from help under ideal circumstances; realistically, we don’t have rescue options.
Starship might be crap. But the bets look good, and the project is on the whole no more ambitious than the original Apollo missions. The criticisms you’re raising are either fundamental to the mission architecture because it’s developing a new spacefaring capability (refueling and rapid relaunch) or cost-cutting choices irrelevant to HLS (Orion’s second stages being efficient but underpowered).
Ughhh, Elon Moosk amirite? Such a fraud, because [???]
I don't really understand why these kinds of comments persist except as some pathological cope when confronted with a world that doesn't work the way you want it to.
It's not convincing, it immediately outs you as a zealot, it's counterproductive in every single way. Why keep doing it?
> don't really understand why these kinds of comments persist
One, you can make money criticizing Elon on the internet.
Two, controversy is catnip to the man. DOGE was a disaster. X and xAI look like aborted disasters. And he’s clearly gotten bored with Tesla. It isn’t hard to project that on SpaceX if you don’t know the heritage.
I fully agree with you, but the answer is obviously "because he's a very unpleasant man."
just saying: he is good at vaporware on a large scale and kind of a fucked up person. It's not weird people are skeptical. But he also has basically an endless money supply so he can throw money at problems and make them go away eventually. But his timelines are basically all lies used to get venture and retail money into the game.
That describes basically all founders though, minus the endless money supply. That's how business/sales works: make promises, build product later.
Also SpaceX, Tesla, PayPal, OpenAI, Grok and Neuralink aren't vaporware...
The claim fundamentally doesn't make any sense.
Cybertruck, Semi, Hyperloop, robotaxi, point-to-point rocket travel, tunnels, the list goes on.
Making promises and "it's essentially ready, it's just about regulators" are quite different, if not for Trump he'd be done for securities fraud.
This mission is Artemis II. Is Artemis III the one with a lander?
> Is Artemis III the one with a lander?
Not anymore. Artemis III is now a LEO systems check [1]. Comparable to Apollo 9.
(Side note: when did we switch from Arabic to Roman numerals?)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_III
There’s definitely “notation-fluidity” in Apollo mission patches. 10 is Roman, 11 is Arabic, 12 & 13 are Roman again.
Which is weird, because "X", "10", "XI", "XII", "12", "XIII", "13" are all unambiguous, while "11" could be read as "II" = 2 depending on the font. In other words, they switched exactly as to maximise ambiguity.
I don't know but the rockets and missiles have done that (Saturn V, Minuteman III, etc)
Starship is just obscene. The thing is never going to work for its designed purpose once you understand what the mission looks like (basically insane amount of refuel dockings while the thing is in orbit)
> insane amount of refuel dockings while the thing is in orbit
What's wrong with this? Lots of launches is fine until we build the scale required to make a proper depot worthwhile. (Which, by the way, is part of Artemis's plans. Though currently it looks like a bunch of glued-together Starship tankers.)
Also all those missions can be unmanned. If you want to get good at something then you do it a lot.
The only question is whether the cost of flying all those missions would be prohibitive: by the stated goals, starship should be able to do the refueling missions cheaper then an SLS launch.
Obviously if it can't then it's failed, but the point of it is cheap heavy lift to LEO which is very obviously quite valuable.
Building a big specialty rocket to get to the moon is waste.
Going to the Moon or Mars is a trojan horse.
Starship's true purpose is to compete with airlines in trans oceanic flights.
Musk has said so many times but then he intentionally obfuscates it with all the Mars and Moon talk.
But remember that you heard this before it was widely realized to be true; Starship isn't about going to Mars. Starship is about going to China.
Far too dangerous and noisy for that to ever happen, surely.
And too fragile/explodey for niche military uses (long range troop drops?)
If you're thinking of passenger service, perhaps it is a bit unattractive in the short term. No good launching and landing spots.
But for military use - think logistics. Rapid delivery of equipment to unusual places. This applies to civilian purposes as well. All kinds of use-cases for speeding up cargo.
The entire economics of Starship and rapid reusability was presented at the beginning of the Starbase work, way back when Hoppy was a thing. He's been sticking to the plan since then. You might want it to be fiction, but he's been very good at figuring out business plans to leverage his ultimate goals.
> But for military use - think logistics. Rapid delivery of equipment to unusual places.
Surely it's too fragile/explodey for military use - the whole thing's a very volatile fuel tank - could it survive being shot at, even a single high-powered rifle bullet (during landing, or even post-landing) without going boom?
>You might want it to be fiction, but he's been very good at figuring out business plans to leverage his ultimate goals.
Not very good on delivering tech though, which is what makes it more fiction than not.
Who makes the bar for "good at delivering tech" if the guy pushing spacex, starlink and tesla simultaneously doesn't reach it?
That sounds even stupider than using it to go to mars. I really hope it stays a fantasy like most musk projects.
What makes you think so?
I will be watching the launch from Europe, so it will be not earlier than half past midnight for us. My kids (9 and 10) are sleeping on the couch in front of the projection screen, so that they do not even have to get up when I wake them up at midnight, which I promised.
Just wanted to add my grain of positivity here. Godspeed Artemis 2!
> add my grain of positivity
The best of science, reason, research, engineering, training, expertise, co-operation...
The best of humanity. Le meilleur de l'humanité.
Even though you could question the whole Artemis concept, it's still extremely exciting watching the countdown with my son. I just missed the original Apollo flights and had assumed I would never see a moon landing in my lifetime. We may well not have a landing for quite some time yet, but it's still cool to see a Moon bound rocket standing on the launchpad...
I don't know if it's feasible for you, but if you can, try to take your kid to see a live rocket launch. The TV is grossly unable to display how awesome these things are in person.
Concur. My kids and watched a “small” Falcon 9 launch from the mainland park nearest the pad at Cape Canaveral. The noise alone was astonishing; bring binoculars to see detail.
It is one of the things I regret not ever getting to see a shuttle launch. The closest I ever got was when I flew over Florida while a shuttle was on the pad.
I got super, super lucky and managed to get VIP tix for the last one. IIRC I took these pics on my iPhone 5
https://imgur.com/a/Mlyxk9u
wow, that shot of it sitting on the pad is much cleaner than I'd have expected from that phone. i'm envious
I cheated somewhat. I had some good binoculars with me that day and I was juggling those in one hand while holding the iPhone to the eyepiece :)
(and I checked, it was iPhone 4 not 5)
I was wondering how the zoom was so clear. However, I'm familiar with the struggle of shooting that way. I don't have a phone mount for my telescope, but with enough struggle, I can get a decent pic from the viewfinder on my phone. So don't play it off as cheating. It was a bit of skill to get both the binocs and the phone steady and aligned enough to get it.
Either way, it's a shot not everyone is going to have posted to their socials.
The scale really is unfathomable for the human brain.
That's what I thought standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon. Pictures just do not do it justice. Same thing with Starship. My brain knows it's massive, yet feels underwhelmed looking at it on video. Musk should let his ego build replica Saturn V and a Shuttle next the Starship launch pad so there will be proper perspective available
Have you been to the rocket garden at KSC? The Saturn V isn't vertical, but they've got almost everything from the Redstone and later vertical. I was in Florida in 2018 and I think they were getting ready to display a pair of SRBs. They did have Atlantis inside, too. And of course a horizontal Saturn V.
I saw that Saturn V as a child once, too. I think that the Saturn V really made me the person that I am today. Seeing something so huge, that is literally engineered down to every last tenth of a millimeter - that was profound for a young child. I could not believe how detailed that rocket was, yet so huge. There should be an engineering term for the size of a machine divided by the smallest critical engineered component of the machine. I don't think any machine would have beat that in the Saturn V's day - maybe some ocean liners?
I've never been to KSC. I've been to Houston a few times. I couldn't imagine trying to have a Saturn V permanently standing would be an easy feat with both locations susceptible to hurricanes and tornadoes. Walking the length of it is still pretty impressive.
I come from a construction family, so I'd put some of the famous sky scrapers in that category too. Especially thinking about the crazy beam walkers like that famous photo of the guys riding the I-beam up eating their lunch on the way up.
A few years ago Spacex did a homage to that photo, with the crew working on the Starship. One of those amazing Human For Scale photos that emphasize just how huge that rocket is.
And a landing! S Padre is great for kids and rockets.
For the more adventurous and/or bilingual the beaches on the Mexican side seem to have awesome views too.
We lived ~60 miles North of the Cape when I was a young boy, and watching the Saturn V's go on the way to the moon was a forming experience.
I lived in Port Orange FL until i was 12, during night launches my dad would take the family to New Smyrna Beach or some where a short drive South where we watched the shuttles come up over the water somehow. I can't remember the details it was a lonnnng time ago haha. I do remember the launches sounding like popcorn popping.
I live in Dallas now and will be turning 50 soon, i want to catch the next Starship launch live but would have to time it perfectly to get time off of work ahead of time.
You probably watched from the Florida side of the intercoastal waterway between the main part of Florida and Cape Canaveral. Because of the 3-mile minimum and Patrick AFB it is pretty hard to find a good watching place that is actually on the cape.
80 miles for me! I was a Space Shuttle era kid though. Saw the Challenger disaster during my lunchtime. And then on perpetual replay for the rest of the week on WESH/WCPX/WFTV most likely. Even still, just knowing we were launching all those people into space was awe-inspiring.
> I just missed the original Apollo flights and had assumed I would never see a moon landing in my lifetime.
The PR Chinese might want to go for a significant landing, too, just for the prestige?
It's even more exciting when you realize that the last crewed mission beyond Low Earth Orbit was 1972 and each person on that spacecraft today are younger than that.
Its going to be a first for me and my son as well. Looking forward to tonight to make an even over it.
Minutes after launch they reached "ten thousand miles per hour". That's 2.78 miles per second. Nuts. No doubt the speeds go even higher later too.
I'm sure people here are already familiar with the speeds these things go, but that's the first time I've confronted a fact like that and it blew me away.
Escape velocity is 25,020 mph (6.95 mps), so not completely surprising.
Note that escape velocity applies to a situation without continued propulsion and also without air resistance, but still you can imagine that the order of magnitude is similar.
Not surprising if you know that. Pretty surprising to me who didn’t.
Maybe you’ll like this too: The Earth’s speed around the sun is around 67,000 mph. So it moves significantly faster than the rocket, though not orders of magnitude. The solar system itself moves at 43,000 mph relative to its local neighborhood.
But speed is always just relative to some frame of reference. Acceleration, on the other hand, is absolute, and so might be the more interesting thing to look at here.
Acceleration is change in speed, so it is, by its very nature, relative just like speed is.
If I fall, I might accelerate at G meters per second, relative to the earth, but I don't absolutely accelerate. If the earth decelerates at the same time, I'm now both accelerating an decelerating. It's relative.
It’s absolute in the sense that you can determine your acceleration without any external reference. You feel a certain force (like what you feel in an elevator). That’s your acceleration. You don’t accelerate relative to Earth, or relative to anything else. You accelerate relative to when you wouldn’t be accelerating (your inertial rest frame, a state of free fall).
If you are in space accelerating and the Earth would decelerate (which is just an acceleration in the other direction), you would still feel exactly the same force (minus Earth’s gravity, to the small extent you’d still feel it), and people on the Earth would feel the Earth’s acceleration. (For them it would feel like “down” isn’t perpendicular to the Earth’s surface anymore, or as if the Earth’s surface was tilted.)
When you sit on a chair on Earth, the pressure you feel on your butt is your acceleration upwards. If there was no chair and no ground (and no air), so that you’d be in free fall, that’s when you’d have zero acceleration. Your inertial rest frame is the trajectory you’d take in free fall. When you’re sitting on a chair, or lying in bed, or standing on the ground, you’re accelerating upwards relative to that rest frame, and that’s the pressure you feel on your butt, or on your body, or under your feet.
I am in a gravitational field. I have no idea what my acceleration is, I just know that I feel 1G (I could be falling in a stronger gravity and only feel 1G, or I could be climbing in a weaker gravity and feel 1G). The only way of determining it is to see if I'm moving relative to the stuff around me. Even then, that's not definite - I could be in an elevator and everything around me is also accelerating.
I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just pointing out that there are circumstances where "you can determine your acceleration without any external reference" isn't true. You might even say that this is relative to your circumstances ;)
According to general relativity, you (and the ground) are accelerating at 1g, and feel weight because your inertia resists that acceleration. If you jump off a cliff, you'll stop accelerating for a bit, until the ground hits you.
Edit to reply:
> I am standing on the ground. I feel 1G acceleration. My speed is not changing. How much am I accelerating?
You are accelerating at 1g through curved spacetime. Newtonian "speed" behaves strangely in curved spacetime.
> According to general relativity, you (and the ground) are accelerating at 1g
I don't believe this is correct. If I lock two rockets in opposition to each other, they aren't accelerating. They're pushing at each other. And their propellant is accelarating away. But their displacement and orientation are unchanging, which means their velocity is zero which means acceleration isn't happening.
Similarly, the normal force resists your gravitational force to produce zero net acceleration. (An object at rest in a gravity well is its own local frame.)
> If you jump off a cliff, you'll stop accelerating for a bit, until the ground hits you
I don't believe this is correct. In GR, free fall is still inertial motion. You're just free of fictitious forces and thus following the curvature of spacetime.
As I understand it, in GR acceleration is indistinguishable* from gravity, so while you're on the ground feeling 1 gee, you're being accelerated up at 1 gee, and so is the ground.
When you're in free-fall, that's when you're in a non-accelerating frame, even though a non-relativistic description** would say that you are, in fact, accelerating.
Caveat: I only do physics as a hobby, neither academically nor professionally, so take with appropriate degree of doubt.
* for point-like observers at least
** ignoring rotation and curved orbits
It is correct, and you're also right that two rockets tethered to each other would not feel acceleration. The acceleration we feel in Earth's gravitational field is affecting our speed, though - it's slowing down the speed at which we move towards the future.
> you're also right that two rockets tethered to each other would not feel acceleration
I just realized that the energy of the exhaust would warp local spacetime. So one might feel acceleration depending on how that geometry settles.
I am standing on the ground. I feel 1G acceleration. My speed is not changing. How much am I accelerating?
You say later that you think gravity and acceleration look the same but cannot be the same , which is funny since that’s exactly what relativity says: if two things are indistinguishable from each other even in principle, then they must be the same. Which is what led Einstein to realize that gravity really is just a curvature in space time. Hard to wrap your head around that! But if you study relativity, you eventually understand what being relative actually means.
You need to take into account your entire 4-vector for speed. You don't just have a speed in the 3 spatial coordinates, you're also moving thorough the "time" coordinate, and that is happening at a slower pace near a large mass like the Earth than it would of you were far away from here.
You are more quickly being carried by the ground further from where you would otherwise be. Hope that clears it up.
Not really, no. The ground isn't moving. I'm not moving. I get that if the ground wasn't there, I would be moving, but that's not the same thing, I think?
Like I said in another response, I have always been told that acceleration is change in velocity over time. If my velocity is not changing, I don't understand how I'm accelerating?
I do understand that gravity exerts a force that is indistinguishable from acceleration, which was my original point. But that doesn't mean it is acceleration.
You can always hold an accelerometer in your hand. If you did so now, assuming you're on Earth's surface, it'd register approximately 9.8m/s/s pointing in the upward direction.
You could also perform one of many historical experiments, such as dropping an object from an elevated height with careful timing, or rolling a round ball down a gently sloped track, and so on.
Yes, because there is no way of differentiating between acceleration and gravity. Which was my point.
You're conflating coordinate and proper acceleration.
I don't think I understand the difference. I have always been told that acceleration is change in velocity over time. Is that wrong? Are there other types of acceleration?
> I have always been told that acceleration is change in velocity over time. Is that wrong?
Not per se, but it's more complicated when relativity gets involved.
Wikipedia has some decent starting points:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_velocity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_acceleration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-acceleration
"You feel a certain force" is that true in zero-g?
Yes
Well, technically no. Zero g, as in zero gravity, is force less. We don’t have a region of space we know of that can block gravity.
Think of it more as "speed is the indefinite integral of acceleration" with the extra constant denoting a choice of inertial reference frame.
Thank you for that precision "without continued propulsion", because when talking about rockets, physics teachers always talk about escape velocity, as if it was an absolutely necessary condition to escape earth's gravity.
But can't you escape gravity slower, just by going higher and higher at lower speed? Like a plane? (ie not vertically, but at an angle)
No, the absolute minimum speed IS required. Anything below that and you’re just making your orbit elliptical.
That seems wrong. If you have a way to maintain enough propulsion for long enough you can escape the gravity well at any arbitrarily low speed. You "just" need to maintain that speed long enough for the escape velocity from the gravity well to go below it as it diminishes with distance from the mass.
Artemis II won't fly by the moon until Day 6, but it only took Apollo 8 to Day 4 to get to the moon. Looking at the wiki for Apollo 8, it shows the moon was 218k miles at launch while they said the moon is currently 240k, so it still looks like Apollo was moving faster than Artemis.
My understanding is Artemis II orbits earth for 23.5 hours before heading to the moon while Apollo 8 did so for under 3 hours, so that accounts for some of the difference.
That would account for some of it. I was surprised the TLI burn wasn't until tomorrow, but I guess we didn't get the Apollo 2-7 tests of the system either, so maybe those are getting compressed into the additional time in earth orbit before TLI???
It's kind of said that we are having to do all of this repeated work just to get to where we've already been even if we are doing it on a much more accelerated schedule.
Apollo put a lot more burden on the Service Module than Artemis plans to put on the Orion. Apollo put the CSM/LM into a low lunar orbit while Artemis plans to put Orion into a high lunar orbit and make the Starship carry a lot more delta-V to land from a much higher velocity (and then accelerate back up to that velocity when coming back).
On top of that there weren’t really solar panels in the 1960s so the Service Module had to carry tons of chemicals to produce electricity, as well as extra fuel for all of that weight. As a result it was massively overbuilt compared to anything we’d try today and even so had to take an expedited flight path to the moon of 3 days in order to conserve operational lifetime. Artemis does not have nearly as severe constraints on either the Orion or the future Starship and so can afford to take a more fuel efficient 5 day coast up to the Moon and make the design tradeoffs on Orion that that entails.
