By all rights, this should be something I am deeply passionate about. I’ve been in tech/engineering my entire adult life and was obsessed with NASA as a kid. I even live on the east coast of Florida and can sometimes see the launches/landings over the ocean. But I just… don’t care at all. I’m not suffering from depression or any other malaise, and generally things are fine. But I haven’t clicked on a single link or looked at a single image. I know this has not been the case for many, many people, so I’m wondering what might be different about this launch (or really the whole program in general), and curious if anyone else has found themselves feeling the same.
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I’m on the other side, wondering where everyone is
We’re bogged down in so much misery, so much self-destructive behavior, so many exploiters and scams, so many people in desperate circumstances …. But Artemis (and similar) is meeting a challenge, doing the impossible, setting a vision of a greater humanity, shifting civilization forward. It’s a reason to live, to hope, to be optimistic, and probably benefits even the most desperate by shifting society forward.
I don’t care because it doesn’t seem like a genuine mission to prove something. It feels like a purely political stunt. At least with the original mission, it was breaking a frontier on top of trying ot show off to Russia during the Cold War, but this time it’s only the US flexing as mandated by the Orangegutan in Charge because he can and it feels icky.
His name is forever going to be associated with this too. Tainted like our lives have been with his toxicity forever
My feelings exactly. This was not politics leveraged to advance science. This was science abused to advance politics.
For me, I just don’t see it as the step towards a bright future that it cone was.
So we reinvigorate the world’s interest in space missions, then what? Every iota of evidence from our own planet tells us that businesses are going to own the moon, mars, and beyond. Wayland-Yutani is more likely than The Federation.
I just can’t get excited about another frontier for Musk and Bezos to rub their stanky dicks all over.
I was far more excited to see the solar panels in Syria.
We have so much problems down here on Earth that Artemis seems like a smokescreen. I see no way it could benefit humanity.
There are an endless number of problems here on earth. However while we can make a difference, establish a trend, we can never fix them. It’s a losing battle. We fix at least as many problems by improving technology, civilization.
Let’s take refrigerators. There are way too many people without adequate food and there always will be. We can fix the excesses, we can set a trend but we will never end hunger. However technology advances, overall societies become wealthier, and now at least in developed countries almost everyone has access to refrigeration. Trying to help the hungry doesn’t get us there, shifting the whole society forward does.
We may not have concrete ideas how Artemis can shift society forward but in general big technology challenges do
Most of Earth problems have very little to do with technology and a lot to do with political and economical systems. And even it we had a Zeus program going straight to Jupiter would make noe difference.
But doesn’t that argue against your earlier point? If our myriad of earthly problems are generally political and economic system, then Artemis does not take away from addressing them.
One of the ways it could benefit humanity is to offload the destruction of our environment in pursuit of rare earth metals, natural gases, to a moon or planet where the environment does not support life.
Strip mining and fracking are actively and rapidly destroying our planet. Stopping those activities here would be a massive improvement to our chances of survival on Earth into the future.
Oh asteroid mining with slow electric engines would offload SOOOOOO much emissions and pollution. Granted we would have to build some sort of space elevator or platform which would be a global effort and cost hundreds of trillions in every stage. But once the main aspects were done, it would be very efficient.
Also it turns out asteroids are conveniently formed in layers like an onion. All the work of pulling veins of ore out of ground and rock is unnecessary, because the heavier elements are further towards the center of these much MUCH Smaller bodies than planets, and the lighter elements on on top. It would make it far far easier to find and harvest these minerals and resources than it is now. As most people are aware, rare earth minerals aren’t actually rare, they’re just so scarcely spread out over our crust.
All the minerals and resources we want that are actually from Earth’s formation are hundreds of miles below the surface, most likely in molten form in the mantle, because of how cosmic body formation works with density and gravity. The resources we are extracting were probably almost all deposited by asteroid, meoterite, and comet strikes, that also probably brought our oceans.
All this to say, these asteroid did the same thing Earth did, pulled their heavy materials to their cores, but these are much easier to crack and process than an entire planet. We don’t need to go all Ishimura from Dead Space with planet cracking, when we can just crack open tiny to small sized asteroids and harvest those valuable materials much more readily, in FAR FAR higher quantity than on Earth’s surface, and with very little environmental impact.
That would be givin a lifeline to an already unsustainable and destructive system.
So… we need resources. Like if we go back to preindustrial society, hundreds of millions die, from diseases and famine and disability and a whole onslaught of issues. We are currently fucking over our planet to scrape the remnant of asteroid impacts to make the tools and systems we use. Now, are a bunch of those unnecessary, of course, and can they probably be done better, yes. But until we have Star Trek style replicators or hard light technology, we will need a decent amount of resources to continue existing. And I don’t know about you, but asteroid mining seems a LOT more attainable and within the nearish future timespan than replicators or hard light.
No, we need different system. We already have enough resources to provide every human being on Earth with decent life. With late capitalism whole universe would not be enough, because its greed is insatiable. So, we’ll add exploitation of Moon to exploitation of Earth.
