It's pretty depressing that on a corner of the internet that's supposed to be a gathering of tech/geeks/nerds/stem people, discussing topics that "good hackers would find interesting", it's seemingly impossible to have a single thread about something like this that isn't almost entirely negative or political bickering.
It’s unfortunate, but if you’re blaming the people in the thread for this, I think you’re directing your energy in the wrong direction. Focus on the people who foment and benefit from this division and distraction instead. If you want people to appreciate the bigger picture, you can’t keep forcing them to live on a shorter and shorter term outlook. The HN that you’re presumably nostalgic for existed in a time when there was a lot more fat on the bone, and every efficiency hadn’t been extracted for nebulous benefit to the average person.
Is there really less "fat on the bone" though? What metric are you tracking for that and what are the historical norms?
"forcing them to live on a shorter and shorter term outlook" -> social media?
Rather than assigning blame I think it's fair to ask the people here to behave. Maybe it's not their fault they spend their day doom scrolling and have the attention span of a cat but they do have agency to change that. [EDIT: This is an attempt at humor]
Isn't "Focus on the people who foment and benefit from this division" asking for politics? The way we get at "those people" (and let's not even argue about who they are) is to regulate ourselves (or for the moderators to do that) and have a more substantive and positive discussion regardless of our perceptions.
> Is there really less "fat on the bone" though? What metric are you tracking for that and what are the historical norms?
It’s just my experience over the last 15 years. If it doesn’t align with yours, that’s nice to know.
> "forcing them to live on a shorter and shorter term outlook" -> social media?
Sure, but it could be lots of other things like 24hr news or the emergence of the gig economy.
> Isn't "Focus on the people who foment and benefit from this division" asking for politics?
No it’s not, it’s asking for agency, personal accountability and self-awareness, as you yourself allude to. If that means politics for you, that’s up to you. I don’t imply to “get at” anyone, but to do best by ourselves instead of doing best by those who benefit from dividing or distracting us.
> It’s just my experience over the last 15 years. If it doesn’t align with yours, that’s nice to know.
I know it's the narrative that times are bad. But me, my coworkers, my neighbors, my local mall, etc. all seem to be doing really great. And look, moon mission! I would think that there are a lot of people in tech who are doing better than ever. We've also seen layoffs and I know it's hard for people to find a job. This is why I'm asking for metrics because I don't think it's actually as clear as the narrative that this is the worse over 15 years. The pandemic was pretty bad? We had the financial crisis? Gas prices were a lot higher in 2021 ... I guess as they say perception is 99% of reality ...
How often do you find yourself wondering how you'll be able to pay rent and your car payment during the month? What happens if you need to get dental work? Does that shift your calculus for expenses day to day? Not it in 2021 or whatever, but like this past week?
I've had a long career in tech and so for me and I assume people like me these are not concerns. I'm not doubting what you describe is the experience for many people.
I'm not American but I work with many Americans who are doing really well (also long careers in tech).
I'm old and I own my house but when I was younger I never leased a car, I always bought used cars that I could afford. So the question of making a car payment wasn't there. I always saved and compared prices in good times and bad times. I rented a cheap enough place to have enough safety margin.
Anyways, being a software engineer through the golden era of software engineering is not your typical person experience.
I still think we need to be more data driven in how we evaluate the state of the economy. The parent was suggesting it's the economic difficulties faced by people on this forum (presumably many in tech) that lead to shallow and political discussion and it's hard for me to gauge that.
tl;dr depending on old you are the bootstraps >>
"when I was younger I never leased a car, I always bought used cars that I could afford. So the question of making a car payment wasn't there. I always saved and compared prices in good times and bad times. I rented a cheap enough place to have enough safety margin."
were still there. They've been notably missing/further and further out of reach depending on where you started these past 15 years. I would argue actually closer to 20.
I’ve been there. I have friends who have been there in the last month. None of them reacted by projecting onto space exploration or science. It’s absolutely a choice as to what one channels one’s frustrations onto.
As I was typing my reply I did pause to think about whether I am being part of the problem. I still decided to reply. My excuse is that I'm not the one who brought politics into this and I feel ok pushing back against that once others do.
> First, are you not doing just that - blaming the people here for making you unhappy?
I don't think so?
> Second, you're welcome to demand this, but they/we are just as welcome to tell you to piss off.
If the majority of people around here just want to argue politics non-stop and turn everything into that there's little I can do.
> if you’re blaming the people in the thread for this, I think you’re directing your energy in the wrong direction
Much of the current environment is driven by the SF Bay Tech Elite/Culture.
Peter Thiel funded and enabled Curtis Yarvin, whose work was the backbone of the modern alt right, project 2025, etc. Plenty of tech VCs/elite are investing huge amounts in fighting effective government, pushing models of city states immune from regulation, policing the discourse, and more. Musk gets more press coverage than most but tons of folks who are either on HN, are connected to startups talked about here, etc. are primary forces driving what America has become.
Choosing one (deliberately ambiguous) line to label the comment “entirely political” is the kind of thinking that explains why tribalism has been so effective.
"Focus on the people who foment and benefit from this division and distraction"
is a political statement. It says: "don't talk about the actual issue, instead let's go after the enemies, we know who they are." It doesn't say "let's find them", it assumes we know who they are.
I would be more depressed if, looking at the current political landscape this corner decided to be entirely alienated or oblivious to the environment in which this massive achievement is made.
I think the tech world is fundamentally difference, though I'm not old enough to experience it in '69. I don't believe we had tech moguls who built enormous wealth and realized they could by the influence they couldn't muster with social influence, and that has made the world net-worse.
What’s the point of focusing on one aspect of the world?
Taken as a whole, the 60’s were far more intense and violent. The Vietnam War. The draft. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Racial inequality and protests. Several major assassinations. Nixon in the White House. And that’s just the US.
The world is net-better even if certain areas still need improvement. But there’s really no point to hyperfocusing on just the things that are worse.
Nixon wasn't in office yet, but he did have his campaign manager got to Vietnam and promise the VietCong a better deal if they walked away from negotiations, which lead to FIVE more years of war and countless lives lost for nothing other than a point to talk about on his soap box
The difference seems to be that Nixon may have been crooked, but he was largely competent. He operated on experience, expertise, and causal reality. Our current political situation is largely free of facts, knowledge, or causality. Much of the corruption that happens today is in plain sight and basically ignored. The goal is governance through depoliticization and post-truth infotainment.
Note that Nixon was actually impeached by his own party and would have been removed for what would now be a single day of news cycle, only on a few networks/papers, and completely ignored by a major political party.
Nixon was on track to be impeached, convicted, and thrown in jail. The people were demanding it. His resignation was basically a "you can't fire me, I quit!" moment. Ford's pardon of Nixon was and remains controversial.
The top comments complaining about other comments complaining about stuff really shows how negative internet discourse is hard to avoid. I don't think these comments are bad (meta-discussion is a good thing in general) but they also seems to embody that same negativity.
This comment also isn't positive and the cycle continues. I agree that people are often too negative and this is a good example of how that negativity is contagious.
There's just so little science here though, to expect the audience on HN to get excited about redoing something 65 years later for the purpose of political grand-standing and nationalism while the world literally burns and so many are hurting... I'd be more upset if a bunch of insulated tech nerds obliviously continued to along their easy trajectories without a though of everyone else. We may not be the 1% but we're definitely the 5%
Opportunistically venturing out of Africa is one thing. Sending a couple people around a distant and desolate rock, while the homeworld burns due to unforced errors, is another.
I don’t think the criticisms on HN are related to Artemis’ imperfect concept and technical design.
They’re almost exclusively related to political reasons. “There are problems in the world, therefore I can’t enjoy this” is flawed reasoning and isn’t even something that they apply to any other interest. It’s just special pleading.
It is possible but you have to cultivate it. There is no mechanism here that automates it, so it’s up to each author’s sentiment to shape the outcome as they see fit.
Submit threads that are apolitical and guide conversations to be positive.
This is never the problem with people talking this stuff. People don't naturally obsess about these things. It indicates that there are political problems.
> it's seemingly impossible to have a single thread about something like this that isn't almost entirely negative or political bickering
After the resurrection of Twitter, the conservative-leaning contingent left for X. This place was left to the miserable left, and as you would expect, is now mostly intolerable.
I think it would have been much better, if the nation that launched that mission did not in the same time start a war... I personally simply cannot separate these two things.
These people existed in the Apollo era just not on a website. We weren't exactly living in a utopia then either and you'd have difficulty convincing some folks to be excited about space exploration then too.
Some people feel their outlook on the world takes precedence. And they'll shit in other people's celebrations to get their point across. Best to downvote or ignore them and embrace what nuance you can find.
In case you're curious about US history and not just trying to make a point, "those people in the Apollo era" were the majority of Americans for most of the time the Apollo program was ongoing. Republicans argued that the large NASA budget was fiscally unwise and Democrats argued that the money would have been better used for social programs. The press referred to the program as the "Moondoggle". In 1962, the New York Times noted that the projected Apollo program budget could have instead been used to create over 100 universities of a similar size to Harvard, build millions of homes, replace hundreds of worn-out schools, build hundreds of hospitals, and fund disease research. The Apollo program's popularity hovered around 40% for most of the 1960s when it was underway. It peaked at 53% just after the moon landing, and by April 1970 it was back down to 40%. It wasn't until the mid-80s that the majority of Americans thought that the Apollo program was worth it.
My problem isn't that these people exist in the world. My problem is they're increasingly drowning out other voices in a community I'm part of. I would prefer significantly more active moderation against politics and general non-technical negativity on this site.
I was 10 in 1969. Landing on the moon was a communal and shared event for a large percentage of the population, via one of the three television networks. As was the war in Vietnam.
Many decades later, our institutions are in need of rebuild, for the common good. Maybe this event is a "small step" in that direction.
There simply isn’t denying the political nature of this mission. Majority of statements from NASA about it specify America’s need for space dominance, thank the Trump administration, and assert American exceptionalism in some other way.
The discussion on HN simply reflects the rhetoric which comes from NASA.
you can't be serious, have an honest look at the history of US involvment around the world in the last ~80 years and tell me how can you be pro-West and pro-capitalist...
hell, even just the situation we're in right now perfectly illustrates what I mean - a rapist president trying to save face and causing the death and suffering of thousands of innocent people - and you're wrong if you think capitalist forces didn't lead us to this point
“It is much safer to be feared than loved because ...love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”
HN is heavily populated by and biased towards left left leaning west coast IT adjacent people. But it still makes me wonder for how long can the US keep it's dominance on the world stage with so many people that think this way in positions of power on the arguably most important econonomic/social area from now on.