Admittedly, I let this launch sneak up on me, and I just haven't paid attention to the flight details. Thanks
I knew someone who knew someone, so I got to see STS-133 from the VIP area.
Nine minutes after launch, it was in orbit.
Nine minutes.
Yup, that's how long it takes. There are a bunch of competing requirements and 9 minutes to orbit is the sweet spot, you can't change it much in either direction. If you go slower you waste all of your fuel just holding yourself up against gravity ("gravity drag" which is a bit of a tongue in cheek engineering term) If you go much faster you're accelerating too hard for your passengers or your structure.
To understand gravity drag think about the rocket firing just hard enough to hover 1 meter above the pad, you burn out all your fuel in 10 or 15 minutes and go nowhere...
In the other direction if you want to accelerate harder you need to make your structure stronger so you need to burn more fuel per second and have to displace some fuel in exchange for more structure and you keep doing that until you're so heavy you can't produce any more acceleration and you're all engine and structure and no fuel.
A Dodge Challenger SRT Demon can also reach 10,000mph in 4 minutes if it held its 0-60 acceleration over the whole span.
So yes, you can buy a car today that'll let you feel the G's like you're a space pilot.
The acceleration of a rocket is slower than a normal car at lift off. It's pulling about 1.2G, but 1G of that is fighting gravity, so effective acceleration is only 0.2G. Almost any car can do that at low speeds.
But a car's acceleration slows almost instantly. The rocket just keeps accelerating faster as the tank empties and it gets lighter. By main engine cut off it might be pulling 5G.
One fact that I found unintuitive (while we're at cars doing things they can't):
If you could drive your car straight up vertically, you'd have to cruise just for an hour or so at 100 km/h (<65 mph) until you reached space. It's not that far.
However space is not orbit. Space is easy, orbit is hard. https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/
NASA uses metric units even under Trump. So this is 16093 km/h or 4.474 km/s .
ICBMs also have a similar speed at the terminal warhead stage — only the direction is different.
I’d prefer to cheer for something that’s primary objective isn’t killing people. So there’s that, too.
Just a friendly reminder that midterms are this year.
If we survive that long.
We'll survive; not sure about our present voting rights.
I was thinking the exact same thing when they announced the speed. I assume the top speed of Artemis will be at least double that too...
Well, notions of speed are a little tricky for spaceships, but yeah, Artemis's top speed is going to be right when it starts reentry: about 25,000 MPH.
It will be slower, eventually. The moon orbits at about 2300 mph, and as Artemis gets further from Earth, it will slow down to a similar speed.
It is a bit chilling to watch these astronaut profiles having just read yesterday about the heat shield issues observed on the prior mission, and that this will be the first time we can test the heat shield in the actual pressures and temperatures that it will have to endure.
Godspeed crew of Artemis II.
It'll probably turn out fine (in the same way that you'll probably survive one round of Russian roulette.) I am quite nervous about this though.
Get nervous in 10 days, they won't need a heat shield until reentry.
10 days? Hope they brought snacks
Seriously though I hope they're able to get up and walk around
I don't know if I could handle that 10 days in that small room
I've heard it feels a lot bigger once you're in freefall. Imagine if you could use all of your room's surfaces as floor space. I would think your room would feel a lot bigger.
Astronauts are made of different stuff. Truly the best of the best.
They can move around after they switch from launch to spaceflight config. Apparently they also have some exercise gear for the journey.
It is just the capsule though? There's no stage under them/another cylinder? Module
Trying to imagine how big the thing is like 10x10 feet room
Just the capsule - there is a module but it can’t be reached and is for more engines that they will leave behind.
ABC News says 330 habitable cubic feet or about the interior space of two minivans.
330 cubic feet =~ 9.3m²
> ABC News says 330 habitable cubic feet or about the interior space of two minivans
I did lockdown in a ~450 sq. ft. Habitable under 400. Partner. Cat. Me. The astronauts will be fine.
~450 square feet, with how many feet in the third dimension? You probably had an order of magnitude more volume than 330 cubic feet there.
> You probably had an order of magnitude more volume than 330 cubic feet there
I’m 6’, so that’s the usable volume. (I’m not claustrophobic heighwise.)
I honestly don’t see an issue spending a couple days with folks I respect and admire in close quarters for ten days.
You don't get it. Your 400sqft apartment needs to be shrunk by a factor of 6 to have the same area as the Orion. Try living in an 8x8 foot square for a couple weeks.
> You don't get it
Have you ever been on a boat?
The boat you can step outside of, have a sky
> boat you can step outside of, have a sky
Not in a storm you can't! Granted I didn't do ten days. But I was with two other people for close to a week and it was...fine. We're old friends. There were moments it got annoying. But it was never boring or restrictive. We just played games, drank, looked out of the portholes, cursed hangovers and talked the one person who occasionally wanted to call it.
Seems like its at least bigger than the Apollo Lunar Module from the 70's
And with modern forms of entertainment to make the trip less boring.
> And with modern forms of entertainment
"We're sorry, your Prime subscription appears to have cancelled. Would you like to renew it? We can send you a text message to get this started ..."
This capsule isn't part of your Netflix Household. Create an account to enjoy your own Netflix today.
I wonder if Starlink works if the dish is above the satellites. Technically GPS can work from the moon.
Starlink uses phased arrays pointed at the ground but lasers between satellites. So it wouldn’t be impossible to spin one around and have it bounce traffic to earth through the swarm pointing down.
But these satellites are very close to earth compared to the moon. It wouldn’t only save 0.3% transmit power vs just sending right to the surface. It’s very unlikely the consumer antennas could manage hitting an earth satellite from the moon.
> Technically GPS can work from the moon.
Well, one side of it.
Actually, it's all dark.
I don't think I would be bored in this trip!
Forget about the snacks, I wonder about the toilet in 10 days in such cramped living conditions.
Toilet fan has already jammed. Not sure if this means the shit has, or hasn't, hit the fan.
They fixed it, fortunately:
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/theres-a-bit...
I hope they will be able to stretch their legs on the moon.
They're not getting off at the moon, it's just a fly by.
... it's an orbital mission. They're orbiting the moon, not landing.
> in the same way that you'll probably survive one round of Russian roulette
Is that with or without spinning the chamber between rounds? The odds are worse if you spin each time. They get worse as the game goes on if you don't spin.
> The odds are worse if you spin each time.
How do they get worse if you spin? It’s still 1/6 odds of dying,iid events.
Erm no. If it goes a round and gets passed without spinning, the chances change of course. It is 1/6, 1/5, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, .. 1
I didn't think of the gun getting passed around. To me, "one round" is pulling the trigger once after spinning the cylinder with one bullet. 1-in-6 chance of dying, you'll probably live. That's how I feel about this mission, I think they'll probably live, but man I'm nervous.
... 1/0
It's 6/11 overall chance of dying if spinning, no?
From a quick search, this page explains it: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/RussianRoulette.html
Dude, it's a nerd-snipe conversation derailing attempt. Don't take the bait.
Talk about space stuff here, not the statistical nature of Russian roulette.
How about don't tell other people what they can and can't talk about, and just ignore side threads you don't care about?
There are about 500 different HN browser extensions that let you collapse threads, btw.
Not parent, but I am genuinely curious: is there a Hacker News browser extension you'd recommend? The text is so small by default that even though I'd like to read on my desktop, I typically only browse it via the Hacki android app.
I vibe-coded one using one of the web-based tools (I think Replit?) maybe a year and a half ago. Just added vote tracking by username, tagging, colored usernames, that sort of thing. Only took a on average 1-2 prompts per feature, I did it in under an hour start to finish.
I had to watch "go at throttle up" on replay on the news in 1986 for the entire year, like almost every newscast
I was only a teenager and it burned into my brain badly
To this day cannot watch any launch with people onboard live
The event itself was a few years before my time, but after reading about it and eventually watching the historical news footage, the phrase "go at throttle up" also seared itself into my brain, and ever since I flinch when I hear it.
Truly. I'm not sure why anyone needs to be on the rocket at all, let alone our best and brightest.
Because human beings are remarkably capable, especially the best and the brightest. There's a great paper called the "dispelling the myth of robotic efficiency." https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article-abstract/53/2/2.22... // https://lasp.colorado.edu/mop/files/2019/08/RobotMyth.pdf
Yes, a robot car that drives on its own will be a better driver than most humans who text and drive, or have 400ms reaction times.
But making a machine that can beat a 110ms reaction time human with 2SD+ IQ, and the ability to override the ground controllers with human curiosity is much harder. Humans have high dexterity, are extremely capable of switching roles fast, are surprisingly efficient, and force us to return back home.
So in terms of total science return, one Apollo mission did more for lunar science and discovery than 53 years of robots on the surface and in orbit.
How does any of that matter for this mission, which will not be landing on the moon?
Because many small steps are required before every giant leap.
I would like to point out that the current misadventure in the ME has cost at least $38,035,856,006 in 32 days. And that won't receive half of the "this is a waste of money" critiques this mission will. And there are a ton of people who are against that excursion.
Most people who will come across this will react with either extreme negativity or indifference. Very few people will react positively. This thread itself is evidence of that. This is a nerdy community filled with people who are deeply positive about space exploration and excluding my comments, the straw poll was,
Only a plurality of comments were positive. 88 comments were neutral or negative.When I see numbers like that ($38 billion) thrown around I always wonder: Where did that money go? In the best case, it stayed in the economy in the form of salaries and such. In the worst case, it goes directly into an offshore pile of mega-wealth where it won't benefit the economy and likely won't even be taxed. Is there any way to determine where on this continuum this program stands? I'm guessing the 1960s space program, while incredibly expensive, was firmly on the "money stays in the economy" side.
That kind of money, even if it goes to a single person, doesn't get taken out of the economy. No one puts it under the mattress. It's invested, so it's basically given to other people in exchange for a promise of equity / future returns.
It might not be the allocation of capital we like, but it doesn't disappear.
> No one puts it under the mattress. It's invested, so it's basically given to other people in exchange for a promise of equity / future returns.
You make wealth concentration sound like a good thing somehow. This was publicly collected tax money, that will go on to enrich some already rich douchebag.
Well, there is a financial 'sink' - stockpiles and ammunition or other non-reusable military gear are basically the definition of money 'destroyed'. Their political value is almost non-existent actual money. If any, at all.
> stockpiles and ammunition or other non-reusable military gear are basically the definition of money 'destroyed'
Goods like longer-lasting food, medical supplies or a strategic oil reserve are not wasted. The money that went into supplying them has gone back into the economy, and they serve a more strategic purpose than the market participants could have borne (i.e. societal insurance policies). The same could also be said of military stockpiles, and continuing to buy them sustains a capability that is hard to get back once lost.
> How does any of that matter for this mission
This is a fair question. The closest answer I can get is eyes and ears onboard complement sensors.
It's also rehearsing/testing/experience gathering for an eventual mission that will land people on the Moon again. Missions don't happen in isolation.
> Missions don't happen in isolation
True. I wasn’t thinking about training the ground crews.
Only in the last few minutes, the livestream actually covered various goals this mission - explicitly a test mission - is meant to achieve. For example, one they just mentioned is they're going to be doing some docking maneuvers practice.
This is not just training the current flight crew and ground crews, but is also generally testing the entire system - including operations and hardware too, with feedback important to logistics and component manufacturers, etc. With possible exception of Falcon 9 launches, space missions are still infrequent enough that each of them is providing knowledge and experience meaningfully relevant to all work in and adjacent to space exploration and space industry.
> testing the entire system - including operations and hardware too, with feedback important to logistics and component manufacturers, etc.
This can be done autonomously. The human training cannot.
Not just yet. Give it a few more years for AI (haha, another thing yielding stupid amount of value to everyone, that people are totally oblivious of - your antibiotics comparison in another subthread kinda applies too) - but for now, having actual people with full sensory capabilities, able to look at stuff on-site (and hear, and smell), is something we can't fully cover with computers and sensors. We can recover that and more data later, but it's a delayed, after-the-fact analysis. There's value in immediate feedback and immediate decisions.
> for now, having actual people with full sensory capabilities, able to look at stuff on-site (and hear, and smell), is something we can't fully cover with computers and sensors
Is this really helpful for a tech validation flight? We can put those sensors onboard.
> We can recover that and more data later, but it's a delayed, after-the-fact analysis. There's value in immediate feedback and immediate decisions
To a degree. We’ve validated vehicles remotely for LEO enough times that I’m sceptical we need humans for that. (Again, we do for ground-crew interaction training.)
To test the stuff that will allow to land humans on the moon
More like to test the stuff that will take them to the ship(s) that will allow humans to land on the Moon.
Are you referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troctolite_76535 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Schmitt#NASA_career)?
Yes, and more!
Scientific papers are a pretty poor measure of productivity so here's another one. We know about the existence of He-3 thanks to samples brought back from astronauts on the moon. Astronauts setup fiddly UV telescope experiments on the moon, trying to set up a gravimeter to measure gravitational waves, digging into the soil to put explosive charges at different ranges for seismic measurement of the moon's subsurface... They were extremely productive. Most of what we know about the moon happened thanks to the 12 days spent on the lunar surface.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Ultraviolet_Camera/Spectro...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Surface_Gravimeter
I’ve wondered for years if this could be quantified. Three orders of magnitude totally justifies the cost, if you care about science.
You’ve got to normalize by dollars spent, though.
If your goal is to save money, just ignore the moon. This is not the west indies to be exploited, at least not yet. These are scientific missions, not economic missions.
The philosopher Randall Munroe once wrote:
Randall Munroe of xkcd? I like his work but I'm not sure I'd call him a philosopher...
ok sure but are humans a full decade of NSF budget better than robots
a bunch of robot cars broke down middle of wuhan highways today.
Because the goal of the program is to return humans to the moon. Artemis I was the unmanned test. This is the first manned test, and what they learn will support the subsequent missions that eventually land humans on the moon.
This is the same way that all manned spaceflight programs are conducted. You iterate and learn a little bit at a time. "Move fast and break things" doesn't work here. :)
I suspect it's the optics of it.
If you can fly people around the moon, then landing people on the moon is a more reasonable next step.
I agree that it may not be entirely logical, but keeping public and funding opinion positive & invested _is_ important.
edit: I thought RocketLab flew their elecron rocket around the moon a few years ago? So it's definitely doable... so again I think it's about the optics.
> I suspect it's the optics of it.
That's probably the justification for sending four people. First test flight probably could have been done with one or two pilots.
Because they want to be on the rocket. To see the moon up close with your own eyes? It's spiritual.
I understand why they want to fly. I don't understand why the people is fine paying taxes for that.
Some are.
Money being fungible and all, the rest can pretend their tax money is going exclusively to their favorite programs, whether that's healthcare or environment or building roads or starting wars or funding more startups or whatever.
The space program has created some great technology we use every day now.
That we probably could have developed without the space program for a fraction of the cost, if we're being honest.
> That we probably could have developed without the space program for a fraction of the cost, if we're being honest
I don't think so. Some people are good at small tasks and stewardship. Some people want to ambitiouslyl build. If there isn't a space program, the engineers who were inspired to join NASA cannot be assumed to have gone into semiconductors or material science. They probably wound up, in the alternate timeline, bureaucrats or financiers.
> If there isn't a space program, the engineers who were inspired to join NASA [...] probably wound up, in the alternate timeline, bureaucrats or financiers.
I guess this is why in this timeline, all engineers in the world are at NASA working on sending humans to space, and everybody else in the world is a bureaucrat.
Do you actually know any kind of engineering that is not happening at NASA? Because it may explain your bias here.
They did say "or financiers". There's an old quote:
- https://www.ft.com/content/0f788814-3ee0-339d-9680-71d6c7596...Personally, I'd also add "Big Tech" to the list, as per a more recent quote:
- https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/747678-the-best-minds-of-my...> guess this is why in this timeline, all engineers in the world are at NASA
How does this follow? Are you arguing the Moon programs didn’t increase American engagement in STEM?
The point is the people who worked on a partial solution to a terrestrial problem because they were working on space may not be inspired—or incentivized—to work on that problem directly. We’re willing, as a society, to spend big on the Moon. Spending big on creek maintenance and desal, comparatively, is boring. Yet both benefit from the first.
> you actually know any kind of engineering that is not happening at NASA?
Yes. Have you done any heavy engineering?
> it may explain your bias here
Do tell me, someone who has never worked at or particularly close to NASA, what my bias is here.
> Are you arguing the Moon programs didn’t increase American engagement in STEM?
Nope. You are arguing that without a space program, people don't go into STEM and instead become "bureaucrats or financiers". I am saying that this is preposterous.
> We’re willing, as a society, to spend big on the Moon.
No. Society doesn't have a say in how that money is being spent, that's my original point.
The current one is?
The current one will
Bro, of all the stupid shit we spend taxes on ($50 billion on corn subsidies), you're mad about space exploration?
I will guess that farm subsidies go to... well, farming. Doesn't sound completely ridiculous at first sight.
> you're mad about space exploration?
Exploration? It's not exploration at all: it's sending 4 humans for a 10 days trip around the Moon. I wish they used the money for actual space exploration, though.
> will guess that farm subsidies go to... well, farming
Or not farming. Lots of CRE. Also constant bail-outs because e.g. the soybean farmers got tariffed. Also ethanol.
Why does Rice play Texas?
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
https://www.rice.edu/jfk-speech
The amount of my taxes that went toward people flying on this trip is so small to be not worth considering.
I'm much more concerned about my tax dollars going toward the US military, especially with Trump wanting another $200B so he can murder more people in Iran while making the world and the US measurably less safe.
Independent of how scientifically awesome this is, this is probably the most cost effective long term propaganda. Why waste money on posters when you can orbit the moon.
Because of all the bullshit that the government wastes our tax funds on, this is the least bullshit.
It is a test of the spacecraft. They need people onboard to test all the human systems. But yes, if this was a purely scientific flyby and not part of a larger manned program, machines would do it fine.
Yeah. Doesn't really make sense. The entire mission could be done remotely.
Even with a goal of eventually putting humans on the moon, it'd be better to do an automated run, measure everything in the cockpit, and put in sandbags and/or something to consume O2 to make sure the CO2 scrubbers are working correctly. It's maybe cruel, but a few dogs would work fine for that sort of thing. A flame would be better, but it's pretty dangerous.