Oh I meant we use this technology in collectivist ways, not private corporations mining. Truly, to build that initial space elevator or space dock, I can’t imagine it outside of a star trek like Earth. We would have to all work together for this and for many other projects which would be cool to accomplish
Whitey On The Moon by Gil Scott-Heron comes to mind. Planet is burning and they’re sending money to space.
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon
Her face and arms began to swell
And whitey’s on the moon
I can’t pay no doctor bills
But whitey’s on the moon
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still
While whitey’s on the moon
The man just upped my rent last night
Cause whitey’s on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But whitey’s on the moon
I wonder why he’s upping me?
Cause whitey’s on the moon?
Well I was already giving him fifty a week
And now whitey’s on the moon
Taxes taking my whole damn check
Junkies making me a nervous wreck
The price of food is going up
And as if all that crap wasn’t enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon
Her face and arm began to swell
And whitey’s on the moon
Was all that money I made last year
For whitey on the moon?
How come I ain’t got no money here?
Hmm! Whitey’s on the moon
Y’know I just 'bout had my fill
Of whitey on the moon
I think I’ll send these doctor bills
Airmail special
To whitey on the moonI feel oddly similar. I think it’s that I can’t cheer for America.
We should have gone to mars by now, but all the funds went to child raping fascists and bombs apparently
i dont think we are technologically there to get to the mars even with money, probably a few more decades of funding and research.
Yep. But that’s the thing, we could’ve been there if we didn’t spend the resources necessary for it on stupid things the last ~5 decades.
that is true, largely everyone forgot about space exploration, and focused on WAR economy instead.
We can with enough money. We already established we can build stuff in orbit and send stuff to orbit. All you need to get to mars is a larger rocket. So assemble it in space and go to mars. It’s the same problem of going to the moon just with more delta v.
It’s a lot more than that, starting with transit time - take a few week lunar mission and scale it up to years
- after such a long trip out in microgravity, will astronauts even be functional when they get there? ISS astronauts in space that long have a hard time standing, walking, etc, and now they need to assemble their habitat for the next couple years?
- by the time they get back they will have been in space longer than ISS limits
- while nasa has very detailed planning, anything that messes up and an “emergency” supply or rescue takes nine months or more?
- so much more fuel needed to deal with trying to get there fast then Mars’s gravity well
- imagine any medical emergency
- there is no short mission where they can try something then head back after a few days. The shortest mission is over 2 years
You already know the answer, I think. It’s because they didn’t land.
Orbiting the moon - super cool. Seeing new stuff from far side - super cool. Emotional investment in something we’ve more or less done before? Well…
Which is actually a damn shame, but brains are funny like that. The entirety of human progress (and hubris) is down to chasing the next dopamine hit - and that probably includes the original moon shot.
Artemis is asking you to feel the same thing twice. Your lizard brain isn’t stupid - it’s just honest and lazy. If novelty is the drug, then this isn’t a new drug. It’s a carefully rebranded rerun with better CGI and a press kit. Plus, you’ve probably had a lot of other proxy hits to the ol’ reward center so that something as big as “humans in a tin can fly around the moon” just registers as “meh - I’ve seen better on For All Mankind”.
And I hate that for us.
Honestly I don’t even think I would care if they had landed. If they were setting up some sort of base I’d be into it – mostly to geek out over the new tech and techniques that would have to be developed for construction, environmental control, etc. But for just boots on the ground? Still kinda meh.
I’d be excited for boots on Mars, but again maybe for the same reasons - just to get people there and back would require an almost unthinkable (today) level of development and dedication of resources.
But they are setting up a base, or they’re claiming to. This is exactly why I’m excited about it.
Assuming politics doesn’t interfere again, I’m expecting a permanent or semipermanent presence and all sort of new stuff
We’ve become so…jaded. I remember flying home from Japan, watching movies on my Ipad and dicking around on the net via inflight wifi. Literally flying over the ocean, in a chair, in the sky, with a supercomputer the size of a book, using invisible waves to communicate instantaneously across the globe.
Yawn.
Our calibration for extraordinary is out of whack. That’s the issue, I think.
I don’t care about it because it’s a NASA mission and I’ve noticed that anything American these days makes me nauseous.
Call me anything you like, I don’t care, this is how o feel after years of america bullshit and decades of more murrica bullshit with their preprogrammed exceptionalism.
I look down upon them, I pity them at best
And then there is something as great as this and I just can help but feel like it’s tainted somehow. I know it’s an international collaboration, but still, the smell somehow remains
I’m sorry, but fuck, so much misery and death and suffering has been brought to the world by the US for so long already… Trump is just the next iteration taking this place to its natural conclusion. Of course trump is corrupt, the country has been through and through corrupt for decades. This is just a typical self absorbed American grabbing the chance geven to get me myself and I to the top.
So yeah, mixed feelings at best.
This system of things, all over the world, is falling apart. Going to space might be likened to a desperate cry for sanity. But a single cry of a baby in an ocean of crying individuals all over the world is not something given much attention.