There was a man on the moon in 1969. 65 years of so-called technological progress and the US is worse than it was before, so we can rule out an interest in technological progress as a reason for any of this. Getting all teary eyed about a second rate mission from a has-been space agency is kind of cringe-inducing, HN.
Maybe we should revive Pamela Anderson's career, or bring Mike Tyson out of retirement to fight a youtube influencer in an effort to re-live past glory. Oh, yeah, that's right. America already did that. America did that and it was sad.
I like how most people's reactions at this point are "yeah, whatever", as if it's every day that humans observe the far side of the moon with a naked eye through a window :). We do know what it looks like and we have photos from the surface, yes, but seeing the reaction from real people who're actually there does hit different, at least for me
Speaking for myself (who has been fascinated with the space program since I was a small child), any joy I might feel around Artemis II feels tainted, by the immense amount of pork involved (SLS is called "Senate Launch System" for good reason) to the point where Artemis is more corporate welfare that happens to involve the Moon than a real space program, and by my belief that it is intended to be little more than a quick, dirty, and vainglorious Apollo repeat by a failing government.
I ran across this video[0] yesterday with Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about how it’s always been political. The first moon landing was more about global politics than science. As a child you likely weren’t concerned about that side of it, or were shielded from it.
It isn’t always the purist motivations that push the human race forward, but forward it moves us.
I don't think OP's problem with it is that it's "political" but that it's a product of pork and corporate welfare. The political thrust of the Apollo program was more "beat the Russians" and less "funnel money into dozens of already-rich corporations in favored districts." Even thought there was a lot of that, too. Modern space (and defense) projects seem to be almost 100% "pork funnel" and zero anything else.
It's not "almost 100% pork funneling" and I know this because....they're there! they are at the moon! I don't like pork either, but let's not blow this out of proportion.
How much do we think that it should have cost, if everything was perfectly optimized, to get to the moon? 50b instead of 100b? so ok, 50% was pork, and that's bad, but let's not overstate it and instead allow a little joy in our lives.
also the original apollo program was about 300b in today's dollars, so seems like things have always been a little porky.
The new NASA administrator, Isaacman, seems to have done a very good job of convincing the various Senators to, if not get rid of the pork, allow him to allocate it in a way that benefits the lunar program.
The result was the Ignition event, which looks like it's planning to send up 17 small and 4 crew-capable landers by 2028, along with a fleet of orbital assets.
You can find out more https://www.nasa.gov/ignition/ , especially the "Building the Moon Base" section. The cost is $10B spread out over 3 years.
Also, if you dont think Apollo had pork in it, you're not aware enough of the history, the various assembly plants were placed mostly for political support, the shuttle and now SLS follows the same pattern.
> The political thrust of the Apollo program was more "beat the Russians" and less "funnel money into dozens of already-rich corporations in favored districts."
Artemis feels a bit more "Beat the Chinese, and show the world we still got it." I think cost-effectiveness[1] is a fig-leaf for what are SpaceX fanboys: had the same mission been on a Starship, HN would be awash with how other companies (Blue Origin) were late to earth-orbit, and the gap had widened beyond Earth's orbit.
1. In contrast, I haven't seen any complaints about Military-Industrial pork on any of the Iran threads, even when contrasting the cost of interceptors vs drones. Let slone have pork dominate the thread.
Even if the Apollo program was similarly politically motivated, it at least was seriously cutting edge science and engineering. I mean, there were many people born before the Wright brothers’ first flight watching the moon landing on TV. Basically repeating Apollo 8’s much less iconic flyby decades later is obviously going to be less impressive.
this is why I mark the divide between the manned and unmanned space program. Historically the unmanned accomplishments have been less political (at least IMO) and made far larger advances. I don't need a human to take a photo of the dark side of the moon and then email it to me if a satellite can do it (with 1980's tech)
It’s a weak take and here’s why. Huge tasks like going to the moon are made up of many different individuals that have different goals. Some are rocket scientists that want to innovate on the science of rocketry. Others are government admins with political goals.
So to call the entire thing “political” ignores the purpose of those involved and critical to the outcome at the expense of just labeling it all “political”.
> my belief that it is intended to be little more than a quick, dirty, and vainglorious Apollo repeat by a failing government.
If the USA successfully sends people to the Moon, achieves all of NASA's technical goals, and the astronauts make it back in one piece, isn't that literally the opposite of failure?
It might be expensive and you can argue that it's wasteful. But even to that point, the $11B cost of SLS is nothing for the US Gov. For example the F35 is a >$1T government program. That doesn't seem a lot to explore a new frontier and expand the scope of humanity.
This is wrong. We’re learning a lot about the new life-support systems. (Courtesy of the ESA.) We’re also going to learn more about the heat shield on 10 April.
Yes true, but these are all technologies required for humans in space. Toilets in space, as intriguing the topic and discussion are, are only needed because we decided to go there. I think the tech is interesting but the human unification vibe is tainted at the least.
I know the RS-25 engines[0] (aka SSME, Space Shuttle Main Engine) were "reusable" in an academic sense (needing a ton of refurbishment after each use) but it hurts my heart that we're dropping them in the ocean and it makes it hard for me to feel good about the Artemis program. It's irrational but it makes the kid who loved the Space Shuttle (which, itself, was a political pork barrel and a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none kind of program) sad.
> it hurts my heart that we're dropping them in the ocean
They are functionally obsolete. Chances that we’re still using SLS in ten years is slim. Any resources going towards refurbishment are better spent on Starship and Blue Moon.
And all of that reuse was so expensive that it set back reusable rocketry for decades as the common wisdom said it was uneconomical - even after it was demonstrated that you could have reuse without expensive refurbishment.
I'm reminded of Ian over at Forgotten Weapons which has presented several rifles which were converted from the old thing to the new thing, say bolt action to semiautomatic.
Each time the government looked at existing stock, thought "hmm surely we can save money by refurbishing these old firearms".
And just about each time they at best ended up with a subpar weapon that cost as much as a brand new model designed from scratch. And often something which cost way more...
The idea looks better on paper than it usually is.
> the immense amount of pork involved (SLS is called "Senate Launch System" for good reason
Most of science has always had this dual use purpose.
No senator ever would have voted for any kind of space program just to send a few tourists to the moon. It's a way to have a substantial workforce, spread across a wide area (so they can't all be hit by the same bomb), that knows how to make and launch rockets and to do weird stuff in space and to work with very energetic materials.
But I agree that it feels hollow right now because of the war abroad and also the needless disrespect we've shown to our Canadian friends at home.
It reminds me a little bit of The Man in the High Castle, it's like these videos are sent from some happier timeline that we don't live in. Hopefully they inspire some people to bring the spirit of curiosity and friendship they present back to our earth.
The manned space program launches from Florida but is controlled from Houston. Why? Wouldn't it make more sense to have both in the same place?
Florida is because there's no other safe place in the US to launch a big rocket on an easterly trajectory* than Florida. Or the extreme southern tip of Texas, which SpaceX uses.
Houston is because NASA needed LBJ's support. They even named the place after him.
* Why easterly? Because that's the direction Earth rotates. If you orbit in that direction you get some free momentum from the planet itself.
I'm not being a hater, but we landed on the moon 55+ years ago and now we're doing a flyby with 35+ year-old engine tech. It's good that we're doing something but we should be doing better.
You’re not seeing better engines because there aren’t any. We are reaching the limits of physics.
That’s why we are working on alternatives like refueling in space or reusable ships.
The Artemis missions are testing things that we still have a lot of area to improve upon — materials (a huge one), international standards for things like docking ports, computing, radiation safety, and a lot more.
Artemis II doesn’t have any docking hardware since it won’t have anything to dock with. And Artemis in general is just using the IDSS used on the ISS and by Dragon and Starliner, nothing new being discovered or tested there.
NASA's Artemis II Live Views from Orion, 04 - Day 1-2 - 03-04-2026 - 1645-Transcript-EN.txt: "03/04/2026 - 18:57:27 (-3 TMZ) | 01:23:22:27 (Artemis Clock) "No joy seeing the device in the list of available devices when I attempt to re-pair it after doing the Bluetooth forget."
In 2-3 years we should expect a Starship mission to Moon, at a much more sensible scale, as in the amount of scientific gear and actual researchers delivered to the surface (and then back).
Some people don’t understand the difference between testing and use. You can afford to test when your launches cost 1/100 of SLS launches instead of risking human lives. Artemis II was human rated with zero launches of its life support equipment, modeling failures of its heat shield, multiple power issues in its only predecessor flight in space. Starship will carry humans after hundreds of launches and landings.
I don't believe that to be true. Starship may host humans next year if it can get to a stable orbit and manage to demonstrate sufficient control for docking. It is extremely unlikely to demonstrate any environmental control before that.
There is literally not many things in life I hope so much for than starship success. Sounds strange perhaps but I just love space and I hope it succeeds.
Funnily I absolutely despise Musk at the same time for being absolute buffoon
I think that the reason you reject the claims and won’t even entertain the notion as a hypothetical is because you know deep down that you’ve been duped by Musk and can’t admit that fact publicly.
Should incontrovertible proof of the magnitude of the atrocities that he has committed come to light you’ll pivot and say that it was worth it because he’s taking us to Mars.
That’s how conmen work and Musk is a damn good one. The sooner you can admit that you’re duped is the sooner you’ll stop letting yourself be duped by him.
I’ll admit that I was duped by him too. I used to believe his stuff and this dream of mars.
He hasn't killed anybody. Nor has he been charged with any crimes.
google sez: "One estimate suggests Tesla’s impact, through emission reductions, has saved over 20,000 lives globally."
google sez: "A 2022 report suggested that Tesla and other electric vehicle technologies (which often include enhanced safety features) have contributed to saving thousands of lives."
Empathy is judged by what one is willing to freely give. Not by making someone else give, and not by spending someone else's money.
> It’s not like this attitude is unprecedented in aeronautics.