The first mission in decades doesn't need to have humans in it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_I
Thanks. I should have looked this up before posting.
I mean, that's how these heat shields work. They aren't reusable, you can't test them and then use them again. Or do you mean the design? We already did Artemis I.
See this recent blog post about it (I am not the author): https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....
It says that it is not safe to fly. They are sending humans without having tested in real conditions that their design was sound, GIVEN that the first time they did that (without humans), it turned out that their design was unsafe.
An article written by a "Polish-American web developer, entrepreneur, speaker, and social critic" says it's not safe to fly. And? What do the astronauts flying on board with significantly more information say?
There is also an old article written by a professional bongo player about the Challenger explossion. He has other hobbies, but he was not a Rocket Scientist https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v2appf.htm
The takeaway, is that the software was fine, but other systems like the main engine used too much cutting edge technology and have a lot of unexpected failure modes and too many problems like partialy broken parts that should no get partialy broken. [For a weird coincidence, Artemis II uses the same engines.] He concluded that when you consider all the possible problems the failure rate was closer to 1/100, but management was underestimating them and the official value that was 1/100000. [Anyway, the engines didn't fail in Columbia, it was one of the other possible problems.]
The articles explain that the shield has problems but management is underestimating them again. Let's hope the mission goes fine, but in case of a explosion it would be like a deja vu.
Anyone can write an article when the hindsight is 20-20. You can make all sorts of justifications about what happened.
Much different than predicting future.
Did you read it? They're prolific here and the essence of the post is a bunch of citations and quotes from Nasa's own staff and literature.
Yes, I've also read material outside of that article from NASA's own staff and literature.
Statements like this:
"Put more simply, NASA is going to fly Artemis II based on vibes, hoping that whatever happened to the heat shield on Artemis I won’t get bad enough to harm the crew on Artemis II."
Are just so intellectually dishonest and completely ignore the extensive research and testing that's gone into qualifying this flight.
So did they! And they showed their work. So far you're just beating around the bush.
What would would help is if you said something like "Maceij says modeling a different entry approach on computers is no substitute for a bona fide re-entry testing a new design, but that's incorrect because _____."
It's Maciej.
I would, except all Maceij is providing is "vibes" and much of the official report is redacted.
That's not even remotely true. They talked in great detail about heat shield fragmentation Artemis I, it's failure modes, the prospect of it getting worse with new designs and a number of other things at much greater detail than you are. Your comments show a fraction of the effort and detail of the thing you're criticizing and you could have made your best argument five comments ago if you were ever actually going to instead of beating around the bush with these substance free drive bys.
Either theres a functional literacy issue here keeping you from understanding what it means to express a substantive thought or you overestimate other people's toleration for writing checks promising unmade arguments that never cash. You can't keep buying time with nothingburgers.
You are obviously very invested in the fact that someone who is going against the grain of the obviously bad, overly buerocratic government agency MUST be correct (otherwise, in the case you actually gave a fuck about the truth, you would be researching statements from NASA and comparing the reports)
If that is so, put your money where you mouth is and place a bet on polymarket. If you are too scared to do so, then admit it to yourself, and understand that you don't believe this shit anyway.
Because you being a cuck for a contrarian for the sole reason that he is going against the grain is basically the same as Joe Rogan being anti-vaxx because its trendy and cool to think government=bad.
> place a bet on polymarket
Aww, it would make me sad if people were betting on astronauts dying.
I don't think "you're being contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian" pairs particularly well with "if you're so convinced then just bet on in bro" as an argument.
> place a bet on polymarket
Isn't that a platform for insider trading? Not sure it qualifies here.
You really have no argument except the appeal to authority.
I mean the design.
They've changed the AVCOAT to be less permeable and altered the re-entry profile.
One of the findings of Artemis I is that lack of permeability led to trapped gas pockets which expanded and blew out pieces of heat shield. The reason for the change to be less permeable is to make it easier to perform ultrasonic testing, not to improve performance.
They altered the re-entry profile on the theory that the skip period contributed to spalling, but Charles Camarda disagrees in this doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
> Another chart which the Artemis Tiger Team did not intend to show on Jan. 8th, was the figure showing the spallation events as a function of time during the skip entry heating profiles (Figure 6.0-4 of NESC Report TI-23-0189 Vol. 1). In this figure, it was quite clear that the Program narrative they were feeding to the press, that it was the dwell time during the skip which allowed the gases generated to build up and cause the delta pressures which caused most of the spallation was, again, patently false. In fact, during the first heat pulse (t ≈ 0 to 240 sec), approximately 40-45% of all the medium to large chunks of ablator spalled off the Artemis I heatshield.
> Hence, varying the trajectory would do little to prevent spallation during Artemis II. I was never shown the new, modified trajectory at the Jan. 8th meeting.
The heat shield is a bit different, and the reentry profile is a bit different as well.
I suppose "this will be the first time we can test this slightly modified heat shield in the slightly different pressures and temperatures that it will have to endure." isn't quite as eye catching.
With humans on board? Even if they are not necessary for the actual mission?
Yeah, that's what "untested" means in spaceflight.
> that's what "untested" means in spaceflight
Sort of. At a certain threshold, everything is untested. I’d put this closer to modified than untested—the general config was tested in Artemis I and the specific configuration in a variety of ground tests.
I'd say it's tested. It failed. Then they're flying it anyway. Wonderful stuff.
The heat shield on Artemis I didn’t fail in the sense that were there a crew they would have died
And the next flight will use a different design. I wonder why?
Artemis II is scheduled for re-entry to Earth on April 10th. That is when the heat shield issue will be the most dangerous.
If it fails and the mission fails with loss of life while knowing it went ahead despite the IG report about the heat shield... It might be the end of NASA.
Hopefully it will return safely.
> It might be the end of NASA
If idiots and emotions rein, maybe. Then the centre of gravity for space exploration correctly shifts to Musk and China.
I mean, sure. But that's like equipping a sub with a screen door and claiming that in the grand scheme of things, it's a slightly different door with slightly different permeability characteristics.
We already did Artemis I and the heat shield lost a lot more material than it was supposed to on that flight. "Specifically, portions of the char layer wore away differently than NASA engineers predicted, cracking and breaking off the spacecraft in fragments that created a trail of debris rather than melting away as designed. The unexpected behavior of the Avcoat creates a risk that the heat shield may not sufficiently protect the capsule’s systems and crew from the extreme heat of reentry on future missions."
Fixes have been made to the design, but they haven't been tested in flight.
Also the fixes weren’t made on this capsule, since it was already built with the old design.
So that means this capsule will fly a different re-entry profile to attempt to avoid the issue and Artemis IV will fly with untested fixes for lunar return.
And the different re-entry profile has more velocity and temperature stress. So if their reasoning is wrong (that the failure was due to do lower pressure during the skip) it will very likely fail.
That was the intent of the piece. It is impossible to assess the true intent of such a piece when it so blatantly is asking for attention.
Some people are great at self promotion.
> Some people are great at self promotion.
We're commenting on NASA's live stream that exists to get us pumped up about the tens of billions of dollars we overpaid for this launch.
I'm probably much more happy than the next guy about getting to see a flyby of the moon this week even if I really wish we'd gotten here another way, but the accusation is a bit funny in this thread in particular.
What’s the another way?
You could just re-use the studio where they faked the Apollo 11 landing except it was in 7 WTC which was destroyed in a controlled demolition to hide the evidence.
https://xkcd.com/1074/
Are you actually surprised that a livestream paid for my NASA would promote NASA? Geez, that’s innocent.
This is a NASA cover up:
https://youtu.be/pzZWs7CexYI?t=78
https://youtu.be/Wuao1LgO66w?t=218
Fingers crossed that this https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly.... doesn't have any effect.
Of course it's not "safe"! We put a ton of explosives into a huge can, put a small can with humans on top of it, set it on fire and try to control what happens and get the humans into space, and then we try to drop the same can from the space, while it's traveling at miles per second, and land it on the ground. It's not "safe" and won't likely be "safe" in our lifetimes, there's always big risk, that's why astronauts get so much respect - they take a lot of risks. These risks become smaller with time, but still they are quite serious. And of course anything that reduces risks - while not disabling the whole program - is good, but I don't think "safe" is the word that is justified when talking about those things.
There is a LOC (Loss of Crew) number that is typically calculated for these missions. I'm curious what that is? Early Apollo missions were on the order of 4%.
Before the Apollo launch, von Braun was asked what the reliability of the rocket was. He asked 6 of his lieutenants if it was ready to fly. Each replied "nein". Von Braun reported that it had six nines of reliability.
I'm assuming this is fake but it's hilarious.
GitHub taking notes
Is that a real fact?
(I misremembered it slightly, so sue me)
From "Apollo The Race to the Moon" pg 102:
The joke that made the rounds of NASA was that the Saturn V had a reliability rating of .9999. In the story, a group from headquarters goes down to Marshall and asks Wernher von Braun how reliable the Saturn is going to be. Von Braun turns to four of his lieutenants and asks, "Is there any reason why it won't work?" to which they answer: "Nein." "Nein." "Nein." "Nein." Von Braun then says to the men from headquarters, "Gentlemen, I have a reliability of four nines."
Reliability of 4 neins to be precise
You know why you chose 6 9s.
The date checks
After the moon landing, Armstrong allowed that he had estimated the survivability at 50%.
In 2014 an independent safety panel estimated 1:75, but I think it's slightly better now. The shuttle program officially had a limit of 1:90 but in practice achieved 1:67.
In the early days of the Shuttle program, the probability was supposedly estimated as low as 1:100,000. Challenger brought on a more realistic approach.
The official minimum standard is 1:270
Hilarious!
After spending years as a kid seeing footage of these things on TV outside living outside of America, I finally got to see it live!
Brought my camera and got a few good pics too! Very invested in this entire mission!
Someone behind me kept whisper crying "That's it! Go baby, go baby go" like it was his child and was encouraging them on. Very emotional, loved it.
Also when that engine sparked it really hit me just how many hours of deep thought and technical innovation goes not only into getting us as humanity to that point, but also the crews at NASA planning, building and executing these missions
watched this with teary eyes. it truly shows what we can do when we come together and challenge ourselves for the greater good of humanity.
A real bright spot compared to lately. The messages of positivity and comradery in the live stream were a nice contrast
(That being said, I can't believe they cut to people on the ground during SRB separation!)
edit: here's better footage from Everyday Astronaut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOsSRRBMNoc&t=24512s
I completely agree on all points.
On your parenthetical point, I also agree: some really weird camera selections, and frustrating dropouts, during the crucial moments of the launch.
Nevertheless, a real triumph, and I particularly enjoyed the "full send" remark from (I think) the commander. I also really enjoy the fact that the livestream is relatively light on commentary and that most of what you hear is from mission control and the crew.
I was cussing at the director of that video stream during that. It was a totally useless shot as well that they lingered on that already had me bothered, and then to cut back to the SRBs fully separated had me in full contempt. Nothing to see here and everything to miss. It's like music videos showing the singer doing nothing while the guitarist is shredding a solo. Like WTF. You have one job, and you totally botched the hell out of it. You get what you pay for I guess. Lowest bidding contractor???
I couldn’t believe it when that happened. Intern at the controls maybe.
I took that to be the most dangerous part and they didn’t want to televise a Challenger II.
What happened to Challenger -- burn-through of a joint in the SRB motor casing -- happened well before scheduled SRB separation.
Agreed! I yelled at the screen when I saw that they cut away.
I also loved the shot of stage separation, but they cut away from that way too soon also!
It was probably deemed a relatively high-risk moment which they did not want to broadcast in case of failure like it was when the Challenger mission exploded.
NASA had another feed that was just the view of the launch from Kennedy Space Center, no commentary. It was a few seconds ahead of the main broadcast, so it seems they already had a delay built in for the masses.
I certainly missed that one. Is it available somewhere recorded? If it is, can you please send a link to it? I'm sorry if I'm asking something stupid, it's just that I can't find anything like that and I also want to see this badly.
For some reason the Kennedy Center one is saying not available right now, but this was the link for it if it returns:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaJklsJonD4
The main broadcast is still up, with the ten minute countdown starting around 5 hours and 27 minutes into it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf_UjBMIzNo
Still an odd choice. It is what it is. It’s a fairly risky mission and they chose to go ahead with that. Yet they avert their eyes, like a child watching a scary scene in a movie. Like it’s somehow ok to actually risk lives of four people, but not ok to televise that.
Same. I watched Apollo 11 launch in 1969 when I was four. Watched on our neighbor's TV. We didn't have one.
Imagine what we could accomplish if we didn't suck.
I’m not American. The Artemis launch feels to me like a beacon that the America the rest of us looked up to isn’t gone.
sending people to the moon was never useful. We can get more done with robots, both cheaper and safer. There are plenty of more useful things we can do instead.
okay what is more useful is a matter of opinion. you can disagree, but I stand by it
I've never understood this hyper-utilitarian perspective. It just seems divorced from what emotionally inspires most people.
Most of what people find inspiring doesn't directly provide a lot of objective utility, and is often quite dangerous for the individuals who choose to participate. Reaching the highest peaks in the last century, antarctic expeditions, pushing the limits of racing vehicles, attempting a sub two hour marathon, and athletes defining new tricks and styles in extreme sports are all objectively pretty useless in terms of their direct outputs -- and yet I find it all a whole lot more inspiring than my computer getting twice as fast, even if the latter is of way more objective utility to my life.
Min-maxing ROI in a spreadsheet just doesn't do it for me in the same way. There's absolutely a place for that and in a world of limited resources it should be how we spend most of our effort, and it is! The amount of money spent on efforts like this is _tiny_ at the scale of nations, and is certainly a much smaller and better use of funds than wars and corruption.
Getting people to the moon is plentry useful for getting an objective you can hang all kinds of useful advancements off.
Then you are wrong (and maybe MAGA? to ignore facts like that). An estimated three orders of magnitude of more science was done in the 12 days astronauts were on the moon than if robots had done those missions. HSF costs about, but it returns a lot of results as well.
>(and maybe MAGA? to ignore facts like that)
What an odd thing to bring up out of nowhere.
It may not be useful but we'll do it anyway. And then it may come to have utility.
That’s fair but the amount of interest in this crewed mission vs. prior uncrewed and robotic moon missions shows that many people find manned missions more compelling.
We didn't have robots in 1969, and the Apollo missions resulted in many of the technologies that make modern robotics (and robotic space missions) possible.
"We have a beautiful moon rise, we're heading right at it" got me a little choked up. Here's to the ever unfolding adventure of mankind.
Orbiter, the space simulation predecessor to KSP, has exactly such a mission where you see the moon in front of you as you ascent into the sky.
Direct livestream link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf_UjBMIzNo
I tuned in for 60 seconds, the presenter got everything wrong, and I just tuned out until liftoff.
She called the top of the ET (well, it's no longer an ET, but it's the stage that was the STS ET) the "upper stage". She said that the propellents are stored at thousands of degrees below zero. And so on. This is a NASA presenter?
You are not the target audience for this sort of presentation. Media directed at the laity is more about being directionally than quantifiably correct, and is full of metaphor and embellishment to capture the imagination rather than communicate something with precision.
People who want the actual details and numbers will read.
I firmly believe you can have both exciting, inspiring, and factually correct communication if you make that a priority.
The experience of hearing factual things presented with passion and obvious expertise is in itself inspiring. Why settle for less?
Bring back John Insprucker.
I for one am begging God that this is merely April fools all the way down.
If it would be, then a fake explosion after start as climax before revealing it, would be quite a joke. Probably will yield mixed reception, though.
> She called the top of the ET (well, it's no longer an ET, but it's the stage that was the STS ET) the "upper stage". She said that the propellents are stored at thousands of degrees below zero. And so on. This is a NASA presenter?
To be fair to her, she seemed to explicitly refer to what sits on top of the core stage, it just wasn't in the diagram she was gesturing to the top of at the time.
To be fair to you, I think the cryogenic comment was worse and she actually said "thousands of degrees below Fahrenheit".
The problem is they're trying to run hours of programming leading up to this launch for some reason, but aren't willing to force the experts to come in to do the commentary. They should have given her a script.
Jesus! Why is there a presenter? Why isn't it just a livestream of the mission control radio chatter? That sort of shit belongs on some 24/7 news broadcast.
Same reason the livestream mentioned jobs about a dozen times in the 10 minutes I watched, NASA is in a fraught position and this is their way of fighting for some continued funding. A 'mass media' event captures more attention than a minimalist stream of chatter. (And a less cynical interpretation is also that getting the public interested in and engaged with space missions is part of their mandate.)
i'm sure the whole talk track was piped through an AI for clarity and excitement and the presenters were told to read the script.
I feel like they really fumbled the video feeds, it was a mess. Rapid shifting of camera angles as it left the pad, black video, switching to a grainy video of the crowd during booster separation, and a hasty switch back well after they separated.
Come on guys. You're going to the moon. You couldn't plan the launch camera / video feed better? This is how the world sees it, gets excited about it.
Launch at around 5h 35m
Regardless of whether this particular mission is perfectly planned, this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement.
It is a noble endeavor - science, engineering and peaceful exploration hold the keys to our survival and prosperity.
It is also important psychologically to our survival - a reminder there is a bigger pie, that we can solve hard problems, that progress can be made, that competence and education counts, as does courage, and that we can work together for a common cause.
This is the best of America, and for a while we can be proud of the human race.
I think these space projects are great, can create much good will, and give people dangerous things to do that are worth risking the danger for. But war, inequality, and climate mismanagement are political problems that are not going to be solved (if they need to be solved) by science and engineering (the first two at least).
If AGI stages a hostile takeover of all the governments of the world would that count as a technological solution to war and inequality?
For that matter I suppose the terminator timeline also counts. Can't have war and inequality if you don't have humans.
They can absolutely be solved by science and engineering, people just need to stop being so fucking afraid to break the rules to do whats right.
I hope it does. But every day that goes by I feel that the future is just going to be like what's shown in the expanse series
My personal take for a long time has been that the primary driver of most war today is boredom. War today is undertaken for entertainment. It's a special kind of entertainment that taps into deep brain stem circuits and provides a false but deeply resonating sense of purpose and meaning. When you hear that "people don't have a sense of meaning," it means their brain stem is not feeling the tribal loyalty emotions connected to warfare.