I kinda felt the same way tbh, I love space stuff so usually I would be super exited about it, and maybe following it in real time, specially taking into account the budget cuts that NASA has been getting over the previous decades, I should be hopeful for the start of a new age of (manned) space exploration, but given the current political climate I can’t ignore that the whole thing ends up being a demonstration of power by the USA first and a scientific mission second.
Thing is, this has always been the case since the very first space missions, it’s nothing new that governments only finance space programs for ulterior motives. Maybe I’ve become too cynical to be able to separate stuff from their political context.
I literally don’t even want to watch Project Hail Mary.
I think of all those space movies where the Earth has to do something together. Where it cuts to listeners in Paris, Beijing, Zimbabwe, New York, and Moscow before going back to some Mission Control center saying “We’re counting on you.”
Then I realize, in reality, there would be American cultists actively fighting any kind of effort to save the world, or run a giant “DEI WILL DOOM US” campaign because one of the astronaut crew is part Asian.
I want these stupid fanciful astronauts to see that we actively don’t have the circumstances to create these wonderful worldwide moments of joy anymore because of the overwhelming levels of sick hatred they’ve created in bankrupting our world of empathy and flooding it with religious propaganda.
The people personally funding rockets could have cured cancer everywhere with their savings. I honestly think if a lethal meteor was headed for the Earth, they’d want to live, but they’d invest everything into trying to save themselves rather than trying to save everyone.
Project Hail Mary doesn’t do that, from what I recall. I think it’s just the US government/military collecting a bunch of scientists. Maybe it’s cut from the adaptation. The mission has a lengthy timeline of decades while the existential threat is already harming the planet. It doesn’t really paint the Earth in any kind of dreamy co-op light from what I recall.
It’s a beautiful movie. I like hard sci-fi drama. My SO does not. We both enjoyed it as it split the difference. It has some beautiful visuals along the way. It’s far from “men being dicks in space” like Ad Astra and it doesn’t do the Armageddon thing with the global livestream. I’m not saying you have to watch it, but it’s just a nice, well done movie worth the time IMO.
You’re criticizing NASA, a public entity, as if they are in the same club as the billionaires making phallus-shaped rockets and putting pop stars into space. They’re not the same.
Also, the Artemis Program’s entire budget so far, over the span of ~ a decade is 93 billion. The US spends 997 billion on its war machine every single year.
Maybe they could bomb, shoot, or invade 10% less in the future and give that money to support those in need?
I actually wasn’t even trying to criticize NASA. “The people personally funding rockets” refers to private companies like SpaceX.
My only criticism to NASA isn’t really on their funding, but on their general goals of spreading joy through their accomplishments; of having Hollywood movies where we see the whole world unite around a shared cause.
The sad reality is, that reality could be as simple as “our planet doesn’t blow up” and we’d have some people remark “MIGHT BE WORTH IT TO KILL THOSE EVIL LIB’RULS” or “Finally, we achieved Armageddon! And here I thought we needed to purge the West Bank first! Where’s Jesus and the risen army?”
I don’t think it’s all that hot what’s being done in contrast to what has already been achieved decades ago.
So, once around the moon, Hm.
On the other hand, stuff others already said. There’s so much stuff going in, imo the effort could be used in other places.
Did you hear about that boat that recently made it to Antarctica? Yeah, me neither.
Imagine modern tech in the hands of 80’s people.
“TF you mean 5.4 Gigaherz, 768 MB RAM, 600 AH battery storage!?”
They would string together something godly.
My personal opinion of it is that it was either a reaffirmation of the tech need to do it, in which case its kinda sad that we haven’t progressed beyond that for the last 50 years. The other idea I have of it is that it was the simplest and fastest way to get eyes on the dark side of the moon to verify or discount the notion of China building a base there
Fwiw the module is 50% larger by volume than Apollo and carries four people rather than three
Also: computers, and a 120Mb/s laser link to earth!
And Microsoft Outlook … LoL
Nah, it’s way easier to send a satellite to take a look.
It’s impossible to secretly launch enough payloads to build a moonbase in the first place. Every launch has to pass through low earth orbit and rockets are shiny. There are too many eyes on the sky to go unnoticed. Even then, there’d be radio chatter between the Earth and Moon, and satellite redirection from the far side. You can encrypt radio signals, but they can’t hide.
So basically it gives life aid to capitalism and will let us destroy planet some more. Even worse.
Personally, for me, I’ve paid attention to it some, but not followed it closely. I think a lot of it is just that I understand it so well and have seen it all before. I love KSP (and KSA is looking great!), and have played it with the real solar system mods. The launch looks better than the game, but everything after the game does better. It can look better (their renders are surprisingly shit still), and I can actually control it.
I love space information and technology, but this is just one more step in it. I can’t follow everything. It’s great that it’s happening, but there’s also a ton more research being done that I don’t even know about. This, while impressive and good, isn’t something new.
I watched the launch after it happened at 2x speed and saw some parts of the descent. My phone wallpaper has been set t9 pictures they took. I’m just not that interested in following it live. I know what to expect, and I’ll hear about it if anything unexpected happens.