You'd be quite wrong. I've worked with many aeronautical engineers, and their primary concern is safety. I'm personally very proud that the system I worked on has never been at fault in an accident. When the MD-83 went down because of jackscrew failure, I was sweating bullets worrying that it was a 757. Whenever I board an aircraft that is a 757, I feel a lot of pride and I always ask to speak to the captain and ask him how he likes it. They always say they love the 757. Makes me happy!
Here's the deal. I feel the same way about it as you do Walter.
I don't really care about all those people who will die because of Musk's actions at Doge with USAID. Poor Americans, poor Africans, In the context of getting humanity to space are all just fuel for the fire -- just like the slaves in mittelwerk and Von Braun. You don't need to convince me that you care about human life and that Elon Musk does too with some nebulous numbers that indicate that Tesla cars save a smattering of lives through reduced collisions and emissions.
My criticism of Musk isn't that he's hurting people -- that's just what shitty people do and I can't stop him -- my criticism is that he's not actually going to do the cool shit that he said he was going to do. It's all a con.
I think they'll get Starship mostly figured out but it'll end up underdelivering on payload. I don't just mean like the way it already has but they claim to be fixing it in v2 and v3, I mean the final version that does launch and comes back to Earth will have a relatively underspecced payload compared to what he sold us as a bill of goods all those years ago. It won't facilitate going to Mars as he sells it but it will enable amazing orbital stuff that can maybe one day serve as a springboard to further space exploration.
But Mars, it just ain't happening.
If you listen to his recent interview with Dwarkesh[0] you'll see that Mars is off the table now. The moon is actually where the cool kids have always wanted to go to and not Mars. And we're building data centres in space now -- terawatts worth -- and robot taxis with robot chauffers or something?
Do you actually think that space will be the cheapest place to locate data centres by 2029? If not then, will it ever be? It seems pretty bogus to me. Why would he make such an outrageous claim? The physics seem to work out, but I'm not certain about the radiation issue in LEO. I don't know enough about it, but it seems to me that it will ultimately require redesigned hardware architectures that can handle this kind of stuff, the workload certainly seems amenable to it, so it should be doable. But designing new chip architectures, and producing and testing all this in three years, on top of everything else that will go into one of these satellites, on top of everything else that his companies are doing sounds too good to be true. This ain't happening in three years.
Do you actually think that Musk's companies will actually be fabbing terawatts of photovoltaics? He says they plan to do it all in house, so what does that mean? Are they going to make their own wafers? Their own ingots? Source their own sand? How long will take to scale up? I don't see hown they can ever compete with China and I'm sure China will knee-cap them at every turn to prevent a competitor in the solar market. I just don't see an American company ever producing a significant quality of solar panels ever again. Just like America is the pornography producing capital of the world and always will be I think it's going to be the same with solar for China. People specialize in what they're good at. That's just comparative advantage.
As for the Optimus Robot -- do you actually think humanoid robots are going to be a household item in the next five years? Worth shutting down to automobile assembly lines to convert into robot production lines? Seems a bit foolish to me when you could be selling cars, a proven product with a known market. I don't think I need to say too much about the robotaxi stuff -- this list of claims about self driving speaks for itself.[0]
When you listen to Elon Musk talk about these things in the interview and you look at his facial expressions and mannerisms, do you actually get the impression that he knows what he's talking about and not just blowing smoke up the host's ass? Because when I look at this stuff, I see a con-man. I see a flim-flam man doing the interview circuit to drum up some press for his impending IPO.
The way I see it Walter, you and others are still in denial about getting duped by Musk. I think on some level you're aware but pride prevents you from expressing doubts and you're still a ways off from admitting the possiblity that you could have been duped. I was duped too. It's okay to admit it.
Did you know that von Braun was jailed by the SS because he was spending too much time dreaming about planets and not enough about weapons? Von Braun was a dead man if he didn't do what they said. What would you do in his shoes?
As for Mars, I've advocated in this forum numerous times that a more practical goal was a Moon base. I doubt I'll live to see a man on Mars.
If Musk has 10 amazing goals, and delivers on 3 of them, is he a success or a con man? I say success. So what has he delivered on? Tesla, X, Grok, AI, Neuralink, The Boring Company (yes it is profitable!), reusable cheap rockets, and Starlink. Any one of those would be a storied lifetime achievement for anyone else.
Platitude alert: If you're not failing, you're not trying.
Who would you say is a more successful entrepreneur than Musk?
Presumably he doesn't "admit" it because it isn't true. You aren't going to get anywhere convincing people if you make attacks on your interlocutor like this.
Sometimes the flaws of someone make him completely predictable. Very trustworthy to repeatedly pour billions in an attempt to become someone he fantasizes to be.
There are innumerable amount of assholes in history that sold things we use daily, sometimes at the expense of original inventors. It is hard to cope with the idea that greed, ambition and ruthlessness are the building blocks of everything that stands around us.
Sometimes it makes me want to reject everything I know of good and human and feed these traits until they fill the hollow parts of mind with wealth, empty fame and too many lonely sunsets on a private island.
His stated and oft-repeated goal is to save mankind by making it interplanetary.
It doesn't seem to be about personal aggrandizement. He has built no monuments to himself, has not named his company "Musk Inc", he doesn't run for office, etc.
Musk does not own a yacht or even a house.
> lonely
If he feels lonely, he can message me and I'd treat him to dinner.
The link blames the Trump administration, not Musk.
google sez: "The World Health Organization (WHO) is the UN's specialized agency for health, aiming to ensure the highest possible level of health for all people. It acts as a global leader, directing health emergencies, promoting healthier lives, expanding universal health coverage, and setting international health standards based on science."
Actually, at this moment, the top 3 parent posts are all about how people aren't responding positively enough to this event. I think it's really cool, and more people would be more exited, if there wasn't so much else going on. To be fair, I already had the conversation this weekend that the late 60s-70s were also quite fraught.
Maybe we really have just been jaded by hours of youtube and tiktok shorts?
I watched it on a 9" B/W crt and I was amazed! Of course I hadn't seen 2001, StarWars, Contact, or The Expanse.
I see what you mean, but I kind of understand the reaction: what does this change in 99.99% of people lives? Nothing at all. It's not necessarily ignorance.
To me, the importance of crewed spaceflight like this cannot be overstated. I think my way of thinking was best phrased by Eddie Izzard: "When we landed on the moon, that was the point where god should have come up and said hello. Because if you invent some creatures, put them on the blue one and they make it to the grey one, you fucking turn up and say 'well done'".
Now, it's not the reason I'm an atheist, but "getting from the blue one to the grey one" (and hearing nothing) is so big that to me it disproves at the very least the existence of a personal god.
You may think it ridiculous, but I'm trying to convey why some people would think that it does change their life.
Most world events don't change 99.99% of people's lives, and yet they matter too. The only big world event, maybe in my entire life, that affected my life was covid. Because I lived in a lockdown country.
It's also not the first time humans are seeing the far side of the moon, Ronald Evans orbitted the Moon 75 times in the orbital module during Apollo 17 (and other ppl did before him), so he also saw it right? The only unique thing is that its the first mission where they dont really do anything more interesting than looking at the far side
it's amazing, but I'll refer you to Gil Scott-Heron for my feelings on the matter
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon
Her face and arms began to swell
And whitey's on the moon
I can't pay no doctor bills
But whitey's on the moon
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still
While whitey's on the moon
The man just upped my rent last night
Cause whitey's on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But whitey's on the moon
I wonder why he's upping me?
Cause whitey's on the moon?
Well I was already giving him fifty a week
With whitey on the moon
Taxes taking my whole damn check
Junkies making me a nervous wreck
The price of food is going up
And as if all that shit 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 moon
I just came across this poem a few days ago and had the opportunity to think about it.
It’s a valuable perspective to hear. As someone prone to getting caught up in the breathless excitement about science, progress, human achievement, etc., it is a hard truth that these things are abstract and not relevant for people who are struggling with day-to-day life, particularly when those struggles are a result of the same government that is executing this mission.
However, the older I get, the less I bind to the idea of a single, correct truth. This perspective doesn’t invalidate the perspective that the mission is valuable. The complexity of the system in which this is taking place means that these things (moon missions and affordable healthcare) aren’t fungible for one another; his poverty wasn’t the result of the moon mission, it was the result of EVERYTHING that had happened over the 100 years prior.
So it’s useful to hear. It’s a sharp, valid reality check for those of us who like to think in big, abstract concepts. And, it’s one perspective among myriad valid perspectives.
Kind of a false dichotomy. How about medical care as a right for a big abstract concept? He's not anti-science here, he's against the inequality of its distribution.
The poem itself seems to mix several things (It is a poem, and can say whatever it wants of course). What parent said doesn't preclude medical care as a right for a concept, though.
Also, a cursory search says around 2 trillion are spent on healthcare (effectively or not is irrelevant in this context) and NASA moon exploration costs $90B. Doesn't feel like these are all mutually exclusive.
That’s precisely my point. Some stanzas in the poem suggest that there’s a direct connection between the moon mission and his poverty.
> The man just upped my rent last night
> cause Whitey’s on the moon
> Was all that money I made last year
> For Whitey on the moon?
And my point then was that I can see and empathize with his frustration, but I don’t feel it’s a singularly correct perspective to the exclusion of the perspective that the missions were of great value.
There is an opportunity cost to everything. Moving money from energy research to food programs may mean not having an energy breakthrough that could potentially cut down food costs (and a lot of other things) dramatically in the long run.
I don't think it's actually a useful perspective at all. The poem is racial resentment repackaged as a means to guilt trip people into feeling bad about adventure, science, and exploration. Unless they were pretty well read at a young age, most millennials probably first experienced this poem in the film First Man, where it is read as a backdrop to Apollo 11 traveling to the moon. It's a great scene because the juxtaposition is stark. We can either hold ourselves back an an endless and futile journey on solving the human condition of poverty and inequality, or we can explore the stars. It's an easy choice.
Is it meant to guilt trip people? Or is it an honest expression of the frustration (and yes, racial resentment) that the author feels?
This is why I consider it a useful perspective to hear. I read this as a human being simply saying “this is how I feel in these circumstances”.
It’s uncomfortable, and I don’t believe that space exploration should be gated on solving poverty and inequality, but it is important to understand that an intelligent, thoughtful human being arrived at this place.
In a sense I feel that this is actually an appeal to the same sense of curiosity that drives space exploration. Why do we explore space? To learn and understand. Why should we consider human perspectives we don’t agree with? To learn and understand.