It would be cheaper to solve resource shortages in almost any other way. I don't really buy that explanation, at least for most wars. I think most wars today have roots that are far less rational.
Note that this applies IMO to all participants on all sides insofar as they had any role in starting or sustaining the war.
I think the primary drivers of war come from the top--powerful people motivated by greed and ego. Those are the spark that starts wars.
Boredom works from the bottom, providing fuel for wars in the form of soldiers. More specifically, young men in particular are easily appealed to by offering them a part in some great heroic endeavor, and a promise to mold them into someone whose manhood and courage may never again be questioned.
Of course, as many former soldiers have found out, you usually receive none of those things. The endeavor was bullshit, you were only a cog, and there is no badge of honor in the world that exempts you from the human experience of being made to feel small.
Wildly disagree with that. I think the overwhelming majority of people want simple, peaceful existence, and that the 'lack of meaning' can be solved through deeper shared community goals and aspirations.
More prominent figures like Trump, Putin or al-Assad don't wage war out of boredom, but out of ego, or visions of a glorious future that only they can impart (which I guess is still ego).
I also think that the various regional conflicts in Africa are in no way driven by the fact that the various political groups are just sitting there with nothing to do.
That said, I do think that a 'common enemy' provides a great deal of focus to communities, as we're wired for it... but the definition of community (who is 'us') is largely malleable and entirely flexible. But it's only one way of providing that meaning.
I also think conflict is largely glorified through American media, which is aggressively pushed on a lot of the English speaking world. The videos of the SF soldiers talking about killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how cool it was with no remorse for the taking of life in a conflict that none of the local population asked for. Of the people I've talked to that have been through armed conflict (specifically Angola, and Serbia), and so strongly against conflict that the reactions are almost scary.
So no, I don't think conflicts are started or sustained out of a sense of boredom.
"deeper shared community goals and aspirations"
When one communities deeply shared goals and aspirations conflict with another's (or subgroups) is when you get war and violence. The eras of relative peace is when you have one empire imposing its will.
> but out of ego, or visions of a glorious future that only they can impart..
Obviously. Why would any one do anything at all if not for this very reason, let alone world leaders...
For world leaders, that is their whole point of their authority.
> My personal take for a long time has been that the primary driver of most war today is boredom. War today is undertaken for entertainment.
incredible claim, any research or evidence behind this?
I agree that its not rational, but it's also not boredom. Its simply stupidity and ignorance.
The expanse future isn't that bad - even at the start of the series we've already made it to the asteroid belt and Jupiter moons, and the civilization consists of several sovereign self-governed entities with individual entrepreneurship and private enterprise allowed. It means we didn't annihilate ourself in a nuclear war, nor our civilization collapsed into allways-fully-connected ant colony (or one global fascist/communist/religious regime).
Agreed it’s a tolerable vision, it could be worse. But it’s also a vision of humanity mostly living in enormous disenfranchised structural underclasses - corporate-authoritarianism in the asteroids and subsistence-UBI for all those unnecessary humans on Earth.
It’s a vision of incredible technological progress without any growth in our ability to justly and humanely govern ourselves or move past violent conflict.
I agree with GP this is our current trajectory. I’d live in that world and hope I’d get lucky, but what a disappointment if that’s all we can manage.
I don't know that there was a lot wrong with Earth under the Expanse though.
The problems there were kind of organic: they just didn't need that many people, but they did have UBI, but even if you wanted to better yourself and were exceptional at your job... You could still be 50,001 in the queue of the 50,000 they needed.
Earth in the expanse desperately needed places to expand too and send people, but the solar system just wasn't that habitable.
uh I would argue that at the beginning of The Expanse things are middling to bad and at the end things are pretty fucking bad. The epilogue of the final book is the only thing that's unabashedly optimistic.
The main series takes place over about 30 years during which several billion people die system-wide as a result of various wars and terrorist attacks, and uncountably many die in the immediate aftermath of the finale. I love it but it's not really a feel-good story!
> this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war
Just a reminder that even the Utopia of the 23rd century and beyond envisioned by Gene Roddenberry for Star Trek - the Federation and Starfleet are still at their core military institutions. Even war was very much still a thing in his utopic vision, despite the fact that scarcity basically no longer exists so what hell was everyone fighting over anyway?
Starfleet is only a few steps removed from the regime in Heinlen’s Starship Troopers. At least Heinlen didn’t pretend that they were enlightened post-imperialists. He was honest about what it was.
Wasn't war on Earth not the issue but war with other species in the galaxy the issue? Sure, there were some sympathizers trying to sabotage peace, but that's because they wanted to continue warring.
There is the Maquis which are basically insurrectionists/terrorists and Starfleet also has Section 31 for doing wet work.
Sisko poisoned a planet’s atmosphere, allowed political assassinations and even Picard did things that could be considered questionable once or twice, even Kirk.
Earth is peaceful because well…in a show about exploring space nobody really wants to see conflicts on Earth (there are a few exceptions where it worked though). And they have enough big guns and secret assassins to keep up appearances.
Earth is peaceful because they went through the horrors of WWIII already
I hope so, but if this goes awry in any way, especially if – god forbid – they lose the crew, my fear is it’ll be a blow to the American hegemony that will be very hard to recover from. Orange man is bad, but I think something like that would add a whole other dimension to the US’s loss of face. I’m as anti-american as they come, but despite everything Pax Americana must be acknowledged and I shudder at the thought of it shattering.
Godspeed!
As far as I am concerned "Pax Americana" ended (if I understand what it means correctly) when they mixed up the best picture at the Oscars!
But may be things have improved since...
> Pax Americana must be acknowledged and I shudder at the thought of it shattering.
Shudder away! We've already had both Carney and the finance minister of Singapore essentially declare Pax Americana to have ended. Everybody else is just being polite.
[EDIT: prime minister of Singapore, not finance minister]
The prime minister of Singapore said something similar. It’s worth a watch, he is very well-spoken.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NXSI4cCm3BM
My mistake, I thought it was their finance minister.
Until nukes are going off, Pax Americana stands strong.
That's just deterrence. Pax America (used to) mean something much more than that.
When the US stops being the main topic on the internet then you'll know it's over. As it stands everyone is still fully obsessed with America. Their cultural dominance is far from over.
That too is a thing but distinct from what Pax Americana has meant for the last 70 years or so.
I'd expect the US to be the main topic on the English speaking internet far after its global dominance ends. I highly doubt that Canada or Australia (let alone the UK) are going to take English speaking dominance any time soon.
> if – god forbid – they lose the crew, my fear is it’ll be a blow to the American hegemony that will be very hard to recover from
This has zero impact on American hegemony. That mission is being prosecuted in Iran and with respect to NATO.
> this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement.
Is that irony or plain naiveness? historically and technically, conquest of space is inseparable from warfare. As for climate change, one can argue that technology is one of the primary driver: aviation alone is estimated to 4% of global temperature rise.
Energy use is the driver. Fossil fuels happen to be cheap. It's effectively a coincidence, nothing inherent to technological progress itself except insofar as something like aviation would never have been a commercial success without an exceedingly cheap, dense, and portable method of energy storage. Solar-syngas and solar-battery would have eventually gotten there but we'd all have been taking trains and ships for the past 80 years while riding electrified public transit.
Energy and tech are two sides of the same coin
I think it's rather the opposite. That space exploration can only possiblly inspire a nation when there is peace, prosperity and justice for all.
This is a new space race. From a geopolitical level, a nation that has a better presence on the moon will have a better strategic advantage.
What about the mineshaft gap though?
What about it makes you think it is important?
I believe the biggest benefit of going to space, particularly in building space stations, is making humanity focused on building a bigger pie.
This is one step towards this. But once we can build (effectively) infinite land, we will be in true abundance.
On the contrary, Whitey on the Moon still rings true.
Yeah, that's the take I have been looking for a spot to drop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4
I believe that folks in the US are, by a large margin, the most highly propagandized group of people in history. It's hard to watch stuff like this.
It's not that I don't understand that comparatively space exploration is small compared to the associated costs of the boots that might hit the ground today.
Space Force would disagree.
The talk of taking the Moon would belie.
Old is new again! :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Horizon
Next stop - defending the base with claymore sticks! :-)
https://www.sandboxx.us/news/featured/project-horizon-nukes-...
Well said. I'd be lying if I didn't get that little flutter inside watching the launch. It felt like "oh, there's still a flicker in the soul!"
>Regardless of whether this particular mission is perfectly planned, this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement.
You watch too much Star Trek. This is precisely the kind of thing that will benefit the military industrial complex, enrich billionaires at the expense of everyone else, and justify the government raping natural resources like it's a little girl locked in a cage.
No one cares about space any more and no one engaging in space travel is doing so for science anymore. Those days, if they ever really existed, are over. NASA has been cleansed and gutted and purged of wrongthink and now only exists to further the cause of American propaganda and be parasitized by SpaceX and intelligence agencies.
I guess we should collectively give up on space. The people at NASA are all doing hard science for that notoriously bloated government salary.
We actually should. By "we" I mean just Americans, though.
Leave the hard science to cultures that still have an educated populace and a government that believes in it. Americans are going to need that money to fund the holy war in Iran over the next decade and to build out Trump's Epstein Memorial ballroom. All that gold filigree is expensive.
If I were a Real Scientist working for NASA I would have seen the writing on the wall and packed my bags for greener pastures once Elon let his pack of groyper skiddie goons slash the department's budget because there were too many brown people on the payroll.
The United States is no longer a serious nation worthy of scientific endeavor, and it won't be again for a very long time. The next person to set foot on the moon won't be an American. These are just the consequences of the choices the American voters have made.
Meh, sounds like you are not American so telling people in the US to just give up on everything is boring and self serving.
If you do have a vote in the US, then you have options to try to make things better. Complaining about pedophiles and people on ketamine in the government is a valid (but extremely small) form of affecting change, but the doom and gloom of everyone should just give up helps no one.
> this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement.
How do you figure? The previous Moon missions certainly didn't accomplish that.
The key phrase is "kind of thing". It certainly does matter what kinds of things we focus our attention on as a species. I think you would have to be quite cynical to think that progress in spaceflight over the past 60+ years hasn't had a positive impact.
> I think you would have to be quite cynical to think that progress in spaceflight over the past 60+ years hasn't had a positive impact.
Spaceflight aside, how exactly has humanity started to outgrow war, inequality, and climate mismanagement? Call me cynical, but I'm not seeing it.
Global rates of poverty are 83% lower than they were in 1969 when we landed on the moon.
So actually, millions of lives have massively benefited from science and technology. To be cynical in the face of all that is a personal take, not a reflection of the facts.
So landing on the moon triggered a reduction in global rates of poverty? do you have any research or citations for this claim?
Vaccines, Mobile Phones, Internet, GPS (How do you think container ships navigate), High yield seeds/fertilizers and the Green Revolution, Weather Satellites, I could go on.
It's really getting tiring repeating this stuff over and over again to the anti-space crowd.
It’s not the anti-space crowd.
You’re arguing against the misanthrops. To them, nothing humans could do would be good enough. We could end slavery in the West and they’d accuse us of not ending slavery enough.
> Global rates of poverty are 83% lower than they were in 1969 when we landed on the moon.
Obvious post hoc fallacy
It’s only a fallacy if the purported facts are fallacious.
And in the case of lifting most of humanity out of poverty, two things are responsible: capitalism and technology.
You can argue that China is a communist state, but it’s the allocation of capital to things that matter that has enable China to thrive.
> It’s only a fallacy if the purported facts are fallacious.
These don't appear to be the words of someone who understands what the post hoc fallacy is.
In any case, the subject is not "capitalism and technology" generally but rather manned Moon missions specifically.
Just because one thing happened after another thing, doesn’t mean the first thing caused the second thing.
Happy now?
However, sometimes it is true that the first thing caused the second thing.
Therefore, it’s only a fallacy when it’s fallacious.
My argument is that going to space was an allocation of capital that mattered in driving technology forward and improved the lives of everyone.
You don't solve these problems in a single step, but notice how space imagery and analogies pop up every time people try to talk about peace, global problems, mutual empathy, understanding, etc. The Pale Blue Dot, images of Earth from orbit or the Moon, etc. Those are anchors in public consciousness, competing in memetic space with usual divisive, dystopian, hope-draining pictures and soundbites - we need more of them to improve on the big problems, and we absolutely would not have them if not for people actually flying to space.
Or, put differently, space exploration is one of the few things "feeding the right wolf" for humanity at large.
It's crazy to believe that people who believe in one holy book are killing people over another holy book in countries like (but certainly not limited to) Nigeria, while another country launches people to the moon.
But, alas, I agree with you. There's no way out but through I guess.
You seem to be forgetting that the country launching people to the moon is primarily of one holy book and is currently bombing the people of another holy book.
And mainly in the name of these holy books too lol. The forgetfulness of people when they see news like this is always funny to me.
That other country has also people killing other people over a holy book.
> You don't solve these problems in a single step
Obviously, but there's no evidence that the previous Moon missions were a step toward solving the problems.
> notice how space imagery and analogies pop up every time people try to talk about peace, global problems, mutual empathy, understanding, etc.
You think these problems will be solved with... photos?
How many more photos do we need? Everyone has seen the photos already. I'm sure Putin and Trump have seen the photos of Earth.
Nobody it'll say space exploration will alone solve those problems. But it helps, and can help more - much more, if we go all the way in and establish permanent economic activity and eventually settlements in the space near Earth and beyond.
> if we go all the way in and establish permanent economic activity and eventually settlements in the space near Earth and beyond.
Could you please explain exactly how these would help to stop war and inequality?
As far as I can tell, space exploration is going to exacerbate inequality, for example, by making Elon Musk even more obscenely wealthy than he already is.
That's part of a general meme shift. 60s tech was defined by a mix of fear, awe, and optimism. Apollo had elements of all three.
There was a confidence underlying all of them. From the New Deal to the late 60s, there was a public belief a better future was possible.
2020s tech is defined by fear, pessimism, and dystopia. The utopian edge has either gone or been replaced by horrific anti-utopian tech - surveillance, manipulation, exploitation, and irrationality.
Tech has become anti-science. Musk's DOGE cut around $1.5 of science funding, science education, and NASA exploration.
The naive sense that a better future is possible, and tech will make it happen, has almost disappeared.
Is the problem inequality or rather poverty? Because those are not the same thing.
What we've done in space has absolutely helped with poverty. It makes weather forecasts possible, which helps even the poorest farmers.
This can happen at the same time a handful of people become obscenely wealthy from it.
Though in Musk's case, I suspect the wealth is a bubble which will pop before he can cash out more than 8% of it.
> Is the problem inequality or rather poverty? Because those are not the same thing.
According to the OP, inequality: "Regardless of whether this particular mission is perfectly planned, this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement."
> What we've done in space has absolutely helped with poverty. It makes weather forecasts possible, which helps even the poorest farmers.
Are you talking about manned Moon missions or unmanned Earth-orbiting satellites? To use your own words, those are not the same thing.
In any case, poverty is a policy decision, a refusal to redistribute the wealth.
This is a policy decision insofar as the policy isn’t to liquidate entire groups of people over class and status resentment. “Just redistribute the wealth bro, it’ll work this time bro I swear let’s just do a redistribution”.
> “Just redistribute the wealth bro, it’ll work this time bro I swear let’s just do a redistribution
Literally 100% of taxes work like this, it happens every monthly paycheck.
> “Just redistribute the wealth bro, it’ll work this time bro I swear let’s just do a redistribution”.
Bro, have you considered that NASA, the topic of this submission, is government redistribution of wealth via taxes?
Yeah, the difference is that NASA is cool, and lighting money on fire for utopian and inevitably corrupt money transfer schemes is not.
Hope that helps.
NASA may be cool, but the main reason SpaceX was able to undercut old launch providers was all the I Can't Believe It's Not Corruption of pork barrel spending by those old launch providers.
So SpaceX made space cheaper, was good value for the US taxpayer, and was also a money transfer scheme from the government to him. (Worse with Tesla, but this isn't about Musk just SpaceX).
That said, now there's questions about if Musk is corrupt with all those US government ties that result in suspicious direct pressure on non-US governments, including with Starlink which even if theoretically separate to SpaceX is obviously functionally inseparable at present.
> Hope that helps.
It doesn't.
I think that helping the less fortunate is cool, and launching people to the Moon is lighting money on fire for utopian and inevitably corrupt money transfer schemes.
Sparked the environmental movement, to name but one major impact.
> > The previous Moon missions certainly didn't accomplish that.
> Sparked the environmental movement, to name but one major impact.
It...really didn't. There was a new wave with a different political orientation (less conservative/elite) in the environmental movement roughly contemporary to the space program from—the 1950s through the 1970s—but it was driven by a variety of human driven (nuclear testing, oil spills, etc.) environmental disasters combined with more modern media coverage that occurred in that time than by the space program itself.
I know there are people who try to ignore all that and pretend that the whole thing was just the Earthrise photo in 1968 but much of the development of the new character of the movement happened before Earthrise, and even what happened after generally clearly had other more important causes.
Regardless of what you think of those first shots from Apollo 8, you have to admit they put things into a different perspective for a lot of people. Seeing the whole of the Earth like that moved a lot of people into realizing this planet is worth saving. That one image was a significant moment causing such a spike in people paying attention that it can be forgiven for being confused as the thing. It's not like John Muir needed to see the Blue Marble image to start his movement. It's just so many more people did
Also wrt. "climate mismanagement", pretty much all tools we get to measure climate exist because of space program, and many require it to function.
Okay well we have those already and it hasn't really changed anything.
> we have those already and it hasn't really changed anything
What’s the term for antibiotics having been so successful that we forget all their benefits?
The Montreal Protocol worked [1]. It probably couldn’t have without our satellite data.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol
Disagree about the change. Even the fact that you know and care enough to argue this on-line is a change that can be attributed to space missions - and it's even more true about the overall global conversation about climate situation, and all activities taken to help with it.
These things do take time though.
This is absurd. Have you heard of Rachel Carson's 1962 "Silent Spring"?
No, what’s that?
QED
> Regardless of whether this particular mission is perfectly planned, this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement.