You could plausibly argue that the poem, when it was written, was meant as an honest expression of frustration, but the context in which it was deployed makes whatever original intent of the author irrelevant. The whole point of the poem's deployment once it was published was to say "white people are wasting money on a moon rocket, they should be spending money on inner city black poverty". Otherwise I think you're reading a bit too much into it. There's nothing more to learn or understand from this poem. "Don't spend money on rockets and going to space, spend it on entitlements and 'fighting' poverty". We get it.
> We can either hold ourselves back an an endless and futile journey on solving the human condition of poverty and inequality, or we can explore the stars. It's an easy choice.
Wait... Are you suggesting that "exploring the stars" is less of an endless and futile journey than dealing with poverty and inequality?
Solving poverty and inequality is for the short term - they'll come back and need solving again no matter how many times you already solved them. But once the stars are explored, they stay explored forever. So yea, that's moving forwards and the other isn't.
The closest stars are way too far to reach on any reasonable timescale. That's not even mentioning the fact that moving forwards is a vague goal. Moving forwards towards what exactly? And if the US government got off of it's ass to... Oh I don't know, maybe fix the bullshit healthcare system we have and help people with tax money instead of bombing people for Israel things would improve quite a bit in a very short time. That's assuming we don't bomb each other over terroritorial squabbles first. In any case I don't really understand your defeatism when it comes to inequality but when it's something as difficult as interstellar space travel you seem to be optimistic.
I am saying that there we never be a world in which poverty and inequality do not exist, unless we are all dead. Maybe it's because I'm an American, but this perspective that grand adventure and exploration is pointless or not worth it is totally foreign to me.
> We can either hold ourselves back an an endless and futile journey on solving the human condition of poverty and inequality, or we can explore the stars. It's an easy choice.
"Sorry, poor people; but I want to live on Jupiter so you're just gonna have to starve to death".
Yea what other technological progress was only wanted by losers? Most of it, by your standard. Yet it's also technological progress that has reduced poverty. You don't care about the people of the future and want to keep them in poverty for the sake of the people of today. I wouldn't call you a loser for that but you do have bad morals.
I get the general frustration there, but it's weird to focus on NASA's budget when it's such a teeny tiny fraction of the total.
Yes, there's a lot of government waste, but NASA ain't it.
And I would suggest that the billionaire class and unfettered capitalism are far more responsible for the modern day version of Scott-Heron's woes than the good ol' government scapegoat.
If DOGE served for anything at all it was for showing that there isn’t even that much “waste” per se. If there’s any waste it’s in the Pentagon which can’t even audit itself, but of course DOGE didn’t even get close to that. It was all performative for them.
I think they proved that the waste is not easily defined. I would call fraud, waste, but a computer program isn't likely to discover it without boots on the ground looking to see if the money is actually going where the records indicate.
The author of this poem went to great lengths to show his racism. It reminds me of a post, probably on Reddit, of a similar racist nature. Just when it's going in the other direction it's clearer.
The post was by a man, supposedly white, who had to pull his child or children from private school because he could not pay for it. His frustration was based on the fact that his taxes were higher than the school tuition, and that another student at the school, a black student, was having his tuition paid by the government. He implied that he was paying for another person's education, and could not afford his own child's education. He saw the same dichotomy as that expressed in the poem, in the other direction.
He could be expressing the generational frustration of being black in America. When things are so segregated you feel you are looking across at a different country landing on the moon, you might write such a poem.
You gotta be completely out of touch with reality to compare a black man who grew up in the Jim Crow era and was living through the civil rights era to thin-skinned white kids who grew up in the suburbs. What a speed-limit IQ take.
> to compare a black man who grew up in the Jim Crow era and was living through the civil rights era to thin-skinned white kids who grew up in the suburbs
I’ll stand by it. Frustration is genuine. Using it as an excuse for racism doesn’t have an obvious reason to scale with distress.
If you think I’m saying the input horror is similar, I’m not. But there isn’t a law of proportionality for racism. If you think being racist is okay because something in your past excuses bad behavior, I disagree with qualification.
> It's safe to assume that racist young Republicans contribute more to the difficulty of being black in America than vice versa
If racism follows “eye for an eye,” sure. I don’t think most people feel someone being discriminated at when young is excused from being racist when older. If that is the case, everyone who had any poverty in their childhood is off the hook for horrible behavior. That isn’t true, at least for most voters anywhere.
Why are you so angry about a black person's perspective of what the moon landing meant to them? Rather than putting a nail in the coffin of the "systemic racism narrative", your post underlines how long we still have to go as a society to take black people's perspectives seriously, rather than simply denigrating them as "race bait."
People are struggling to afford every day life and we are surrounding by crazy things every day like cellphones talking to satellites in space. On any objective measure it is definitely amazing to send humans to the moon, but there are more pressing issues for most people right now.
If we as a species had more of our ducks in a row we may be able to better celebrate this as the achievement for humankind that it is.
The Artemis program has an estimated cost of 93B since 2012 [0].
As a comparison:
"Between 2020 and 2024, $771 billion in Pentagon contracts went to just five firms: Lockheed Martin ($313 billion), RTX (formerly Raytheon, $145 billion), Boeing ($115 billion), General Dynamics ($116 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($81 billion). In comparison, the total diplomacy, development, and humanitarian aid budget, excluding military aid, was $356 billion."[1]
people have been struggling to afford every day life for decades. So that’s nothing new. Unless only people in the 1st world count as people lol.
You’re either emotionally consumed by the human struggle or not, it’s a personality thing - in my opinion. You’re allowed to be poor and a nerd, unless I missed the memo. I’ve met poor and wealthy people that are excited by space.
Struggling to meet our basic needs is not a recent phenomenon. It has been a part of the human condition for millenia, not just decades.
Some people think that if we can just eliminate our 'struggles' by building AI tools to do the hard thinking or robots to perform all our labor; that civilization would become some kind of utopia. I don't believe that. Progress happens when we do hard things.
I don’t think people are spending their time on more pressing issues. I think they are just are hooked on an endless stream of content that is built for addiction and is always within arms reach.
America has spent more than the equivalent of Artemis blowing up yet another middle eastern country for no good reason. I know which I'd rather get the money.
If it makes you feel better, the amount of money the United States spends on space is a very small percentage compared overall entitlement spending. There is always going to be some level of inequality, so your maxim that we should only spend money on space exploration when those problems are solved just isn't workable. The enormous amount of money the United States spends on "solving" inequality and poverty begs the question of if that's even an effective or efficient allocation of resources in the first place.
And? Is that a hurdle or something? You know homeless people are allowed to go on the internet? Smartphones? You'll find other homeless or desolate people here on HN - I won't name anyone out of respect but if you read enough comments here over time you would recognize them.
nah, it just seems like that on Twitter. We have more prosperity by far than we've ever had in history, this is a time to celebrate.
We have our 'ducks in a row' more now than in the 1960's when we went to the moon because of a cold war and nuclear annihilation / escalation.
My grandparents were born on farms with no electricity, plumbing, there was no real 'police' no social services, no healthcare, no antibiotics, 10% of children did not make it past age 1. That's in living memory.
Despite the insanity on the news, it's mostly drama, and we still have more people coming out of abject poverty than ever.
We have 'modern world problems', they are real problems for sure, but they are of a different scale entirely.
Frankly, it may never even get that much better as we may be hitting diminishing marginal returns on 'progress' - we now have to figure out how to live 'long lives and stay healthy'.
It is a fine time to be going to the moon, but we could be doing multiple productive things at the same time. It just doesn't surprise me that there are so many people that are not caring so much about this.
What about the workers that will be eventually replaced by said robots? You think they're just going to get free money to exist? Most likely they'll end up in the private prison system or in institutions while the corporations pocket all of the savings. Things are a lot more complicated than they seem I think...
I hope you're right but I think it won't be pretty in all cases. It's easy to forget the industrial revolution wasn't entirely positive for common people or for that matter the environment.
That's upside down. The industrial revolution was more beneficial for 'common people' than it was for anyone else.
The 'industrial revolution' upended the ancien regime of basically feudal order.
For the fist time, it created actual 'surplus' in the economy, and that surplus went into all sorts of things: education, leisure, the arts, medicine, travel.
The very concept of 'working people' taking a vacation - very modern idea.
Then that broke through into basic real emancipation, universal suffrage.
Then medicine, healthcare, social services etc.
All of that only happens because of elevated productivity that's not captured by a passive elite.
The game is different now for sure, but there's almost no argument that can be made for 'less surplus'.
It's almost like saying 'what if energy were free, that would be bad'. No - it would mostly be good.
But we, as humans, were literally "been there, done that". Nothing new is happening. We are just picking up the ball where we dropped it 50 years ago. The ship is somehow newer and even has a toilet. The said toilet receives most news coverage.
I thought this but have since changed my mind. On board, real humans tax life-support systems in a way that’s difficult to simulate. And real human astronauts garble processes and communications with ground control in ways that a nation that hasn’t done deep spaceflight in a generation could probably do with practice on.
> thought the various space stations were there to develop & test life-support systems long term?
I thought ducks were a preparation of chicken until my early teens. I was wrong.
We have never flown this deep-space life-support system on the ISS together. In parts, yes. But that doesn’t substitute for a real mission. As for simulations, how would you rate your experience from a role play versus the real deal?
I just need to say it's an extremely huge bummer how much cynicism and negativity there is about this mission. Is it perfect? No, of course not. Neither was Apollo.
We are all painfully aware of the things that make it imperfect.
The cynicism or even lack of interest is because it's extremely underwhelming.
If you ask 100 people in 1969 what humans would be doing in space in 57 years I can guarantee not a single person would guess that we've done nothing of substance. And that the most exciting thing we have done that involved human space travel is simply flying around the moon, people wouldn't believe it
Humans going around the moon will be amazing every single time for the next 10,000 years it happens for anyone who isn't already a miserable person. Going for a swim in the ocean is an amazing experience every single time and I can do it every day. It's still a great feeling. Going to the moon is so much more extraordinary in the literal sense of the word. The fact that any collection of creatures is able to do it is remarkable.
It really sucks that you responded to my exhaustion with the exact thing I'm exhausted by. And you aren't even saying anything new. Please don't do this again.
This has to be the most poorly documented event of this scale.
This link, for example, "first glimpse of far side...[video]", is a video of the crew inside the craft. yawn It seems like every article I've read is like this. Like they're trying to encourage conspiracy theories.
We're talking about the unseen, far side of the moon, and they can't scrape together at least a still image of it?
The launch was in lower resolution than many shuttle launches I've watched.
Looking at the NASA.gov site, it is pale comparison of what it used to be. They seem to have opted for a few well polished articles and images, and they've jettisoned any semblance of passing along the data itself.
No video of earth either, just a very promoted new image (taken on old cameras). And then the conversation is about the amazing emotions they feel. And all four of them are just chatting, no need for anyone to be monitoring anything.
I checked out some subreddits on the mission, and left pretty quickly for that reason. It's nice to find some positivity and wonder at it. I love what Artemis II is doing, found the launch very exciting and a little nerve wracking, and can't wait until they get even closer to the Moon.
Am I losing it? They can’t be seeing the far side of the moon right now, because they haven’t adjusted course to go round the far side of the moon yet…
So does this suggest the BBC is wrong and it’s the side of the moon we’re used to seeing, but just it’s “dark”?
But then the astronauts are saying it’s weird seeing the moon in a whole new light (excuse the paraphrasing pun).
They're already at a point where they see the moon from a different angle than we see it from Earth, enough to see a bit of the side that we can't see from here.
It took me this diagram to realize they're shooting to where the moon will be, when they cross its orbit, and are not flying straight at the moon. /facepalm
Imagine you're holding a ball with drawings on it. Hold it out at arms length and fix how it looks in your memory. Now bring it close to your face and move your head a tiny bit to the side. You're not seeing the whole back-side of the ball. Far from it! However, you are seeing some bits you weren't seeing before and the whole picture you can see now looks different than it did when the ball was at arm's length.
That's my guess. They're seeing parts of the dark-side of the moon because they're now close enough that they have a different viewing angle than we do on Earth. Remember, they're not flying straight at the moon. That's not how transfer orbits work.
>they haven’t adjusted course to go round the far side of the moon yet
They did, 3 days ago! Maybe this is being pedantic (?) but the trans-lunar injection burn they did on April 2 put them on the complete trajectory including return to Earth. Though there are still possible correction burns that can be done to increase precision (the first 2 of these were already canceled).
I was also very confused, but after some reading I figured it out.
> In an interview with NBC News from space, NASA astronaut Christina Koch described seeing the moon out the window of the Orion capsule and realizing that it looked different from what she was accustomed to on Earth.
> “The darker parts just aren’t quite in the right place,” she said. “And something about you senses that is not the moon that I’m used to seeing.”
They are not on the other side of the moon seeing the full dark side, but from their position they're seeing the moon at a slight angle, meaning that SOME of what they now see is "the dark side", or the part we can never see from earth since the same side always faces us
Remember that they’re not flying towards the Moon but to a point in space where they and the Moon will be closest together in a day or two, hence the Moon is now ‘off to their side’ and they can see a segment of it that is hidden to Earth observers … I think.
Also, the dark side of the Moon is often illuminated but we call it dark because it’s also hidden from earth due to the Earth and Moon being tidally locked (the same side of each always faces the other body).
The same side of the moon always faces the Earth. If the same side of the Earth always faced the moon, then only one hemisphere would be able to see the moon. Since you can see the moon from everywhere on Earth (not at the same time...), we know that the same side of the Earth does not always face the moon.
Unless you're thinking of the "outside" of the Earth. /s
It got deleted now. It would be nice to see a new versions if abailable.
So, let's make some guess, but IANAA. Orion is in the middle of the trip going to the meeting point to the Moon in a quite straight line but the Moon is still not there. It will be there in 2 or 3 days, that is like 45° of the orbit.
O . . o
Earth > . . . . Moon
Orion in 3 days
.
.
.
.
.
.
o
Moon
now
Using some sloppy Math and sloppy Astronomy, I estimate that the difference between our point of view and their point of view is 20° or 30°. So the visible surface has like a 10% difference, that is consistent to call it a "glimpse". My estimation is also similar to the graphic posted in Reddit, but I'm not sure what was the problem.
I actually can't tell the difference in the photo to save my life, but I have a friend that is astronomer and I'm sure that if I show the photo to him, he could use a sharpie to mark the difference on my screen without any problem.
I think they're saying they can see a sliver of the far side, and that seeing the moon from a slightly different angle is weird having seen the near side so often. But they didn't really make that clear.
They've actually already on course to go around the moon for a couple days! There's been the option of performing some some minor course corrections to make sure they look back around to the right Earth orbit, but I think those haven't actually been necessary
Source: NASA's YT channel + way too many hours playing KSP. Skipping the course correction burn yesterday gave them the opportunity to try and unclog the liquid waste valve
They did that change a long time ago. They are on a course
to go around the Moon from the TLI burn (trans lunar injection) Thursday at 7:49pm EDT. They don’t need any more burns for that.
That site absolutely murders my CPU by... drawing vector graphics. This one displays basically the same info and is made by someone competent: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis-ii/arow/
This is an entire Unity project that won't load due to however many content blockers I've got running on my phone. The incompetent one loads instantly, though it's admittedly laggy.
It's interesting to me how cautious NASA is being with Artemis II. I wrote about the risk / mortality calculation behind this, but everything from the trajectory, the decision not to do an orbital insertion, the checkout in high-Earth orbit is very cautious.
I wish this mission took greater risks. Or, just at least go as far as Apollo 8, but stay for a bit longer, and try out new things. It would be fun to take a finicky low mass radio telescope experiment to the far side of the moon.
It is not possible for them to say a bit longer because Orion doesn’t have the deltaV necessary to go into LLO and orbit the Moon like Apollo 8. Orion is like HlS in that it is the worst possible craft for a mission to the Moon, but it’s the one we have. At least Starship has a potential future for further missions.
how are they broadcasting in what seems like near real-time? i don't have a whole lot of understanding on the topic, but if they're seeing the dark side of the moon then i assume they don't have line of sight to Earth. it makes me feel pretty rotten about some SQL queries i have knocking about.
> but if they're seeing the dark side of the moon then i assume they don't have line of sight to Earth
No, you can see both the dark side & have line of sight to earth, at the same time. The key insight, probably, is that they're not behind the moon (yet) from Earth's PoV, and/or "seeing some of the dark side" vs. "seeing only the dark side"; currently, they are seeing only some of the dark side, assuming I'm interpreting the tracker correctly.
The line I've put here is the moon's orbit. Everything ⬃ of the line is the dark side, as it faces away from Earth. From this diagram, if you drew a vertical line through the moon, Orion sees the right half. Some of that is what the Earth sees, and some of it is not — the portion that isn't is the dark side.
(Also note that "the dark side of the moon" is a specific term meaning the far side of the moon, not the literal dark portion. The "dark side of the moon" is lit 50% of the time.)
The moon is tidally locked with the Earth, which means the same side always faces the Earth. So, for example, when the moon is between the Earth and the sun, the far side (from the perspective of Earth) would be fully illuminated by the sun.
The “far side” of the moon refers to the hemisphere that can’t be seen from Earth.
They want to fly by at lunar sunrise as the shadows help see depth better. Also, they have very sensitive cameras (up to 3,280,000 ISO!); the Earth photo the other day was taken at night, so you can see how they'll be able to get detail even in the dark parts
The sun. The moon always shows the same side to Earth, so the far side has phases just like the Earth-facing side does. When we see a full moon from Earth, the far side is a "new moon"; when we see a new moon, the far side is full. And so on for the other lunar phases.
The sun still. It's just that that side never points towards the earth, but it still gets sunlight. Same as how the side we see isn't fully lit except during a full moon.
Just some humans doing proper awesome human stuff and being good people advancing international brotherhood and scientific advancement.
Love seeing our Ontario native Jeremy Hansen on the microphone, and those two flags properly positioned beside each other.
I'm not a Christian today, but was raised that way. This is the hopeful message I want to see on this day, and the true meaning of the symbol. Hope for all humankind. Working together.
I'm going to be VERY disappointed if there's no Pink Floyd music or commentary from the Artemis mission. Particularly now. Life's short, and one can't be serious all the time...
Wallis and Gromit would be a partial substitute, but the boomers are still around.
Absolutely. Last year we went to Italy and I played “The Count of Tuscany” in the car while driving in Chianti region. My wife does not really enjoy Dream Theater but that was in the rider for the Italy trip :-)
So they let them just wear hoodies in space now? Or are these fancypants space hoodies that cost a quarter mil and weigh a couple grams less? Or does that level of weight reduction not matter because the rocket is nowhere near maxed out?
Yeah, if we cut back a bit on the war crimes we could easily fund both more moon missions and cool science, as well as a shit ton of great programs to help people with the basics like food and rent and health care.
The US spends more per capita, and even as a share of GDP, on healthcare out of public funds than some advanced industrialized states that have universal systems, as well as spending even more on healthcare out of private funds than out of public funds. If we didn’t have a system which expended vast quantities of additional resources in order to assure that a substantial subset of the population is denied needed healthcare and instead just provided the needed healthcare, we could fund all those other things without cutting back on the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace, either direct or those that we subsidize that are executed by other regimes.
We still should cut down (ideally to zero) on war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace, but the reason is because those things are unqualified evil on their own, not because doing so is necessary to fund healthcare and other priorities, which it very much is not.
I completely understand and agree. But there is still something magical about spaceflight that will forever put me in awe. It’s a small moment of wonder in a world of disappointment. I’ll take anything I can get these days
Shame, you would have missed Apollo then too, if you were living in the 60’s instead. Would you have regretted it?
The bad things should make you even more thankful for the good. It’s perfectly healthy to allow yourself to enjoy the positive things in life, especially during the dark times.
Agreed. I remember following the various Mars rover missions of the 1990s-2010s with avid interest. I have now lost my interest in space completely. The house is on fire and we're going on holiday again? It's beginning to feel almost indecent.
I’m sorry but things are definitely better than they were in the 2000’s. Even this war is smaller scale than Iraq/Afghanistan, and seems like it will be over much quicker. Even the economy isn’t nearly as bad.
But the Mars missions, the ISS, and all the rest was not indecent. You were not wrong to enjoy those things back then. And you wouldn’t be wrong to enjoy this now.