More likely, it is precisely the kind of thing that will be managed specifically to keep people distracted, so that the people who have a near term benefit from the dark age of war, inequality, and climate mismanagement can continue realizing that benefit without interruption by people taking action right up until there is no one left to distract or benefit.
The engineering was done in the 70's and 80's. This rocket is built out of leftover shuttle hardware.
The exploration in this mission was done 50 years ago.
I fail to see how this mission is noble. It's biggest accomplishment is keeping the NASA beurocratic apparatus in tact.
This spectacle of a mission is precisely the kind of distraction which enables complacency and allows the "dark age of war" to remain dark.
You're supposed to have peanuts, not popcorn, tonight:
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/what-are-jpls-lucky-peanut...
Found a stream on YouTube earlier (which presumably wasn't an official one because it disappeared 15 minutes later after a claim by "FUBO TV") and it had a poll attached: "Will the Artemis astronauts land on the moon?"
40% of people had voted yes. Which is somewhat worrying given the mission plan and hardware.
If these astronauts land on the moon, something has gone seriously, seriously wrong.
Maybe they'll just stop for some pictures on the way back. I mean, it's a shame to go all that way and not at least get a cool selfie!
Captain's discretion
Does anyone know of a good status tracker for the mission? I'm watching the official feed on Youtube and it's great for commentary but I'd love a live Kerbal-style UI I could poke around.
Ah, I found the official one: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis-ii/arow/
Unfortunately the UI seems pretty busted. The tour is trying to point out a bunch of UI elements that don't exist and the mouse interaction just doesn't work at all.
Here is the official one from NASA:
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis-ii/arow/
but I admit that it isn't what I would really want.
The official one doesn't work for me on mobile but this does: https://artemistracker.com/
but it's not accurate. it claims TLI (trans lunar injection burn) happens two hours after launch when in reality that is going to happen about a day after launch
I don't think I'll ever not get chills when watching a crewed launch. Godspeed!
Kelon Mus is surprised that the rocket didn't explode at all. “You can't learn anything from a rocket that doesn't explode,” Mus said.
Liftoff! The planning that went behind this is mind boggling. Well done
I can’t deploy a stupid little app at work without something breaking.
Im impressed when people can build something so complex that works on the first try.
I really hope the report from a few days ago about the heatshield not sustaining earth reentry does not turn out to be true.
I desperately hope so too. It will be absolutely terrible if there were to be an issue, and moreso if people can say “We knew about it beforehand but still went ahead”.
That was awesome!
it's better to invest in human progress than in war
There is also a stream on ESA Web TV https://watch.esa.int/
As someone who watched the Apollo 11 launch live on TV, this is no less awe-inspiring. This transcends nations, languages, and politics. This is of and by all humanity.
(If anyone managed to get the perfect shot of the spark-filled separation feed, please share. That was... incredible.)
I do hope the doomers who think that the entire US government has been completely gutted will take note of this. The government workforce is in a bad spot for sure, SLS is far from a perfect program, but this still demonstrates that we are doing some real work still.
Take note of a project that’s about 15 years behind schedule and many multiples over budget finally progressed because we lowered safety standards to just launch?
I’m not sure how that’s proof the government isn’t gutted. Let me know what our schedule is for the next one and how that timeline has changed. Ignoring the projects that have been outright canceled…
You’re currently the guy saying “ya, all you haters that said I’d lose my house if I stopped paying my mortgage, who’s laughing now?” - one month into not paying your mortgage.
We’ll still be dealing with the after effects of doge 20 years from now.
> we lowered safety standards to just launch
Aren’t they still well above anything in the history of human space flight?
We keep treating these systems in popular discourse as airliners. They’re not. They’re experimental craft. With mass production maybe SpaceX can bring launch closer to general aviation. But the notion that any loss of life is intolerable is (a) unsustainably expensive and (b) not a view shared by the lives actually at risk.
They aren’t in the same magnitude as F9 and Dragon to ISS, so no. I question if they are as safe as the shuttle (final computed risk 1:90).
> aren’t in the same magnitude as F9 and Dragon to ISS, so no
Fair enough. For a heat-shield discussion I guess we should talk about higher-energy missions. But conceded. LEO has normalized safe space travel.
If it's 15 years behind budget and many multiples over budget, it wouldn't be DOGE's fault then?
The main critique of the handling of heat shields also happened at NASA in 2022-2024 and the project continued on. Artemis is largely a product of congress.
Remember when DOGE tried to cut out the inefficiencies and failed miserably? The "inefficiencies" and "bloated budgets" are there for a reason.
If Elon ran this project "without bloat", there is probably a 70% chance that the vehicle would have exploded, much in the way of his Starship and early Falcon vehicles.
Indeed. The GSA with 10k employees is going to fall apart without the 40k unused winzip licences DOGE so cruelly took away from them in their senseless spree of madness.
That logic is very short term and while comical isn't close to reality.
I hope you live a long and prosper life so you can see the consequences of this presidential term fully unfold.
Don't confuse bureaucracy with "gutted." The federal government is bigger than at most any point in US history. Arguably that fact is -why- it's 15 years behind schedule.
Nope, the federal workforce is now the smallest it's been in a half century[1].
February 2026: 2.693 million, the lowest number since July 1965.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001
That's per 100k (which just says it's mostly flat per 100k), net spending of the federal government is more than ever, and actual workforce is bigger than ever. Federal spending as a percentage of GDP is stubbornly high despite us being in "peace time," and not recession spending.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W068RCQ027SBEA
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USGOVT
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
If you all don't think bureaucracy is the main driver of government delays...well you clearly have never worked with or in and around government. I try to live in reality.
> That's per 100k
No, it's a plain headcount. Your first link is a chart of non-inflation adjusted spending. Your second link is all government, not just federal employees so it's not really germane to the discussion, and your third link includes things like Social Security, and frankly...good. Without the government stabilizing spending the economy would be even more of a dumpster fire of random investor panics.
I'm close to a number of people in the public sector. They're brilliant, they do great work and they aren't paid what they're worth. I've also worked for a long time in a mega-corp. It was frequently just as bureaucratic and wasteful, if not more so, than the government.
> No, it's a plain headcount
> They're brilliant, they do great work and they aren't paid what they're worth
The headcount of such wonderful people you are describing has been reduced but then replaced by 3x+ times the rates Gov is paying for the contractors that were hired (I am one of them). so this headcount being low is a nothing more than political smokescreen that will probably be used in campaigns leading up to November election (not probably, certainly cause there is nothing else to run if you are member of the ruling party)
I am willing to concede that it would be more financially responsible for the United States to greatly increase the size of the permanent federal workforce, and to stop making its size a political football.
Have you talked to any actual NASA employees (not just contractors) that work in science?
For what it’s worth, I watched today’s Artemis II launch with them. While proud of the mission, they’re likely in your “Doomer” category after a year being devastated and demoralized by having their science budgets slashed, grants/projects cancelled, having been forced to fire good contractors of 10+ years and then watching some of the most knowledgeable/skilled folks take early retirement. Don’t let the awe or Artemis fool you — NASA, especially when it comes to science, has been gutted and functionally degraded. For what it’s worth, they’re not focused on earth/climate science.
Yep, I work with them every day, since I am myself a NASA contractor. I'm curious what you think the major distinction is between a contractor and a civil servant in the first place. I work directly as part of a division (used to be "on site" before 2020, but now I'm remote so that doesn't quite fit) doing 80% the same job as any of my civil servant colleagues. I really don't think the range of opinions is all that different on either side of the fence.
I'll repeat that there are a lot of problems, but it's not nearly as bad as some people on the internet make it out to be.
Fair question—I probably overly delineated the two as I currently only know people on the civil servant side at NASA. Decades ago (!) I worked in the DC, hung out some folks, and often the ones who had strong opinions related to policy were the ones at risk of losing/keeping/winning a contract, not the government employees. That was probably in the back of my head when I made the distinction. I don’t really have a strong opinion either way now, but I felt it was only fair to answer you as best I could. Either way, I’ll try to be cognizant of that potential bias in future.
With that said, and while I haven’t had much exposure to what folks on the internet are saying, all I know is I’ve never seen this group of friends this worried or impacted. Most of them are also the type to just keep their heads down, focus on the mission, and wait for the winds shift.
I have a really hard time telling if this is despite the current administration’s best efforts, because the current administration’s policies, or just an artifact of government inertia.
Top level: Super excited to witness this in my lifetime.
Edit: Also, my 40 years of life leads me towards the latter category.
For sure this is 90% inertia, although like Bridenstein in the first administration, who turned out to actually be a pretty good administrator in the grand scheme of things, I'm cautiously optimistic that Isaacman is working in good faith to make NASA the best it can be. (Which isn't to say that I agree with him 100% mind you.)
How exactly would you interpret this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Redefinition_a...
Definitely despite.
NASA has been well treated by both parties in general, with their budget rising faster than inflation most years. This administration also appointed Isaacman to be the NASA administrator which I think is a 10/10 choice for that job.
All of NASA's climate work is under attack by the current administration.
I’d argue that NASA should not have ever got into studying climate science, it should be a responsibility of NOAA. NASA should be focusing on NEP, atmospheric satellites, better aircraft, making life interplanetary and astronomy.
It’s not that simple. Trump admin requested a massive cut to NASA’s budget, which after much delay Congress finally rejected. Isaacman’s path to NASA administrator was also, erm, circuitous. Having a competent and knowledgeable NASA head was not really Trump admin’s priority.
While the current administration has multiple areas of improvement and isnt really taking feedback in an adult manner, the federal workforce has some of the most competent people working for it inside certain parts of the organization. im thinking especially of NASA and NASA JPL.
This is true, but a lot of the top positions are being replaced with unqualified loyalists. It's only a matter of time, if this continues, that the competent workforce gets eroded
JPL has been strangled by both parties. They had huge staff cuts in 2024, and then more in 2025. They've gone from ~6,500 to ~4,500. Trump closed their research library[1].
Of course this is a drop in the bucket, the entire science research apparatus of the United States is being burned to the ground[2]. This administration is doing to the future of scientific research what the Mongols did to Baghdad.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/climate/nasa-goddard-libr...
[2] https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-026-00088-9/index.ht...
NASA also has some of the most incompetent people working for it, and a lot of them are responsible for overseeing SLS and Orion. JPL hasn’t been doing to well lately either (Mars Return?).
Let's not jinx them; let them get home safe before we take a victory lap.
Exactly. The heat shield problems and lack of full disclosure are quite troubling.
Not entirely a doomer, but I would wait to grandstand until after the crew is returned safely, considering the allegations regarding the capsule heat shield.
We are basically going this to funnel more tax payer dollars to musk or bezos. What a moment for humanity
Wrong in every way.
> The mission's objectives are to conduct tests in low Earth orbit with one or both commercially developed lunar landers—SpaceX's Starship HLS and Blue Origin's Blue Moon—and the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) space suit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_III?wprov=sfla1
It’s Orion that’s dodgy as fuck not the booster. I.e the new thing. Not the decades old, proven, launch engines.
Let’s wait for the back patting when they splash down.
I genuinely hope not but i am worried about this craft.
>Not the decades old, proven, launch engines.
Which are, I will note, being expended on this single launch, despite being designed, built, and functioning over decades as re-usable engines.
Just like to point out the a SRBs aren’t really the same.
> Orion that’s dodgy as fuck not the booster. I.e the new thing
I mean, newly shaped and partly reformulated.
Avcoat was “originally created…for the Apollo program” [1]. (“A reformulated version was used for the initial Orion heat shield and later for a redesigned Orion heat shield.”) The new things are Orion’s size and weight and the size of the tiles. All of which has precedented flight in Artemis I.
At the end of the day, I’m going to trust the astronauts. This issue was openly discussed, despite NASA’s original—and fair to criticize—instinct to cover it up. While any manned reëntry is a nail biter, I don’t think this one is especially so.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVCOAT
Aren't astronauts by definition bat shit crazy? We have people lining up for one-way missions to Mars. Not to say this is a bad thing, but their ROI calculations are not normal.
> Aren't astronauts by definition bat shit crazy?
By poetic definition, e.g. “Here’s to the Crazy Ones,” yes. Clinically and technically, no. They’re paragons of human explorers, and exploration is a fundamentally human trait.
> We have people lining up for one-way missions to Mars
How many astronauts?
I think sometimes, clinically: yes.
https://www.houstoniamag.com/news-and-city-life/2018/11/astr...
> How many astronauts?
More than we can send. Wasn't there a country-wide competition?
> sometimes, clinically: yes
Sure. Compared to population, no.
> More than we can send
Which astronauts said they’d be fine with a one-way mission?
> Wasn't there a country-wide competition?
Was there? You’re the one making the claim.
Glad you agree with the crazy.
Google is your friend re; Mars one-way astronauts.
> Glad you agree with the crazy
I don’t. Having mental illness in a population below baseline rates isn’t crazy. Nowak’s story is notable for a reason.
> Google is your friend re; Mars one-way astronauts
So you don’t have a source. Because I’m not finding any astronauts going on the record on this.
Go look at the amount of grants getting funded this year and tell me we aren't completely gutting the national research apparatus.
I just need to look locally and see we're in trouble. NIST, NCAR. Super Drought conditions forming in the West.
This isn't good.
But hurray Moon missions, I guess. Pity we're causing the entire World Economy to collapse with a unneeded war.
Rather unfortunate timing that the original Apollo moon landing also happened in the middle of the Vietnam War.
Well, when you zoom out a bit, it’s not a stretch to say that both Apollo and Vietnam shared the same goal of countering the USSR.
The Vietnam War was us violating Vietnamese sovereignty and self-determination and losing.
…and why did the United States feel the need to do so?
Honestly, that coincidence was NOT lost on me.
Part of me finds it inappropriate to do the two things at once. Advancement in scientific knowledge being somewhat at odds with blowing up one of the oldest civilizations in the World.
Your life must pass by really slowly with a lot of waiting if you don’t do more than one thing at a time.
It's a game of priorities I guess when resources are limited. And no: I can't do everything, everywhere, all at once. Can you?
Big rocks in the pickle jar first. For you that includes wars when talking was working?
April 1; I see what you did there, well played.
I certainly hope the mission goes as planned but it does feel like SLS is the wrong approach in the time of reusable rockets, even if this specific mission profile would probably have demanded the booster be expendable. Using the Shuttle main engines - designed and made to be 'refurbishable' rather than 'reusable' but still dumped into the ocean after each mission - and the SRBs (solid boosters) still gives the impression of the booster design being dictated (at least in part) to accommodate the needs of former Shuttle contractors. If either Starship+Superheavy or some other fully reusable heavy left vehicle comes on-line it will be hard for NASA to justify spending billions of $ on, well, a flying pork barrel. Sure, it has been proven time and time again that canned pigs can in fact fly but that does not make them the go-to transport.
Conversely SLS is ready now. Starship and Super Heavy are not and cannot do this mission today.
We'd look better if there was still a USAID.
I'm having trouble finding a simple tracker of whereabouts the craft is at in terms of the path to the moon? Might just be me but the fancy 3-d rendering thing on the NASA page just shows me a close-up of the craft and not much else?
The camera work was just terrible. They really need to learn from SpaceX how to do this right. Minus the obnoxious cheering.
SpaceX does these beautiful drone shots and live telemetry so well. Considering that each SLS launch costs in the billions it would be nice to do a little better on production
I felt the commentary during the launch also wasn't good. And I am not too interested in hearing from some Hollywood people before the launch
I love listening to the cheering because it really drives home what an accomplishment it is for the people who work on it.
Starlink launches don't get the cheering, so it's not like it's a laugh track.
I thought the same thing - hopefully by the time Artemis III launches they'll remember the gaps and blank screens from this launch. Even the live telemetry model at the core stage separation seemed to not match what the on-board cameras showed. Artemis I's camera work was better. Why???
It's been 54 years since humans last visited the Moon. Hopefully, in a few years we will get boots back on the surface.
Out of curiosity, why do you see this as a worthwhile endeavor?
My personal perspective is that the resources are better used for other purposes, but it's possible that I just haven't encountered some compelling reason yet.
Do you watch sports, football, the Olympics? If not I'm sure you know someone who does. Same category as this. Each of the 32 NFL team is worth about the cost of 1-2 Artemis launches. The entire league could fund the whole Artemis program nearly twice. Hosting the Olympics is worth about 3-10 launches.
Like sports, the objective is ultimately useless except as a showcase of what humanity has to offer, and people like to see that.
I think in general space exploration is a great use of taxpayer money, but the artemis program doesn't seem great from either a "science per dollar" or "novel accomplishment per dollar" standpoint.
If the goal was just to flex on the rest of the world I would've much rather we focused on going somewhere new or returning to the moon in a more sustainable way
"returning to the moon in a more sustainable way"
Isn't this the point of this mission? If your point is "it shouldn't take this much money", then I agree. But also point to almost everything else.
Each Artemis launch costs something like $4b (that's the incremental cost of a new rocket, it's much higher if you amortize the design costs).
IMO the program is not optimized for cost or sustainability, it's optimized for creating jobs in various congressional districts. Of course that provides a certain amount of political sustainability to the so-called Senate Launch System.
I just don't see a future where NASA can afford multiple SLS launches per year to maintain a continuous Lunar presence
> Each Artemis launch costs something like $4b
Early launches, yes, because SLS is a garbage heap. Later ones, almost certainly not.
I think that is the point, but whether this mission will actually do that is rather unconvincing.
After (and if) Artemis III lands on the moon and brings home the astronauts there seems to be very little planned on how we actually get to the moon base which NASA is claiming this will lead to, let alone the manned Mars mission that is also supposed to follow.
In other words, I think NASA is greatly exaggerating, and possibly lying, about the utility of this mission.
> there seems to be very little planned on how we actually get to the moon base
There is a lot of research going into in situ construction methods and even nuclear power plants on the moon [1]. (Which would be necessary to bootstrap eventual indigenous panel production [2].)
To me it’s encouraging to see this fundamental work being attacked than an endless sea of renderings. The reason you aren’t seeing heavy detailing, despite construction slated to begin with Artemis V, is we’re waiting for the launch vehicles. (“Any exploration program which "just happens" to include a new launch vehicle is, de facto, a launch vehicle program” [3].)
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-department-of-energy-...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00971-x
[3] https://blog.matt-rickard.com/p/akins-laws-of-spacecraft-des...
> This effort ensures the United States leads the world in space exploration and commerce.
> “History shows that when American science and innovation come together, from the Manhattan Project to the Apollo Mission, our nation leads the world to reach new frontiers once thought impossible,”
> Under President Trump’s national space policy
I smell politics and American exceptionalism, not science. There are a lot of could-bes in these statements as well, I have serious suspicions that these goals are not serious engineering. I am 99.999% certain that NASA will not build a nuclear reactor on the moon this decade, nor even the next decade. NASA is not giving me any signals they are capable of that.
> I am 99.999% certain that NASA will not build a nuclear reactor on the moon this decade, nor even the next decade. NASA is not giving me any signals they are capable of that
You don’t think NASA and the DOE, together with Lockheed and Westinghouse, can build a reactor? Why? The major technical issues were largely de-risked with the 2022 solicitation.
They’ve changed it so III isn’t landing. That will be IV apparently.
I feel like these missions are just paving the way for billionaires to have a new vacation spot.
Even if you think Space travel is worth the money (which I personally do), adding humans to the mix makes projects incredibly more expensive. Even in the realm of space travel and research, sending humans is a questionable use of the money.
Sports would also be much cheaper without humans.
The most important (if not entertaining) things you can do in space don't involve humans. Telescopes, communications, earth observation, sending probes to distant bodies, etc.
It's nice that we can send humans to space and it's good to keep that capability going so that the knowledge doesn't die. But the unmanned missions tend to pull the weight of actually accomplishing useful things. Humans just get in the way.
Most people don't find those things interesting unless people are directly involved in them.
Turns out I don't understand the point sports either.
People are going to have to die in order for us to increase our space knowledge. It sucks but thats just how it be, it requires humans for most of it.
The difference being that sports are not exclusively paid by taxes, I guess?
> difference being that sports are not exclusively paid by taxes
Space isn’t financed “exclusively” by taxes, either.
In the USA tax payers pay for most stadiums/arenas.
But I'm guessing the people benefit from those, too.
I think there is a major difference though. Sports events are not pretending to be anything else. The Artemis mission claims to be advancing science and claims to be a stepping stone for an eventual moon base and a manned mission to Mars. I personally have serious questions about all of these.
The fact that we hope to get some new tech with this whereas sports aims for nothing is just icing on the cake. I think big space missions are worth it every now and then on a humanitarian level; even if no new discoveries are made, a new generation of engineers will become fluent in what we have already discovered. Humanity's education is not "done" when the last fact is written in a book, it needs to be constantly refreshed or it will disappear.
Even in sports you do not get "nothing", it has certainty helped advance the field of medicine.
> a new generation of engineers will become fluent in what we have already discovered.
We seem to have lost the technology of going to the moon we gained from Apollo. So without an actual follow-up and a tangible long term plan I suspect the exact same will happen this time around.
> We seem to have lost the technology of going to the moon we gained from Apollo
Some of it. Much for good reason. What are you referring to that we’ve lost that we would want?
Yeah, that's probably an indication that we waited too long.
Or, more likely, it is an indication that manned moon missions are simply not that important, that this technology is simply not worth the cost of maintaining.
In contrast, we kept the technology of doing robotic missions in space, on the moon, and even on other planets and even asteroids (the latter two have much to improve upon though).
Do you really disagree that it’s advancing science? Surely actually testing hardware, building knowledge on how to run this type of mission, learning to use lunar resources, figuring out how to keep people alive, etc. will teach us things we couldn’t learn any other way.
Fwiw do share your concerns about the methods (sending humans on this specific mission is questionable, SLS is questionable compared to SpaceX approach).
It's not science, it's engineering. I don't think it's advancing science in a way that wouldn't be possible with a fraction of the cost without sending humans there.
The distinction is kind of meaningless, advancing our engineering capabilities in space is advancing the science.
And as I said, agreed on the concerns about cost and sending humans.
> The distinction is kind of meaningless
Only if it helps you to call this "science", I would say.
> advancing our engineering capabilities in space is advancing the science
In this case, we are advancing our engineering capabilities to make humans survive in space, which is arguably completely useless.
Not only that, but we keep focusing on the easier and fun part for engineers. A real problem for surviving in space is life support, see e.g. this: https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/a-primer-on-long-duration-....
But it is a lot less fun than sending humans around the moon in a ship that doesn't need them at all, isn't it?
Do you think we will learn more from Artemis or the Asteroid Redirect Mission? Because that's a concrete example of how funding this mission caused other experiments to be cancelled.
Fair point, but that’s an argument about prioritization within NASA’s budget (and its size relative to other spending), not the scientific value of the mission.
There's never non-zero value to any challenging engineering problem. The question is whether the finite resources spent to solve it are best spent on it versus other projects.
And in this mission in particular, you can't divorce science from politics. NASA's budget was reined in by Trump 45 and his admin picked Artemis because a manned mission to the moon invokes a particular feeling and memory, not because it benefits science. The moon is a known quantity, and going there is not more valuable than the other projects the government could have spent $100 billion on.
Keep in mind, this is one of the most expensive single launches in history while there is a partial government shutdown and the rest of the federal government that does real research has been gutted by this same administration. So it's tough to talk about "scientific value" when it's obvious that this mission is doing little science at the same time the government has decreed it won't be in the business of paying for science.
The moon isn’t a known quantity, we sent a handful of people there for a combined few days half a century ago. There’s immense scientific and engineering value in keeping a generation of engineers fluent in deep space operations.
If you’re angry about this dumpster fire of an administration wasting money and gutting research (I am too), the answer is to fight for better funding across the board, not to tear down one of the few ambitious programs left that’s actually pushing the boundaries on what we can do. NASA’s budget amounts to a rounding error and isn’t zero sum with the rest of federal science funding, these are separate appropriations.
I don’t have any questions about a mission to Mars, it is a stupid and pointless trip that I don’t want to ask any questions about.
The Moon, I dunno, it’s at least in Earth’s gravity well so it isn’t like we’re going totally the wrong direction when we go there, right?
At best it could be a gas station on the trip to somewhere interesting like the Asteroid belt, though.
Mars pushes the frontier (even if no one might survive the trip due to human body deteriorating), going around the Moon is meh - we were there ~57 years ago multiple times so what's the point?
Whether a moon base is needed or even beneficial is a question I have not heard a convincing answer in favor. And even if moon base is indeed needed and/or beneficial to future space exploration / resource extraction why robots cannot more efficiently build (or assemble) such a moon base is another question I need an answer to.
We are sending humans to (or around) the moon now, but it may just turn out to be a wasted effort, done solely for the opulence (or more cynically bragging rights / nationalist propaganda).
> Whether a moon base is needed or even beneficial is a question I have not heard a convincing answer in favor
If we want to go to Mars, the Moon is a good place to learn. Simple things like how to do trauma medicine in low g; how to accommodate a variety of human shapes, sizes and fitness levels; how to do in situ manufacturing; all the way to more-speculative science like how to gestate a mammal. These are easier to do on the Moon than Mars. And the data are more meaningful than simulating it in LEO. If we get ISRU going, doing it on the Moon should actually be cheaper.
If we don’t want to colonize space, the Moon is mostly a vanity mission. That said, the forcing function of developing semi-closed ecologies almost certainly has sustainability side effects on the ground.
I think I mostly agree with the other comment by runarberg—Earth is the place to be. But it is also worth noting that even if we do end up colonizing space, Mars is still really pointless. Mars is not significantly more habitable than orbit.
There’s some gravity: the wrong amount. In space, you can at least get 1G with centripetal force.
In orbit, you are halfway to anywhere. On Mars, you’ve gone back down the well. Make sure to bring enough gas to get out again…
Mars is just a bunch of irradiated rocks. Bring your own ecosystem, and wait a couple thousand years while it installs.
The only thing Mars has going for it is that it’s really far away, so we can still pretend to entertain sci-fi plans about colonizing it. The practical next step for space colonies would be large investments in additional space stations, a step so imminently possible that the only way to take it seriously would be to do it.
> Earth is the place to be. But it is also worth noting that even if we do end up colonizing space, Mars is still really pointless. Mars is not significantly more habitable than orbit
I’m not pitching a specific destination. And I’m not pitching exploration to the masses. Most people on the planet never have and never will leave their home country.
If we want to go to space, we probably want a lunar base.
> There’s some gravity: the wrong amount. In space, you can at least get 1G with centripetal force
Maybe this is important. Maybe it’s not. We need physiological experiments.
> In orbit, you are halfway to anywhere. On Mars, you’ve gone back down the well
In orbit you’re perpetually nowhere. On a surface you have in situ resources.
> Mars is just a bunch of irradiated rocks. Bring your own ecosystem, and wait a couple thousand years while it installs
Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s moving from New York to Wyoming. Maybe those are the same thing. But I’m more of a red Mars advocate today than I was when I read Robinson’s trilogy in my twenties.
> only thing Mars has going for it is that it’s really far away, so we can still pretend to entertain sci-fi plans about colonizing it
It’s mass and an atmosphere. That’s a lot to what Earth has going for us.
> practical next step for space colonies would be large investments in additional space stations
Practical next steps are lots of experiments in centrifuges and micro and low gravity. To fund and focus that you need a goal.
We don‘t want to colonize space. Colonizing space is science fiction, not a serious goal for humanity, and certainly not an engineering challenge. There is no reason for humans to live anywhere other then on Earth. We have more reasons to live on Antarctica or the deep ocean then on the Moon, Mars or Alpha Centauri.
What I really want is for us to send a lander and a launcher to Mars capable of returning to earth the the capsules Perseverance has been collecting. I would love for geologists on earth to examine Mars rock under a microscope. I would want them to take detailed pictures of an exoplanet using the Sun as a gravitational lens. And I would love it if they could send probes to Alpha Proxima using solar sails to get there within a couple of decades.
None of these would benefit from having a moon base. In fact this moon base seems to be diverting funds away from missions with more chance of success and more scientific value.
> We don‘t want to colonize space
I do. Plenty of people do. Plenty of people also think exoplanet science is useless. I disagree with them. It the arguments are symmetric to those against human spaceflight.
> certainly not an engineering challenge
…how? We don’t have the technology to do this.
> There is no reason for humans to live anywhere other then on Earth. We have more reasons to live on Antarctica or the deep ocean then on the Moon, Mars or Alpha Centauri
Strongly disagree. You’re describing disrupting biospheres.
> None of these would benefit from having a moon base
Of course it does. ISRU (and baseload launch demand) decreases costs of access to deep space.
> diverting funds away from missions with more chance of success and more scientific value
The science slakes our curiosity. The engineering slakes our needs. And they both benefit from each other. Claiming Starship and in-orbit refueling won’t benefit scientific missions is myopic.
We are nowhere near the capability to launch robots to the moon that can autonomously build or assemble a moon base for any useful definition of moon base.
> We are sending humans to (or around) the moon now, but it may just turn out to be a wasted effort, done solely for the opulence
My 4 year old is extremely excited to watch the launch tonight because it’s manned. I’d say a few billion is worth it if all it does is inspire a new generation of astronauts, engineers, and scientists.
And neither are we anywhere near the capability to lunch construction workers to the moon which can build or assemble an equivalent moon base with their human labor. So this answer does not satisfy me one bit.
> inspire a new generation of astronauts, engineers, and scientists
This is a good point. And I would like it to be true. However when you have to lie about (or exaggerate) the scientific value of the mission, that is not exactly inspiring is it. Your 4 year old could be equally inspired by the amazing photos James Webb has given us, and unlike Artemis, James Webb is providing us with unique data which is inspiring all sorts of new science.
> And neither are we anywhere near the capability to lunch construction workers to the moon which can build or assemble an equivalent moon base with their human labor. So this answer does not satisfy me one bit.
We have the capability to do that. We don’t have the will to do it, but we have the technology. We don’t even have autonomous robots that are capable of building a moon base on earth.
> Your 4 year old could be equally inspired by the amazing photos James Webb has given us, and unlike Artemis, James Webb is providing us with unique data which is inspiring all sorts of new science.
He’s not though. People gather around as a family and watch manned space missions. It’s exciting in a way that a telescope or a probe isn’t.
Indeed, in 1969, as a small child, I watched the Moon landing together with my parents, in Europe, like also the following missions, in the next years.
They have certainly contributed to my formation as a future engineer.
The key here is “could be”. But most four (or in my case, six) year olds can’t really grasp the abstract concepts of what JWST is or the data it’s sending back. For that matter most 40 year olds can’t.
A manned mission on the other hand is tangible in a way a probe isn’t. “See the big round thing in the night sky? There are four people going around it in a spacecraft”.
It isn’t a _complete_ argument in favour of manned missions- that has to account for the risk of the endeavour and reward of the science potential of having people there to react in ways robots can’t. But it’s hard to pretend that the inspiration pretty much everyone feels when they see manned missions is somehow achievable purely by robotic ones.
> neither are we anywhere near the capability to lunch construction workers to the moon which can build or assemble an equivalent moon base with their human labor
Why do you say this? What is the bottleneck you feel we are more than half a decade from?
The moon has about the same make up as the Earth when it comes to distribution of elements in the crust. If it's anywhere near 8% like Earth then it makes sense to mine aluminum and other metals on the moon in order to build megastructures in orbit. Since the moon has no atmosphere you can accelerate things using mechanical mass drivers. Basically rail systems. At 5,300 mph you hit escape velocity and can then move payload somewhere with no rockets. It would keep us from polluting Earth too. This is the precursor to O'Neil cylinder type structures. AI robots will probably be the play but you still want a transportation system that works and frankly building a landing zone would improve overall outcomes regardless.
The rocks at the surface of the Moon are richer in metals than the crust of the Earth. They are especially richer in iron and titanium.
Without oxidizing air, it is easier to extract metals from the Moon rocks.
There is little doubt that it would be possible to build big spaceships on the Moon.
However, what is missing on the Moon is fuel. For interplanetary spacecraft, nuclear reactors would be preferable anyway, which could be assembled there from parts shipped from Earth, but for propulsion those still need a large amount of some working gas,to be heated and ejected.
It remains to be seen if there is any useful amount of water at the poles, but I doubt that there is enough for a long term exploitation.
I imagine a foundry would use solar power and lasers to heat up the material. No atmosphere means less heat energy wasted. My thinking has been how to get enough actual build material to build something like an O'Neill cylinder. Well you'd need really thick metal plates. And then you'd want to get them into orbit without rockets. And these stations would likely be at the same orbit as Earth or nearby. Mainly because of how much sun energy you get around here. Going out to the outer solar system is a different beast all together.
This argument comes up a lot, about whether a space program is “worth it” in some sense. One problem I’ve found is that these discussions often treat this in the abstract. And then we get into the nature of human endeavor, the economic benefits of that R&D, etc.
Let’s talk about this in terms of practicalities. The NASA budget for 2026, per Wikipedia, is $24.4B. I often find it hard to really reason about the size of federal budgets, and the impact on tax payers, but I have a thought experiment that I think helps put it into perspective. Suppose we decided to pay for the NASA budget with a new tax, just for funding NASA. And we did that in the simplest (and most unfair) possible way: a flat rate. Every working adult in the US has to pay some fixed monthly rate (so excluding children and retirees). Again, per Wikipedia, that’s around 170M people. Take the NASA budget, divide by 170M, and you get … $11.96/month.
Obviously, there’s lots of flaws in this. That’s not we pay for NASA, we have income tax as a percentage with different tax brackets. But it is a helpful way to frame how much a country is spending, normalized by population. And I think it puts a lot of things in perspective. $11.96/month is comparable to a streaming service. And we talk a lot about whether NASAs budget is better used for other purposes, but we don’t do the same thing for a streaming service.
Hell, look at US consumer spending: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm (note that that spending is in dollars per “consumer unit,” which is I think is equivalent to an adult US worker, but there might be some caveats). Based on that, the average US consumer spends around $26.17/month on “tobacco products and smoking supplies”. I just feel it’s a little silly to worry about the NASA budget when the US consumer spends twice that on what is objectively a luxury good. At least NASA won’t give you cancer.
> And we talk a lot about whether NASAs budget is better used for other purposes, but we don’t do the same thing for a streaming service.
Actually, we do. I just cancelled two of mine in the last hour, and I know many people who are serial join/cancel subscribers because they "talk a lot about whether the [monthly fee] is better used for other purposes".
NASA isn't expensive. The science parts and the job creation parts almost certainly return a significant economic multiplier. The spend is very good value for around 0.5% of the federal budget.
That doesn't mean Moon shots are the best possible use of that budget. There are strong arguments for creating more space stations first, and then using them as staging for other projects.
Mars and the Moon are ridiculously hostile environments. Hollywood (and Elon Musk) have sold a fantasy of land-unpack-build. There aren't enough words to describe how utterly unrealistic that is.
Current strategy is muddled, because it contains elements of patriotic Cold War PR fumes, contractor pork, and more than a hint of covert militarisation. Science and engineering are buried somewhere in the middle of that.
They could be front and centre, but they're not.
I would like to watch a new Moon landing, but in my opinion more useful would be to build a space station with artificial gravity.
At some point it may become cheaper to build a spacecraft on the Moon and launch it in interplanetary missions than to do it from Earth. It might also be useful to build some bigger telescopes on the Moon than it is practical to launch from Earth, because due to the pollution of the sky extraterrestrial telescopes become more and more necessary.
Despite the fact that there may be some uses for bases on the Moon, it is likely that those bases should be mostly automated and humans should stay in such bases only for a limited time, much like staying on the ISS. The reason is that it is very likely that the gravity of the Moon is still too low to avoid health deterioration. According to the experiments done on mice in the ISS, two thirds of the terrestrial gravity were required to avoid health issues and one third of the terrestrial gravity provided a partial mitigation.
So even the gravity of Mars is only barely enough to avoid the more severe health problems, but not sufficient.
For long term missions, there is no real alternative to the use of a rotating space station, to ensure adequate gravity.
While with underground bases on Moon or on Mars it would be much easier to provide radiation protection, there remains the problem of insufficient gravity. It may be necessary to also build a rotating underground base, at least for a part where humans spend most of the time.