It’s perfectly healthy to accept that the world is not perfect AND to still enjoy things in life. If you feel otherwise I highly encourage you to change. Those who improve the world do not feel defeated.
Incredible achievement but I'll be honest — if you showed me this photo without context I would have no idea it was the far side. Just looks like the Moon. Also didn't realize we could capture an image like this in what I assumed was total darkness.
On one of Apollo missions they've read from Bible, Book of Genesis [1]. I wish they did something like that here - and I'm not even a Christian, let alone religious. They did relay some beautiful message [2] though.
I sure hope they don't. Even just the hint of connecting this achievement to the supposed Christian nature of the US would reinforce a lot of the bad things in the world right now. Namely, that we're actively at war in the middle east (Christianity and Judaism vs Islam), in a burgeoning cold war with China (more Christianity vs "godless" communists), and run by an increasingly fascistic administration (the ties between religion and government are a hallmark of fascism).
I am not a Christian, but it was arguably the Christian value system which forged the government and institutions that made these achievements possible. Such progress happens only in high trust societies.
> but it was arguably the Christian value system which forged the government and institutions that made these achievements possible.
Many of the founders were specifically anti-Christian. They were deists, and believed in a higher power, but specifically rejected the idea of a divine intervention of God or Jesus.
Christians do not own the idea of being nice to others and trusting others.
Of the 45 delegates to the continental congress, only two (Benjamin Franklin and another) were known to be deists. One's membership records couldn't be found. The other 42 were active members and on the books in their churches.[0]
Jefferson also was a deist, but he wasn't present at the constitutional convention of 1787 (though he earlier authored the Declaration of Independence).
[0] M. E. Bradford. Founding Fathers: Brief Lives of the Framers of the United States Constitution, second edition. University Press of Kansas, 1994.
I stated that the United States is based on Christian values. Not that the United States is a Christian state.
Do you value separation of state and religious authority? Women's rights? Minority rights? Human dignity? Equality before the law? Sanctity of life? Individual moral responsibility? Monogamous marriage? The objective study of history? Fair trial? Witnesses at trial? Tolerance of alternative viewpoints?
Those are all Christian values. For what it's worth, I'm not Christian.
> I stated that the United States is based on Christian values. Not that the United States is a Christian state.
And I said:
> Christians do not own the idea of being nice to others and trusting others.
But let's look at your list:
> Do you value separation of state and religious authority? Women's rights? Minority rights? Human dignity? Equality before the law? Sanctity of life? Individual moral responsibility? Monogamous marriage? The objective study of history? Fair trial? Witnesses at trial? Tolerance of alternative viewpoints?
First of all, these are all Jewish values that Christian's adopted. And secondly, none of these are exclusive to Christianity. In fact they appear in many religions worldwide, as well as secular societies.
These are all just common decency, which is why they appear in most religions, and non-religions.
> These are all just common decency, which is why they appear in most religions, and non-religions.
You and I both wish these decencies were common. Some cultures have some variations on some of these decencies, but they are not common. Assuming that they are common is projecting your culture onto others.
This is why I mentioned the importance of high trust society.
Christian values are always whatever individual Christians say they are.
There's really no such animal in practice. Over time Christian values have included charity for the poor, rapacious capitalism, slavery, the abolition of slavery, anti-science, science, war, peace, and the rest.
> stated that the United States is based on Christian values. Not that the United States is a Christian state
I believe most of the founders expressed disdain at the notion that the United States was built on Christian values. They were privately Christian. But publicly American. They were trying to break the cycle of history that building countries on religious values brings.
Saying we were built on Christian values is arguing for a continuing role for Christian values. Which, in turn, leads to a Christian state. And then we’re back to popes and mullahs in charge, and the SecDef and Speaker of the House giving sermons.
Actually a lot of the enlightenment ideas (which our government is based on) came from native American critiques of European societies. Read The Dawn of Everything for the details.
I was addressing values, not religion, but I seem to have touched a nerve. I'm not Christian, but I recognize that Christian values lead to high-trust society, leads to innovation in industry and science.
> I suggest you look up the founding fathers' views on religion
Alright:
"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports."
- George Washington
"It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favors."
- George Washington
"Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
- John Adams
"The Bible contains the most profound philosophy, the most perfect morality, and the most refined policy that ever was conceived upon Earth."
- John Adams
"I hold the precepts of Jesus, as delivered by himself, to be the most pure, benevolent, and sublime which have ever been preached to man."
- Thomas Jefferson
"Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep forever."
Can you explain what "Chinese fascism" is? Not citizen of any super-power, but how can you be sure you're not fallen under some propaganda where you see "them" as being evil and not just some other-way-of-living?
China may be authoritarian (I would agree that they are), but they're not fascist. They're also a much smaller threat to anyone living in the US. I'm more worried about the jackbooted thugs on my own streets than the ones halfway around the world.
"forcing them to live on a shorter and shorter term outlook" -> social media?
Rather than assigning blame I think it's fair to ask the people here to behave. Maybe it's not their fault they spend their day doom scrolling and have the attention span of a cat but they do have agency to change that. [EDIT: This is an attempt at humor]
Isn't "Focus on the people who foment and benefit from this division" asking for politics? The way we get at "those people" (and let's not even argue about who they are) is to regulate ourselves (or for the moderators to do that) and have a more substantive and positive discussion regardless of our perceptions.
It’s just my experience over the last 15 years. If it doesn’t align with yours, that’s nice to know.
> "forcing them to live on a shorter and shorter term outlook" -> social media?
Sure, but it could be lots of other things like 24hr news or the emergence of the gig economy.
> Isn't "Focus on the people who foment and benefit from this division" asking for politics?
No it’s not, it’s asking for agency, personal accountability and self-awareness, as you yourself allude to. If that means politics for you, that’s up to you. I don’t imply to “get at” anyone, but to do best by ourselves instead of doing best by those who benefit from dividing or distracting us.
I know it's the narrative that times are bad. But me, my coworkers, my neighbors, my local mall, etc. all seem to be doing really great. And look, moon mission! I would think that there are a lot of people in tech who are doing better than ever. We've also seen layoffs and I know it's hard for people to find a job. This is why I'm asking for metrics because I don't think it's actually as clear as the narrative that this is the worse over 15 years. The pandemic was pretty bad? We had the financial crisis? Gas prices were a lot higher in 2021 ... I guess as they say perception is 99% of reality ...
I'm not American but I work with many Americans who are doing really well (also long careers in tech).
I'm old and I own my house but when I was younger I never leased a car, I always bought used cars that I could afford. So the question of making a car payment wasn't there. I always saved and compared prices in good times and bad times. I rented a cheap enough place to have enough safety margin.
Anyways, being a software engineer through the golden era of software engineering is not your typical person experience.
I still think we need to be more data driven in how we evaluate the state of the economy. The parent was suggesting it's the economic difficulties faced by people on this forum (presumably many in tech) that lead to shallow and political discussion and it's hard for me to gauge that.
were still there. They've been notably missing/further and further out of reach depending on where you started these past 15 years. I would argue actually closer to 20.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1970/demo/p60-72... https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/nrs/tables/time-ser... https://www.thezebra.com/resources/home/housing-trends-visua... https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-american-income-vs-... https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe... https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo... https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-is-spent-on-personal-... https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/life-expectancy-vs-healt... https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year https://educationdata.org/average-student-loan-debt-by-year https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/is-the-stem-job-shortage-ov... https://issues.org/what-shortages-the-real-evidence-about-th... https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/stem-crisis-or-ste... https://www.whatjobs.com/news/shocking-entry-level-job-exper... https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20198/s-e-labor-market-conditi... https://issues.org/stem-workforce-shortage-data-hira/ https://listwithclever.com/research/home-price-v-income-hist...
First, are you not doing just that - blaming the people here for making you unhappy?
Second, you're welcome to demand this, but they/we are just as welcome to tell you to piss off.
> First, are you not doing just that - blaming the people here for making you unhappy?
I don't think so?
> Second, you're welcome to demand this, but they/we are just as welcome to tell you to piss off.
If the majority of people around here just want to argue politics non-stop and turn everything into that there's little I can do.
Much of the current environment is driven by the SF Bay Tech Elite/Culture.
Peter Thiel funded and enabled Curtis Yarvin, whose work was the backbone of the modern alt right, project 2025, etc. Plenty of tech VCs/elite are investing huge amounts in fighting effective government, pushing models of city states immune from regulation, policing the discourse, and more. Musk gets more press coverage than most but tons of folks who are either on HN, are connected to startups talked about here, etc. are primary forces driving what America has become.
your comment is entirely politcal, i.e. contributing more to the problem.
qui bono? we for sure don't bono.
is a political statement. It says: "don't talk about the actual issue, instead let's go after the enemies, we know who they are." It doesn't say "let's find them", it assumes we know who they are.
Taken as a whole, the 60’s were far more intense and violent. The Vietnam War. The draft. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Racial inequality and protests. Several major assassinations. Nixon in the White House. And that’s just the US.
The world is net-better even if certain areas still need improvement. But there’s really no point to hyperfocusing on just the things that are worse.
Note that Nixon was actually impeached by his own party and would have been removed for what would now be a single day of news cycle, only on a few networks/papers, and completely ignored by a major political party.
This comment also isn't positive and the cycle continues. I agree that people are often too negative and this is a good example of how that negativity is contagious.
There are negative things to observe about this project. They should not be ignored
They’re almost exclusively related to political reasons. “There are problems in the world, therefore I can’t enjoy this” is flawed reasoning and isn’t even something that they apply to any other interest. It’s just special pleading.
If you don't mind me asking, what did they do for NASA?
I quickly browsed the top 10 comments, didn't see much negativity.
And maybe this is because this is a forum of "tech/geeks/nerds/stem people" that you'd expect some educated and critical comments.
Submit threads that are apolitical and guide conversations to be positive.
After the resurrection of Twitter, the conservative-leaning contingent left for X. This place was left to the miserable left, and as you would expect, is now mostly intolerable.
Or are you considering this for the first time?
Some people feel their outlook on the world takes precedence. And they'll shit in other people's celebrations to get their point across. Best to downvote or ignore them and embrace what nuance you can find.
Many decades later, our institutions are in need of rebuild, for the common good. Maybe this event is a "small step" in that direction.