That’s a very fair point. Frankly I don’t know enough about the Artemis mission and general path, and would like to learn more. I’m certainly open to the argument that NASA’s budget isn’t properly allocated to the right priorities. I was responding just to the classic argument of “why spend money on NASA when we could be spending on …”
> Out of curiosity, why do you see this as a worthwhile endeavor?
to me it's inspiring and gives people something to cheer for. It also keeps a lot of people employed, productive, and at least has the possibility for new innovation. When looking at the mountains and mountains of wasted taxpayer dollars I dislike these the least.
The moonshot is a halo program that, when executed in a non-profit form, ends up benefiting society as a whole due to smart people being cornered and forced to solve hard problems that typically have applicability elsewhere on Earth.
Edit: remember the Kennedy speech — We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.
> when executed in a non-profit form
For-profits are of no benefit to society? Are SpaceX rockets a loser for society?
> Are SpaceX rockets a loser for society?
That remains to be seen. By giving Musk the prominence to set up DOGE and destroy USAID, they've indirectly led to the deaths of almost a million people.
By launching starlink, they're also increasing the amount of aluminum in the upper atmosphere, which may have catastrophic effects on the ozone layer.
Do government non-profit spacecraft not use aluminum?
SpaceX rockets also are re-usable, which is environmentally better. They also cost about 10% of what non-profit rockets cost to launch.
> they've indirectly led to the deaths of almost a million people.
DOGE is a non-profit entity. Besides, why can't other non-profit governments pick up the aid?
The problem is the amount of aluminum. Government non-profit spacecraft do not use very much aluminum, because they don't launch thousands of LEO satellites per year. By building the first megaconstellation and kicking off competition, SpaceX is exposing humanity to different risks, namely ozone depletion and new mechanisms of climate change:
[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL10...
[2] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024JD04...
> DOGE is a non-profit entity
You seem to be saying that non-profit entities are incapable of killing people? Or that it's fine if non-profit entities do kill people?
> Besides, why can't other non-profit governments pick up the aid?
I think you're being obtuse. An analogy: "Sure I turned off the circuit breaker that was powering the life support machines, but why couldn't someone else bring in a UPS and plug them in to that?"
Government non-profits also have little to no ability to create a starlink system.
To your last point, because DOGE shut down programs in a such a way as to make that impossible, to the point they chose to let food rot, let medicines go bad, and stranded Americans overseas working on the projects without a way home.
It's still a non-profit.
That's debatable. Musk bought his way into politics and shut down USAID very specifically because USAID was investigating him [1]. Oh, and he used his position in DOGE to assist in making sure that government contracts went to his companies, or licensing out his SpaceX workers when his idiocy led to a shortage of air traffic controllers [2], which was very obviously a publicity stunt if nothing else.
So it's a product that was bought and used to enrich a single person. Sure seems like a for-profit to me, at least in this administration.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/usaid-elon-musk-starlink-probe-ukra...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Still non-profit
Only nominally.
Specific innovations tend to be protected via IP when they are developed privately and, as a result, “butterfly effect” developments in a completely different field from cross-pollination are less likely to occur later down the line.
Patents expire. Also, engineers are pretty good about working around patents. Look at all the various AI implementations, for example.
P.S. I oppose patents.
Maybe ... depends on the net net ... some people have internet access and can throw some satellites into space ... on the other hand, wealth and influence accrues to a specific kind of destabilising wanker
Because humans are destined to colonize space, and this is just an early step in a journey that will take hundreds or thousands of years.
More importantly, challenges like space exploration help drive knowledge and our economy; and are critical for national prestigue.
(And, most people don't focus on this, space exploration is a way for the US to demonstrate its military technology in a non-antagonistic way. There's a lot of overlap in space exploration technology and miliary technology.)
It is great to advance of what is humanly possible. Sending a robot? Great! Good data. If it dies, who cares, it does not live anyway. All abstract.
But sending a human? That feels more real. If we have the power to go alive to the moon, we also have the power to go even further. And we lost it, now we are reclaiming it.
And it doesn't matter to me what I think of the US government - this is progress for all of humanity. Also the comment section on the youtube stream is interesting - lot's of different flags are posted, sending good wishes from all around the world, low effort comments otherwise of course, but largely positive. (Very rare I think)
So, more rockets into space please and less on earth.
> My personal perspective is that the resources are better used for other purposes, but it's possible that I just haven't encountered some compelling reason yet.
Well, people are often obsessed with rationality, and seek reasons to do something, but there is one reason that works almost for anything: just because. If we want to go forward, we'd better try a lot of things, including those that do not look very promising. We don't know the future, the only way to uncover it is to try. Did you hear about gradient descent? It is an algo for finding local maxima and to do its work it needs to calculate partial derivatives to choose where to go next. In reality doing things and measuring things are sometimes indistinguishable. So society would better try to move in all directions at once.
A lot of people believe that to fly to the Moon is a good idea. Maybe they believe it due to emotional reasons, but it is good enough for me, because it allows to concentrate enough resources to do it.
> the resources are better used for other purposes
It is much better use for $$$ than the war with Iran. I believe that the war have eaten more then Artemis already, and... Voltaire said "perfect is an enemy of good". The Moon maybe not the perfect way to use resources, but it is good at least.
Go take a look at how much this costs compared to the rest of the federal budget. I think you'll be surprised by how little money NASA gets.
Now, the military...
NASA is something like the third biggest space program in the US
I want humanity to continue to be explorers. The Moon is a good next thing, then asteroid mining, humans on Mars and Venus, and eventually colonizing the Milky Way.
You're right. The future of humanity is not in space, but in venture-backed smartphone apps.
Because one day, far far in the future, the humanity would reach out to the stars, and these are the first tiny steps to enable this. There's always the question of directing the resources, and this program is not that expensive, really - around $100bn. Given that fraud at COVID time alone is estimated to have cost the Treasury twice as much, seems like a worthy investment into the future.
It encourages kids to study science.
It unites Americans towards a cause.
The engineering advancements have commercial applications.
And at the most basic level, it's a jobs program. Look at how many Americans are working because of this.
Think of all that cheese.
But we already learned there is no cheese there, that’s why we never went back.
Successful space travel is one of the few big news events where nobody has to be unhappy.
Most of the other big news events are ones where people get severely hurt, and political ones where one partly loses.
With this, we can look up at the moon, and say "Humanity did that."
Simply because Earth is too small a place for humanity to limit itself to.
Because inevitably the Earth will have yet another ELE. And it's a better use of tax dollars than warmongering, YMMV.
How many days of a war with Iran could be funded with the Artemis budget?
It's quite telling that all the replies you're getting are about "hope" and "jobs" with no actual scientific reason. I guess we're taxing people for vanity space missions and jobs programs. Makes sense.
Because it is good for humans to have a thing to do. Not sure why this is not considered a valid reason. A lot of these 'it would be better to do X' assumes everyone has the same psychological profile as you. They don't. Many people are driven to explore and would go mad otherwise.
It's a better thing to strive for than war.
Man I’m tired of people only caring about money when it comes to space. Meanwhile they lose their shit when someone suggests that tax payers shouldn’t pay for people’s Coca-Cola.
I do much better with things to look forward to, or when I have a feeling that progress can be made. An interesting movie coming out, new music coming out. Or even better reminding me what humans are capable of above just grinding to get by or grinding to exploit others. Haven't been many moments of feeling progress lately.
Hopefully, in a few years we will figure out that hydrogen rockets can not reliably launch on time and we'll switch to less leaky fuels. Then maybe we won't need to pull 40 year old engines out of museums to dump in the ocean.
I'm all for human spaceflight, but the Senate Launch System seems the best argument for shutting down human spaceflight programs.
Oh, don't worry, we did figure that out. What we haven't figured out yet is how to stop Congress from involving themselves in engineering decisions.
Well, we should have figured that out with the STS. That's what the STS was for - figuring out what technologies made for inexpensive, rapid spaceflight and which technologies don't.
Then the senate mandates the new rocket to use specifically the most expensive, problematic, least reliable technology. Completely designed to fail.
Have such hopes for the Starship.
NASA is risking the Astronauts lives, and could have done the mission uncrewed to test what is being tested for the first time with humans:
Artemis II is not safe to fly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582043
But they need to convince the people that it's worth the money, and the people are more excited when humans risk their lives, even if it is for nothing.
Why do they need to convince low IQ people?
Longest trip since 1972.
54 years.
I hope we as humanity never stop again.
Good luck!
Praying for these astronauts to have a safe return. The heat shield stuff has me really rattled. These folks are really brave to go through with this.
Gonna watch with my son if it doesn’t get postponed.
I'd like to see views of the moon and the earth from the spaceship on every hour. Is there any link for that?
Is anybody aware of audio-only coverage of this mission? I'd have loved to just tuned into most of the launch like radio, rather than having my unwatched youtube running.
The politicization of everything and constant doomerish on here sure has echoes of early 2000s Slashdot. That's not a compliment. Reading the comments here is actually depressing. Human progress is never all at once, we can't even celebrate this triumph? Life is almost never "one or the other," the program could be scrapped to a junk yard and that wouldn't solve global hunger or global conflicts. Setting human eyes forward is good.
I pray to never reach a point of cynicism where my response to watching humans leave the planet on a rocket is immediately "meh, whatever, here's my political complaint of the week"
Global hunger's a great example. When we last left the moon (1972) 35% of the global population was undernourished. Today it's ~8%. Optimism is a choice, and generally a more rational one. That doesn't mean we don't have real issues.
24/7 coverage here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3kR2KK8TEs
From here on the space coast of Florida: GODSPEED THE CREW OF ARTEMIS II
Wish them all the best and safe travels. I’ll be tuning in as you never know when the next crewed mission will be, probably not another 50 years if advancements in space travel happen.
An okay unity app for tracking:
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis-ii/arow/
Historic day. Watching the propellant transfer milestones will be fascinating to track over the next few years.
There are tons of comments here that say, "this could have been a robot." And no, it really couldn't have.
The best of humanity is remarkably capable as compared to the best physical machines / robots. There's a great paper called the "dispelling the myth of robotic efficiency." https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article-abstract/53/2/2.22... // https://lasp.colorado.edu/mop/files/2019/08/RobotMyth.pdf
Yes, a robot car that drives on its own will be a better driver than most humans who text and drive, or have 400ms reaction times.But making a machine that can beat a 110ms reaction time human with 2SD+ IQ – and the ability to override the ground controllers with human curiosity – for exploration is much harder. Healthy, smart humans have high dexterity, are extremely capable of switching roles fast, are surprisingly efficient, and force us to return back home.
So in terms of total science return, one Apollo mission did more for lunar science and discovery than 53 years of robots on the surface and in orbit.
They are not going to land on the Moon! They are just going to sit in a can for two weeks and take photos. (OK. Tthe can is on top of a lot of burning explosive material and if they don't aim correctly they will get in a weird trajectory that will kill them. Not for the faint of heart.)
I'm not sure if they can override the commands send from Earth, but turning on and off the engines like in the Apollo XIII movie is like 100 times less accurate than the automatic orders. It's not 1969, now computer can play chess and aim to go around the Moon better than us.
Also, there is still Artemis III to test the live support equipment with humans inside, before Artemis IV that is spouse to attempt landing on the Moon.
The SpaceX cameras of live launches are way better. This NASA stream is mostly all computer generated art after the initial pad launch. Hardly any live space feeds from the ship.
The lack of NASA live feeds from space is very disappointing. Our tax dollars at work.
SpaceX can also reuse their rockets by landing them backwards.
Just listened on the radio driving the kids to swim class! I'm curious, does anyone think the show For All Mankind provided any peer pressure or influence to help propel NASA to this moment?
It’s a fun idea to consider, but I suspect the true push is due to how capable China is proving to be in spaceflight. They’ve got plans for a manned mission to the moon and are eyeing the same craters at the Lunar South Pole as we are.
While the outer space treaty forbids claiming territory in space, it doesn’t forbid building a base and putting a “Keep Out” sign on the airlock.
As a huge fan of Ron D. Moore’s shows, and especially For All Mankind, I don’t see how it could possibly have (or have had) any meaningful impact on NASA or NASA-adjacent efforts. Especially Artemis.
I doubt it, SLS and Artemis predate 'For all mankind' by many years.
True but they have been drag-assing for years.
I think spacex and now blue origin lit a fire under their butts.
Is there any website that gives me updates mirroring the livestream but in plain text? I won't be able to tune in for the launch but this is exciting and I'd like to follow the developments! I'm sure the answer is "Twitter" but I don't understand how that platform works.
https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2026/04/01/live-artemis-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601017
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c4g4ygw0r02t
This is the first live launch I've seen on TV (well, YouTube in this case) since the Challenger disaster. Was a nice relief to see this one go so smoothly.
You never watched any of the SpaceX launches? The first landing attempts? The massive explosions or 'RUD' - rapid unscheduled disassembly - events? The epic launch and synchronous landing of the twin Falcon Heavy side boosters?
Why not? Maybe you're not interested in space launches, in that case I understand. Otherwise I wonder why you did not follow SpaceX in its path to reusable rocketry.
I’m so glad they lifted off safely. I hope they re-enter safely too.
Heat shield is the concerning part, yeah. I'm thrilled the launch went well but that's the thing to watch for, AFAIK
Mission commander made the call himself I believe if it should go ahead, after talking to the engineers.
Mild Space Weather: https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/
Moderate geomagnetic storm watch until April 2.
I'm watching it rapt, but also wondering which KIND of leaky will result in a scrub..
glad to have been wrong on this one!
Can't understand why there doesn't seem to be much wider excitement at all, around "our Apollo 8", that I've been waiting decades for (late 40s here).
Apparently here in the UK our schools are hardly even hyping it.
And NASA proves that it's still got game!
Really it’s all the primes and sub contractors. NASA is more like a management layer. The difference between this and what commercial space companies do comes down to who’s paying and what’s the penalty for poor performance. Not much motivation to get things done in a timely manner with cost-plus programs.
Range is go after they worked to verify the FTS. Great news.
Somebody needs to say that:
What was the AI usage in this endeavour?
Zero, huh?
I'm just SO HAPPY we can talk about something that doesn't involve the Iran war, ICE etc. This is a really historic moment, I hope that the current and future administrations continue investing in space exploration. I've waited my whole life for this as the entire "action" happened before I was born. Hubble/James Webb/ISS are cool but Artemis is something else!
>we can talk about something that doesn't involve the Iran war, ICE etc.
And yet, you did bring them up.
... federalized voting, birthright citizenship... it is amazing how space exploration can be a unifying moment of positivity.
Safe trip to the crew. I do hope that they have ironed out all the issues.
Good luck to the astronauts
https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....
Neil Armstrong 2: A New Moon?
Godspeed AI-I
God speed
Gods peed
I get that not everyone, even on HN, thinks crewed-spaceflight is worth doing. And I certainly get that launching people to the moon doesn't makes up for the latest crap thing Trump is doing to the world.
But I really think that space exploration could be the thing that unites everyone, and the more unified we are--the more we feel like we have a common purpose--the easier it will be to solve our other problems.
I for one pledge to support space exploration (crewed or uncrewed) regardless of who is running the government. I will cheer Artemis II even though I voted against Trump. I will cheer if/when China sends people to the moon. I will even cheer if Russia does something cool in space.
If the crew were to be lost into deep space or something, is there a protocol for self euthanization?
They will be in a free return orbit so that can’t happen - just other bad things.
What’s the margin of error on a free return orbit burn though? Isn’t there a scenario of being pointed slightly in the wrong direction or burning for too long throwing them off?
too windy outside for this to happen imo
You better run over there and let them know.
What is your opinion based on?
licked my finger and stuck it in the air
walking outside, and the surf report... they cancel all the time for less wind shear
They should switch out to a quad fin fish, it'll handle the chop much better.
And yet they didn't.
KSP irl. I still dont know how they keep the framerate so high with so many parts.
4.5hrs to go
17 minutes to go now!
Oh hell... Thanks for this reminder, I have almost forgot about it with all the problems I'm trying to solve now.
Why do this? Why look to space and understand Earth's smallness? So we can understand reality as Carl Sagan explains in his pale blue dot speech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g
It is very disconcerting to see so many completely disregarding incredible technological innovation because other problems exist, especially on HN.
If we were not allowed to progress technology until everybody is 100% free of suffering, we'd never be able to create technological that may potentially lead to the alleviation of suffering. It all feels very crabs in a bucket - "I don't feel happy so nobody else should, and nothing should happen unless it is things that directly, immediately do things I want and solve problems I care about."
There is no technological innovation in the Artemis stack.
Three of the main engines are refurbished Shuttle engines. The fourth is a clone that cost more than the entire SpaceX Starship stack.
The boosters are derived from the Shuttle SRBs.
It's a late-60s technology rocket stack with a 2000s-era flight computer.
It's such a travesty.
Its true that innovation isn't clearly shown in this mission; we also haven't flown humans out that far in more than 50 years either and while we have memories of it, our ability to even execute something like this must be built again. I'd rather see us doing this and 'pick up from where we were last time', than giving up on it or just using a stack that's not currently set to do this.
What Artemis is doing is not impeding innovation: its building our muscle back to work on such things; the discipline, rigor, scale, and attitude needed to execute such missions is unimaginable and orthogonal to the technical innovation and stack used. I also believe that its completely fine to use a 2000s-era flight computer, if that suffices for this purpose. Somehow, for such critical missions, my mental model is to use at least 10 year old technology that has stood the test of time, before going into space. If there's a need for the latest technology - then yes, it should be leveraged.
Not impending innovation is IMHO debatable - Artemis has definitely potential to motivate a lot of lay population & young people to go do space stuff and tech in general.
On the other hand SLS and Orion have gobbled insane amount of money that could have been invested to other science missions or even more efficient human space flight.
> our ability to even execute something like this must be built again
Why? Because "dreams"? "Reach for the stars"?
You know what I remember from the shuttle launches as a kid? I remember my school not being able to afford textbooks but apparently we had enough to spend billions on putting people in space for no reason.
I really resonate with this. I remember watching Comic Relief with Whoopie Goldberg as a kid, the whole show focused on homelessness in America, andshe said somthing like "why are we spending billions launching shuttles when people are sleeping on the streets?" That hit me hard. Especially because I was also the kid who was obsessed with space. It felt like a contradiction I couldn't square - I wasn't homeless, I think my school had books, but who remembers...