The discussion on HN simply reflects the rhetoric which comes from NASA.
hell, even just the situation we're in right now perfectly illustrates what I mean - a rapist president trying to save face and causing the death and suffering of thousands of innocent people - and you're wrong if you think capitalist forces didn't lead us to this point
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
― Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
Maybe we should revive Pamela Anderson's career, or bring Mike Tyson out of retirement to fight a youtube influencer in an effort to re-live past glory. Oh, yeah, that's right. America already did that. America did that and it was sad.
It isn’t always the purist motivations that push the human race forward, but forward it moves us.
[0] https://youtu.be/j_AlXChA9F4
How much do we think that it should have cost, if everything was perfectly optimized, to get to the moon? 50b instead of 100b? so ok, 50% was pork, and that's bad, but let's not overstate it and instead allow a little joy in our lives.
also the original apollo program was about 300b in today's dollars, so seems like things have always been a little porky.
Everything about SLS, and most of Artemis, has been dictated by Congress, often overriding expert advice.
Why not just give NASA the money and let them get on with it?
The same happens with the US military, Congress constantly deleting funding for programs they don't like to fund ones they do.
The new NASA administrator, Isaacman, seems to have done a very good job of convincing the various Senators to, if not get rid of the pork, allow him to allocate it in a way that benefits the lunar program.
The result was the Ignition event, which looks like it's planning to send up 17 small and 4 crew-capable landers by 2028, along with a fleet of orbital assets.
You can find out more https://www.nasa.gov/ignition/ , especially the "Building the Moon Base" section. The cost is $10B spread out over 3 years.
In the 60s we weren't going to land in the darkness because we couldn't see to land.
But the shadows are probably where the water might be, and that's where we're going next!
Artemis feels a bit more "Beat the Chinese, and show the world we still got it." I think cost-effectiveness[1] is a fig-leaf for what are SpaceX fanboys: had the same mission been on a Starship, HN would be awash with how other companies (Blue Origin) were late to earth-orbit, and the gap had widened beyond Earth's orbit.
1. In contrast, I haven't seen any complaints about Military-Industrial pork on any of the Iran threads, even when contrasting the cost of interceptors vs drones. Let slone have pork dominate the thread.
I had a great Prof during my bachelor from Russia - this is what he always told -> and it makes sense: Back then was cold war
So to call the entire thing “political” ignores the purpose of those involved and critical to the outcome at the expense of just labeling it all “political”.
If the USA successfully sends people to the Moon, achieves all of NASA's technical goals, and the astronauts make it back in one piece, isn't that literally the opposite of failure?
It might be expensive and you can argue that it's wasteful. But even to that point, the $11B cost of SLS is nothing for the US Gov. For example the F35 is a >$1T government program. That doesn't seem a lot to explore a new frontier and expand the scope of humanity.
There is no gain in knowledge from this mission. It's more like cheering for your favorite soccer team.
This is wrong. We’re learning a lot about the new life-support systems. (Courtesy of the ESA.) We’re also going to learn more about the heat shield on 10 April.
Same as Mercury/Gemini/Apollo except this time China instead of Russia.
Step away from your screens. Framing everything exclusively in these hard terms isn’t healthy (or true).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25
They are functionally obsolete. Chances that we’re still using SLS in ten years is slim. Any resources going towards refurbishment are better spent on Starship and Blue Moon.
Each time the government looked at existing stock, thought "hmm surely we can save money by refurbishing these old firearms".
And just about each time they at best ended up with a subpar weapon that cost as much as a brand new model designed from scratch. And often something which cost way more...
The idea looks better on paper than it usually is.
Most of science has always had this dual use purpose.
No senator ever would have voted for any kind of space program just to send a few tourists to the moon. It's a way to have a substantial workforce, spread across a wide area (so they can't all be hit by the same bomb), that knows how to make and launch rockets and to do weird stuff in space and to work with very energetic materials.
But I agree that it feels hollow right now because of the war abroad and also the needless disrespect we've shown to our Canadian friends at home.
It reminds me a little bit of The Man in the High Castle, it's like these videos are sent from some happier timeline that we don't live in. Hopefully they inspire some people to bring the spirit of curiosity and friendship they present back to our earth.
Florida is because there's no other safe place in the US to launch a big rocket on an easterly trajectory* than Florida. Or the extreme southern tip of Texas, which SpaceX uses.
Houston is because NASA needed LBJ's support. They even named the place after him.
* Why easterly? Because that's the direction Earth rotates. If you orbit in that direction you get some free momentum from the planet itself.
No, it wasn’t. The real world seldom has single causation. Some people supported Apollo as a messaging exercise. Most had other reasons.
And in any case, there are easy ways to demonstrate ICBM competence. Pyongyang isn’t going to the Moon to prove it can bomb Alaska.
That’s why we are working on alternatives like refueling in space or reusable ships.
The Artemis missions are testing things that we still have a lot of area to improve upon — materials (a huge one), international standards for things like docking ports, computing, radiation safety, and a lot more.
Sharing because this seems to capture the je ne sais quoi that seems off about Artemis for me.
1. https://github.com/RICLAMER/Artemis_II_2026
NASA's Artemis II Live Views from Orion, 04 - Day 1-2 - 03-04-2026 - 1645-Transcript-EN.txt: "03/04/2026 - 18:57:27 (-3 TMZ) | 01:23:22:27 (Artemis Clock) "No joy seeing the device in the list of available devices when I attempt to re-pair it after doing the Bluetooth forget."
Funnily I absolutely despise Musk at the same time for being absolute buffoon
Now also Neuralink.
It’s hard to imagine anyone else who’s done more for the planet with his money than Musk.
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
Hate the guy all you want, even for this, but don't try and juice it another 20% with emotional words that are ultimately incorrect.
I'm a bit skeptical of estimates that vary by 3 orders of magnitude.
How would you feel about that?
Should incontrovertible proof of the magnitude of the atrocities that he has committed come to light you’ll pivot and say that it was worth it because he’s taking us to Mars.
That’s how conmen work and Musk is a damn good one. The sooner you can admit that you’re duped is the sooner you’ll stop letting yourself be duped by him.
I’ll admit that I was duped by him too. I used to believe his stuff and this dream of mars.
> dream of mars
He's doing something about it, while nobody else does nuttin.
Meanwhile, https://medium.com/swlh/here-s-to-the-crazy-ones-941190f58c5...
And it's his money being spent on it, not yours. You're not out anything. And if he succeeds, we all win.
The starship is a reality. Not a con.
Like why beat around the bush? Just be honest man. The honesty would be refreshing.
It’s not like this attitude is unprecedented in aeronautics.
google sez: "One estimate suggests Tesla’s impact, through emission reductions, has saved over 20,000 lives globally."
google sez: "A 2022 report suggested that Tesla and other electric vehicle technologies (which often include enhanced safety features) have contributed to saving thousands of lives."
Empathy is judged by what one is willing to freely give. Not by making someone else give, and not by spending someone else's money.
> It’s not like this attitude is unprecedented in aeronautics.
You'd be quite wrong. I've worked with many aeronautical engineers, and their primary concern is safety. I'm personally very proud that the system I worked on has never been at fault in an accident. When the MD-83 went down because of jackscrew failure, I was sweating bullets worrying that it was a 757. Whenever I board an aircraft that is a 757, I feel a lot of pride and I always ask to speak to the captain and ask him how he likes it. They always say they love the 757. Makes me happy!
I don't really care about all those people who will die because of Musk's actions at Doge with USAID. Poor Americans, poor Africans, In the context of getting humanity to space are all just fuel for the fire -- just like the slaves in mittelwerk and Von Braun. You don't need to convince me that you care about human life and that Elon Musk does too with some nebulous numbers that indicate that Tesla cars save a smattering of lives through reduced collisions and emissions.
My criticism of Musk isn't that he's hurting people -- that's just what shitty people do and I can't stop him -- my criticism is that he's not actually going to do the cool shit that he said he was going to do. It's all a con.
I think they'll get Starship mostly figured out but it'll end up underdelivering on payload. I don't just mean like the way it already has but they claim to be fixing it in v2 and v3, I mean the final version that does launch and comes back to Earth will have a relatively underspecced payload compared to what he sold us as a bill of goods all those years ago. It won't facilitate going to Mars as he sells it but it will enable amazing orbital stuff that can maybe one day serve as a springboard to further space exploration.
But Mars, it just ain't happening.
If you listen to his recent interview with Dwarkesh[0] you'll see that Mars is off the table now. The moon is actually where the cool kids have always wanted to go to and not Mars. And we're building data centres in space now -- terawatts worth -- and robot taxis with robot chauffers or something?
Do you actually think that space will be the cheapest place to locate data centres by 2029? If not then, will it ever be? It seems pretty bogus to me. Why would he make such an outrageous claim? The physics seem to work out, but I'm not certain about the radiation issue in LEO. I don't know enough about it, but it seems to me that it will ultimately require redesigned hardware architectures that can handle this kind of stuff, the workload certainly seems amenable to it, so it should be doable. But designing new chip architectures, and producing and testing all this in three years, on top of everything else that will go into one of these satellites, on top of everything else that his companies are doing sounds too good to be true. This ain't happening in three years.
Do you actually think that Musk's companies will actually be fabbing terawatts of photovoltaics? He says they plan to do it all in house, so what does that mean? Are they going to make their own wafers? Their own ingots? Source their own sand? How long will take to scale up? I don't see hown they can ever compete with China and I'm sure China will knee-cap them at every turn to prevent a competitor in the solar market. I just don't see an American company ever producing a significant quality of solar panels ever again. Just like America is the pornography producing capital of the world and always will be I think it's going to be the same with solar for China. People specialize in what they're good at. That's just comparative advantage.
As for the Optimus Robot -- do you actually think humanoid robots are going to be a household item in the next five years? Worth shutting down to automobile assembly lines to convert into robot production lines? Seems a bit foolish to me when you could be selling cars, a proven product with a known market. I don't think I need to say too much about the robotaxi stuff -- this list of claims about self driving speaks for itself.[0]
When you listen to Elon Musk talk about these things in the interview and you look at his facial expressions and mannerisms, do you actually get the impression that he knows what he's talking about and not just blowing smoke up the host's ass? Because when I look at this stuff, I see a con-man. I see a flim-flam man doing the interview circuit to drum up some press for his impending IPO.