What shifted my thinking over tim was the actual numbers. NASA's entire budget during the shuttle era was roughly 1% of federal spending [1]. We chose to de-institutionalize heathcare which really impacted homelessness. We didn't have to, but it was choice. And we could of done both. The failure was our leaders choosing not to, and that choice had nothing to do with NASA.
And the shuttle era, for all its problems, gave us Hubble. That single telescope showed us the universe is 13.8 billion years old, that expansion is accelerating, that nearly every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. The shuttle crews serviced it five times to keep it running. I think it's hard to overstate what that one instrument did for our understanding of the universe.
I don't think the instinct you had as a kid was wrong at all! - And thanks for helping me re-activate some neurons- Whoopi made a real impession on me came from a real place. But I think we're lucky enough to live in a world where people fight to fix things on the ground and also point telescopes at the sky.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
Developing something like this would push the frontiers of human technology. Without the Apollo program, not to mention anything else, the personal computer boom in the 1970s might have been delayed by a long time.
We're redoing things we did before most people in this thread were even born, how would any of this "push the frontiers of human technology?"
The Space Shuttle’s technology is indeed quite old, but by today’s standards it is not exactly outdated. What matters is that we have lost the ability to carry out that technology — or even the ability to organize and coordinate a project like that. Otherwise, the price of the SLS as an “off-the-shelf product” would not be so outrageous, and it would not keep getting delayed again and again. Technology gets forgotten and capability is lost as people and suppliers disappear. The fact that we could build the Saturn V half a century ago does not mean we could still build it today; even the fact that we could build the F-22 twenty years ago does not mean we could still produce it now once the production lines are gone. Restoring that capability is always a good thing, considering the indirect effects.
Because we have gone backwards so any advancement requires some repetition.
Strange that SpaceX doesn’t seem to be suffering from that limitation. Could it be that the real problem is pork barrel spending and government wastefulness?
Which mission went to the moon?
Why would they go to the moon? They’re far too busy doing things that actually matter, such as slashing launch costs by 80% or more, while achieving the highest reliability of any launch system ever.
What are you talking about? SLS is on the way to the Moon now. Starship is still in development. SpaceX only exists because of massive NASA subsidy. Any success from SpaceX is thanks to NASA.
>We're redoing things we did before most people in this thread were even born
oh really? show me a picture of the dark side of the moon then
not a reconstruction, not touched up crap based on data like that black hole pic that went viral a few years ago, an actual photograph taken by an astronaut of the dark side of the moon
The first orbit of the moon by a manned spacecraft was Apollo 8 in 1968.
The first photos of the dark side of the moon were taken by the Soviet Luna-3 probe in 1959.
Have you looked at US per pupil K-12 spending growth & absolute comparisons vs. peer nations?
The problem with US public schools is not funding.
If we're going to be idealists and say that the money that'd come out of space exploration would go into education, there is an awful lot more money being spent on the business of killing people that you could also say should go elsewhere.
Do you honestly believe that by repurposing money from missions like these would suddenly free up money for text books? That’s not how it works. Especially not in 2026.
I don't see them insinuating that, just that it certainly raises a question about what we value and how we allocate resources.
I guess probably we should stop spaceflight until we can go back in time and buy you a textbook.
Spaceflight is cool. Its a awesome thing that people can exist outside our gravitational well. We don't need to solve every possible problem before we do anything cool.
Almost all of what makes spaceflight “cool” today is inherited excitement and nostalgia, most of it unearned by the current generation of space endeavors.
Apollo was a humanity-defining undertaking. Repeating the same 60 years later with outdated technology at outrageous costs for pork barrel spending, while far superior launch systems have been available for a decade, is about as far away from being “cool” as I can imagine.
The average ESA environmental observation satellite is a lot cooler (and a lot more important) than this launch.
> is no technological innovation in the Artemis stack
Scaling is still engineering.
And the environmental control system, laser-optical communication systems and block-construction heat shields are new. For Artemis III, in-obit propellant transfer will be new and transformational.
The block construction heat shield was new on Artemis I. Now we just know that it is an unfixed problem that will be done differently on future missions.
And Artemis III has nothing to do with in-orbit propellant transfer, that will be SpaceX and Blue Origin testing independently of Artemis III.
> block construction heat shield was new on Artemis I. Now we just know that it is an unfixed problem
Unfixed problems on a new technology mean it’s still new.
> Artemis III has nothing to do with in-orbit propellant transfer
I may have fucked this up—isn’t the depot supposed to be up for III? Or is that punted to IV?
It isn't moving forward. It's an ill-conceived Apollo 1.5 with the MIC calling all the shots and a lander that is MIA. China is doing Apollo 2.0 which is fine considering this is their first attempt. The US needs a modular launch system with orbital booster tugs that can be mixed in various combinations for different mission profiles. One big booster with all of the risk stacked onto billion dollar launches is not the future we should be working toward.
> US needs a modular launch system with orbital booster tugs that can be mixed in various combinations for different mission profiles
This is what the propellant depot is building towards.
> in-obit propellant transfer
I'm hoping they can do it in-orbit. We've had enough NASA obits
Hehe. Obits to be avoided in obisular orbits.
All of this stuff is really great but it's not worth the cost that was spent on it.
The thing you have to keep asking yourself is "what could 100 billion dollars of non-pork barrel spending have bought instead of what we ended up with?"
A month of war in the middle east.
> All of this stuff is really great but it's not worth the cost that was spent on it
It’s building towards a system. If we get Starship and in-orbit propellant depots and a lunar nuclear reactor and then kill the programme, it will probably be judged by history as a success.
> what could 100 billion dollars of non-pork barrel spending have bought instead of what we ended up with?
Rien. This is the system we have, and it’s unclear such a program could have survived sans pork.
It may be building towards a system. Or it could all be cancelled in 3-4 weeks after these four explorers burn up on reentry.
And then all these hopes and dreams that you have will be gone, like that $100 billion dollars just up in smoke.
I can tell that you're as passionate about space exploration and colonization as I am, but this isn't the way my friend.
This program is coming at the cost of the Aldrin Cyclers and Von Braun Wheels that you and I know could and should have existed decades ago and while you may think that those things will come from this program I think you should consider the fact that root cause of this program's dysfunction is what is denying us this reality of humanity spreading across the stars.
> It may be building towards a system
It may build. It is building.
> it could all be cancelled in 3-4 weeks after these four explorers burn up
We’d have wasted money. But we’d still be ahead. Artemis has funded a lot of development.
> can tell that you're as passionate about space exploration and colonization as I am, but this isn't the way my friend
In a perfect world? No. Is it a legitimate way? Absolutely. We’re still moving forward.
> This program is coming at the cost of the Aldrin Cyclers and Von Braun Wheels
Nobody is funding these. We’re beating the Chinese to land. That clicks. That sells. Space-based infrastructure is hallucinated competition.
> that root cause of this program's dysfunction is what is denying us this reality
The alternative is we spend NASA’s Artemis budget on Medicaid billing at autism centers in Indiana.
I’d prefer the vision you painted. But I won’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. This program moves us forward and funds roads to alternatives. Starship, for example.
What a simultaneously cynical and boring and completely useless attitude. Is it your position that if this hadn't happened 100b of otherwise more important spending would have happened?
I think that $100 billion, spent effectively could have resulted in Von Braun Wheels in LEO. I think that it could have resulted in teleoperated lunar mining and smelting that would be allowing us to build human bases on Earth now instead of a single fly by that may end in the death of these four amazing explorers.
It's silly to say there's no innovation here. These aren't legos that you just snap together. I'm sure there are innovations up and down the whole thing, using the old technology they have easily available to them.
No, it's not the most modern Rocket Lab or SpaceX project but they have immense drag on their process that those companies don't have and they still got the dang thing up and headed toward the moon.
That old technology wasn't remotely "easy" and the reason the top minds aren't going to NASA is because nobody wants to work on tech selected for maximum pork.
It's not about the Orion unit specifically but the fact that this is happening in the first place. This is simply a precursor to future missions and the construction of the Artemis Base Camp.
This read like one of those "I could've done this in a weekend" replies to app launches.
IIRC there are some hydrogen powered APUs on the SLS core stage, replacing the Hydrazine powered ones used on Shuttle (both on orbiter & SRBs). The solar panel control on the Orion also seems coo and useful, not to mention having cameras on the arrays for self-inspections.
I am sure there are more subtle innovations like this that would hopefully be useful on more sensible rockets and space vehicles in the future. :)
While that might be true, it is on course to the moon now. Starship hasn't really done anything close. So while cheaper might be on the way, it doesn't exist now. When Starship can do now, we can talk about if the Shuttle Leftover System is ready to be retired
Starship is not designed for high-orbit deep-space missions; it is more like a cargo truck for low Earth orbit.
Fine, but you're dodging the actual point here I think
So you agree that SLS provides useful functionality and that Musk lied about Starship being a Mars bus.
We'll be sure to give you a ring when the Moon base needs food delivery apps in the year 2347.
I believe the fourth is actually built from left over STS engine parts and they haven’t gotten to the clones yet.
It's in orbit. I for one love the fact they recycled some well-designed engines and made this mission a success (so far).
So, are you suggesting we should not misunderstand “just business” as “glorious human achievement”?
Well what are they suppose to do other than continue where they left it? As far I understand purpose of Artemis mission it is to build a pernamently occupied base on the moon not to build better and better rockets now. I mean, it's not the best solution but it is proven to work and they perceive it as enough for now. I think it's very similar to some critical systems still running code written in cobol sixty years ago.
The Artemis was a pork barrel project to feed federal tax money to all the states that had huge space shuttle contracts.
That and NASA is pathologically terrified of anything resembling innovation.
Yeah, fuck the engineers who worked full time and ran many simulations tirelessly and worked out the best stack for this mission, right?
Most of the combustion engines in your car are still from designs late 60s - 80s (Eg. Renault). Does that mean it's a travesty too?
Let me guess, a bunch of dudes sitting in SF in a garage could have made a better rocket that runs on ReactJS, right? Because NASA BAD.
Give me a break.
It’s interesting to compare to Apollo 8 (circumlunar Apollo mission). That mission culminated a year that saw escalation of the Vietnam War and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
The Apollo 8 book I read once ended with a letter to NASA thanking them and saying “You saved 1968.”
It was a telegram, not a letter. As also immortalised at the end of the 1968 episode of ‘From The Earth To The Moon’, attributed there to an apparently fictitious person.
It's much more popular to be doomer and a critic on the internet. Virtue signalling etc.
> It's much more popular to be doomer and a critic on the internet
Is it more popular? Or is it just easy? Dismissive “reads” are done by the picosecond; there is just much more to choose from than constructive thinking, which takes work.
That's true, most of these comments are just drive by pessimism by people who just skim headlines and don't really care to deeply understand the topics being discussed.
That’s a good 75% of HN these days.
Nice drive by pessimism.
Why is pessimism, virtue signalling, doomerism, etc. so prevalent on the internet these days?
It wasn't always this way, was it? Am I misremembering "the golden years"?
Is it the failing economy? The K-shaped economy? The political and news cycle?
I'm excited for all of this stuff, and I can't imagine being downtrodden and pessimistic about our outlook. The only thing I'm down about are authoritarianism and monopolies, but those are outside of my control. Modern science and engineering rock.
Going to the moon is amazing. All this AI stuff is amazing. It feels like the future again.
I agree entirely. HN tends to be incredibly nitpicky and dystopian. I think it's because so many HNers work in dystopian software-only companies, not doing much in the physical world, away from the algorithms.
Incredible technological innovation is on the horizon. That's why we are not doomed this century. We can make it.
*hits 'reply', knowing there will be nitpicky comments because of course on HN these days, no positive point shall be left standing.
This is such a strawman argument because nobody expects nobody expects all wealth to be redistributed absolutely equally. What many of us would like however is a sufficient baseline.
I've recently seen a seris of Tiktoks from a 50 year old woman who lives in rural China on ~$1/day. She works in a shoe factory and makes ~$11/day. Her husband is a truck driver. Thing is, she has a house, a phone, an electric scooter, enough to eat, electricity and overall all her basic needs are met.
That's the baseline for modern China.
In the US, you'd end up homeless, eventually lose your car, find it impossible to keep your car, probably end up self-medicating with drugs, get harassed by police and ultimately your status will be criminalized and you'll end up being convict labor.
I don't need Jeff Bezos to have the same amount of money as everyone else but I do want, in the wealthiest country on Earth in particular, everyone to have secure housing health insurance, food, clothing and utilities.
There are other reasons too to criticize the SLS program: it's incredibly wasteful and is just another welfare program for defense contractors. The Artemis/SLS programs have cost ~$100 billion in the last 2 decades. That's staggeringly inefficient. Likewise, each Artemis mission costs ~$4 billion. That's ridiculous.
I, for one, would be much happier seeing these Moon missions if it wasn't such a giant scam to steal $100 billion from the government coffers.
Well said. I find it interesting that a single proton-m total cost per launch is about 70 million. Of course its lift capacity is much smaller, but if the 4 billion figure is correct, it does seem like a ridiculous amount. But then again things are no different from the defense expenses.
How dare we want to fix the existential threats on the planet before we spend billions on a publicity stunt.
No, there's no possible way we "save humanity" with space exploration. The whole "eggs in more than one basket" thing is insane.
The resources required to establish a colony, get it self-sufficient, then able to grow, and then put enough people on it will take half a century and the planet is burning up today.
Do you think that had this not launched that it would have been spent on something else that would have "saved humanity" better?
US spends 4x as much on just nuclear bombs as the NASA budget for some perspective. Nuclear bombs are only 10% of the military budget, and as big as the military spending is, all of that is still only 15% of the federal budget.
It seems a bit ridiculous to be thinking NASA spending is in any way meaningfully holding us back from whatever "save humanity" spending we could be doing.
Waiting to see what happens to the heat shield on reentry...
https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....
https://theconversation.com/heat-shield-safety-concerns-rais...
> the agency said it was confident that a change to the re-entry trajectory would be more than adequate to offset any spalling issues. Somewhat confusingly, they also announced their intention to switch to a new heat shield design, starting with Artemis III.
It's fine to be concerned, but this kind of take is why public agencies are damned no matter what they do. In the private sector, operating with the suboptimal resources you have while working on a better iteration is standard practice, even in industrial settings. But when you're a public organization, if anyone can find anything that is less than 100% optimal, the same people who complain about how slow the public sector is will complain that you're cutting corners, or that you're inept.
In the private sector, risking astronaut’s lives when you know a problem exists can result in jail time - what will happen to NASA?
1. The entire mission is “risking astronaut’s lives”.
2. NASA employees don’t have criminal immunity.
> the agency said it was confident that a change to the re-entry trajectory would be more than adequate to offset any spalling issues. Somewhat confusingly, they also announced their intention to switch to a new heat shield design, starting with Artemis III.
This is not confusing in the least. Engineers don't talk about safety in binary terms. It's not "safe" vs. "not safe". Instead, it's all about the probability of a bad outcome. At NASA, they compute the probability of Loss of Crew (LoC) and the probability of Loss of Mission (LoM).
For Artemis II, a change to the re-entry trajectory brings the LoC/LoM back to an acceptable level. For Artemis III, which a new shield design, they can get to the same LoC/LoM with a different trajectory (which gives them other benefits).
Stop thinking in terms binary terms. Everything is a probability.
There was an interesting thread on HN yesterday about the safety of the heat shield.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582043
Really hoping those of us who think NASA has jumped the shark won't have to keep ourselves from saying "I told you so" next week out of respect for the dead.
This is four people putting their lives at risk for poor engineering and bad project management.
The "right stuff" applies to the engineers too, but they've all unfortunately left Boeing and NASA.
This opinion may be unpopular here but it's hard to get excited about a colossal waste of taxpayer money after all the damage DOGE did. I don't understand how these NASA missions with questionable scientific value and obscene budgets get off the ground.
I mean I do understand, NASA funding is important to oligarchs. But still.
I personally find the grind easier when there also big things happening. You can't just cook the same, most basic, cheapest meal every day for your family and expect them to be happy. Who wants to join a club that doesn't do anything interesting? Same with society. It sometimes needs to dream, to aspire and inspire. To lift peoples head from the toil and look up.
Artemis was already set in stone well before DOGE came about and IMO if the federal government is going to set mountains of cash on fire I'd rather it be to NASA than half the crap the government wastes every year.
My point is that DOGE killed a bunch of government programs that help people while saving no money, yet this giant waste of money survived. Cancelling Artemis II alone in favor of III would save a billion dollars by itself.
Guy who runs space program joins government to kill his competitor would be a beautiful story.
> government programs that help people
Like spending $1.5 million on DEI programs in Serbia? That actually happened.
Multiply by 1000. Then multiply by 10. And that is expenditure on another country but instead of for promoting equity (how can anyone be against DEI as it is properly defined???) it is spent on slaughter.
It was never intended to save money. It was about a crusade against remote work, eliminating civil servants who might be loyal to the Constitution rather than the president, and planting a seed of government dysfunction for later years.
Good idea, we should divert taxpayer money to offshore wind and AI-powered food delivery startups instead.
I find it interesting the MSM is too busy sperging out about Trump to not treat this as page-three news and place it below the cut.
It's also the first woman and black guy to go to the moon, for those keeping score at home.
Trump scored an own goal. Military conflict tends to hijack the front page.
Did anyone else even know this was happening?
Even I'm a big space fan, at moment I just can enjoy anything that comes from USA. I just can't applause to a super bully.
That's your own thing. Think about it to applause the dedicated work of people who have spent their life building these missions and have to do this work through multiple different administrations.
What a sad, disappointing instinct. It completely divorced from reality to assume that "enjoy[ing] anything that comes from [the] USA" implies any sort of political allegiance to whoever happens to sit in the Oval office at that particular point in time.
There's no way you're "a big space fan" if the first thing you think of when you see a rocket launch that was announced 9 years is Donald Trump.
Finally something interesting. I'm familiar with dead Internet theory, the whole Lindy thing where culture died in the early 2010's etc. Economy stinks, global violence everywhere.
Going back to the moon is really acceptable distraction. I mean that seriously. I know it's technically not new but it will be amazing to see modern video and photographic pictures of the moon close up.