The way I see it Walter, you and others are still in denial about getting duped by Musk. I think on some level you're aware but pride prevents you from expressing doubts and you're still a ways off from admitting the possiblity that you could have been duped. I was duped too. It's okay to admit it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
As for Mars, I've advocated in this forum numerous times that a more practical goal was a Moon base. I doubt I'll live to see a man on Mars.
If Musk has 10 amazing goals, and delivers on 3 of them, is he a success or a con man? I say success. So what has he delivered on? Tesla, X, Grok, AI, Neuralink, The Boring Company (yes it is profitable!), reusable cheap rockets, and Starlink. Any one of those would be a storied lifetime achievement for anyone else.
Platitude alert: If you're not failing, you're not trying.
Who would you say is a more successful entrepreneur than Musk?
Sometimes the flaws of someone make him completely predictable. Very trustworthy to repeatedly pour billions in an attempt to become someone he fantasizes to be.
There are innumerable amount of assholes in history that sold things we use daily, sometimes at the expense of original inventors. It is hard to cope with the idea that greed, ambition and ruthlessness are the building blocks of everything that stands around us.
Sometimes it makes me want to reject everything I know of good and human and feed these traits until they fill the hollow parts of mind with wealth, empty fame and too many lonely sunsets on a private island.
It doesn't seem to be about personal aggrandizement. He has built no monuments to himself, has not named his company "Musk Inc", he doesn't run for office, etc.
Musk does not own a yacht or even a house.
> lonely
If he feels lonely, he can message me and I'd treat him to dinner.
I don’t think I need to remind you how he treated his transgender daughter and that’s just single example
George Washington declined being crowned king and set the tone for a modest and limited Executive branch. Yet he also owned slaves.
Saint Thomas More burned people at the stake.
You'll have a hard time finding any faultless people.
Buffoonery is harmless, why despise him for that?
Besides, that's not what "buffoonery" means.
google sez: "The World Health Organization (WHO) is the UN's specialized agency for health, aiming to ensure the highest possible level of health for all people. It acts as a global leader, directing health emergencies, promoting healthier lives, expanding universal health coverage, and setting international health standards based on science."
Why isn't the WHO stepping up?
Depending on the outcome, that’s also a way to say less overengineered.
Maybe we really have just been jaded by hours of youtube and tiktok shorts? I watched it on a 9" B/W crt and I was amazed! Of course I hadn't seen 2001, StarWars, Contact, or The Expanse.
Knowing what the far side looks like and floating there looking at it are completely different things
Now, it's not the reason I'm an atheist, but "getting from the blue one to the grey one" (and hearing nothing) is so big that to me it disproves at the very least the existence of a personal god.
You may think it ridiculous, but I'm trying to convey why some people would think that it does change their life.
Most world events don't change 99.99% of people's lives, and yet they matter too. The only big world event, maybe in my entire life, that affected my life was covid. Because I lived in a lockdown country.
It’s a valuable perspective to hear. As someone prone to getting caught up in the breathless excitement about science, progress, human achievement, etc., it is a hard truth that these things are abstract and not relevant for people who are struggling with day-to-day life, particularly when those struggles are a result of the same government that is executing this mission.
However, the older I get, the less I bind to the idea of a single, correct truth. This perspective doesn’t invalidate the perspective that the mission is valuable. The complexity of the system in which this is taking place means that these things (moon missions and affordable healthcare) aren’t fungible for one another; his poverty wasn’t the result of the moon mission, it was the result of EVERYTHING that had happened over the 100 years prior.
So it’s useful to hear. It’s a sharp, valid reality check for those of us who like to think in big, abstract concepts. And, it’s one perspective among myriad valid perspectives.
Also, a cursory search says around 2 trillion are spent on healthcare (effectively or not is irrelevant in this context) and NASA moon exploration costs $90B. Doesn't feel like these are all mutually exclusive.
That’s precisely my point. Some stanzas in the poem suggest that there’s a direct connection between the moon mission and his poverty.
> The man just upped my rent last night > cause Whitey’s on the moon
> Was all that money I made last year > For Whitey on the moon?
And my point then was that I can see and empathize with his frustration, but I don’t feel it’s a singularly correct perspective to the exclusion of the perspective that the missions were of great value.
> The man just upped my rent last night > cause Whitey’s on the moon
Be interpreted as anything other than directly blaming his poverty on the moon mission?
This is why I consider it a useful perspective to hear. I read this as a human being simply saying “this is how I feel in these circumstances”.
It’s uncomfortable, and I don’t believe that space exploration should be gated on solving poverty and inequality, but it is important to understand that an intelligent, thoughtful human being arrived at this place.
In a sense I feel that this is actually an appeal to the same sense of curiosity that drives space exploration. Why do we explore space? To learn and understand. Why should we consider human perspectives we don’t agree with? To learn and understand.
Wait... Are you suggesting that "exploring the stars" is less of an endless and futile journey than dealing with poverty and inequality?
What crack are you guys smoking?
So like "whitey going to the moon" again on Artemis II?
I am saying that there we never be a world in which poverty and inequality do not exist, unless we are all dead. Maybe it's because I'm an American, but this perspective that grand adventure and exploration is pointless or not worth it is totally foreign to me.
"Sorry, poor people; but I want to live on Jupiter so you're just gonna have to starve to death".
What a loser
It’s very telling that you think poverty can’t be solved.
—
I can't pay no doctor bills
But whitey's on the moon
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still
While whitey's on the moon
The man just upped my rent last night
Cause whitey's on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But whitey's on the moon
I wonder why he's upping me?
Cause whitey's on the moon?
Well I was already giving him fifty a week
With whitey on the moon.
Rest in peace Gil-Scott Heron.
Yes, there's a lot of government waste, but NASA ain't it.
And I would suggest that the billionaire class and unfettered capitalism are far more responsible for the modern day version of Scott-Heron's woes than the good ol' government scapegoat.
Fraud doesn't even begin to describe it.
The post was by a man, supposedly white, who had to pull his child or children from private school because he could not pay for it. His frustration was based on the fact that his taxes were higher than the school tuition, and that another student at the school, a black student, was having his tuition paid by the government. He implied that he was paying for another person's education, and could not afford his own child's education. He saw the same dichotomy as that expressed in the poem, in the other direction.
I’m sure that’s how the racist young Republicans would defend themselves too. It’s hard being a young man in America today.
I’ll stand by it. Frustration is genuine. Using it as an excuse for racism doesn’t have an obvious reason to scale with distress.
If you think I’m saying the input horror is similar, I’m not. But there isn’t a law of proportionality for racism. If you think being racist is okay because something in your past excuses bad behavior, I disagree with qualification.
If racism follows “eye for an eye,” sure. I don’t think most people feel someone being discriminated at when young is excused from being racist when older. If that is the case, everyone who had any poverty in their childhood is off the hook for horrible behavior. That isn’t true, at least for most voters anywhere.
If we as a species had more of our ducks in a row we may be able to better celebrate this as the achievement for humankind that it is.
The Artemis program has an estimated cost of 93B since 2012 [0].
As a comparison:
"Between 2020 and 2024, $771 billion in Pentagon contracts went to just five firms: Lockheed Martin ($313 billion), RTX (formerly Raytheon, $145 billion), Boeing ($115 billion), General Dynamics ($116 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($81 billion). In comparison, the total diplomacy, development, and humanitarian aid budget, excluding military aid, was $356 billion."[1]
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#cite_note-NASA...
1. https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/economic/us-federa...
You’re either emotionally consumed by the human struggle or not, it’s a personality thing - in my opinion. You’re allowed to be poor and a nerd, unless I missed the memo. I’ve met poor and wealthy people that are excited by space.
Some people think that if we can just eliminate our 'struggles' by building AI tools to do the hard thinking or robots to perform all our labor; that civilization would become some kind of utopia. I don't believe that. Progress happens when we do hard things.
Since the first life appeared.
If it makes you feel better, the amount of money the United States spends on space is a very small percentage compared overall entitlement spending. There is always going to be some level of inequality, so your maxim that we should only spend money on space exploration when those problems are solved just isn't workable. The enormous amount of money the United States spends on "solving" inequality and poverty begs the question of if that's even an effective or efficient allocation of resources in the first place.
2. What would you rather the money be spent on?
2. I don't understand the question. What money?
That's not something to mock people for; it's a problem to apply your mind to and fix.
In kids, sure. In adults, not sure it’s worth the effort on a society wide basis.
We have our 'ducks in a row' more now than in the 1960's when we went to the moon because of a cold war and nuclear annihilation / escalation.
My grandparents were born on farms with no electricity, plumbing, there was no real 'police' no social services, no healthcare, no antibiotics, 10% of children did not make it past age 1. That's in living memory.
Despite the insanity on the news, it's mostly drama, and we still have more people coming out of abject poverty than ever.
We have 'modern world problems', they are real problems for sure, but they are of a different scale entirely.
Frankly, it may never even get that much better as we may be hitting diminishing marginal returns on 'progress' - we now have to figure out how to live 'long lives and stay healthy'.
It's a fine time to go to the moon.
They are like 50 companies making robots right now that will soon do a lot of work.
There are advances in many fields.
Headlines are dominated by something else, the 'news' is not a good reflection of reality.
The industrial revolution moved almost 95% of people away from direct agrarian labour.
We'll find ways.
It won't be pretty in some cases, but we'll figure it out.
The 'industrial revolution' upended the ancien regime of basically feudal order.
For the fist time, it created actual 'surplus' in the economy, and that surplus went into all sorts of things: education, leisure, the arts, medicine, travel.
The very concept of 'working people' taking a vacation - very modern idea.
Then that broke through into basic real emancipation, universal suffrage.
Then medicine, healthcare, social services etc.
All of that only happens because of elevated productivity that's not captured by a passive elite.
The game is different now for sure, but there's almost no argument that can be made for 'less surplus'.
It's almost like saying 'what if energy were free, that would be bad'. No - it would mostly be good.
Well figure it out
Landing on the Moon South Pole and start setting up the lunar station there will be a huge step, especially after 50 years of nothing!!
But this flight has already been done without a crew. Doing it with a human crew is important, but it achieves nothing new and exciting.
I thought this but have since changed my mind. On board, real humans tax life-support systems in a way that’s difficult to simulate. And real human astronauts garble processes and communications with ground control in ways that a nation that hasn’t done deep spaceflight in a generation could probably do with practice on.
I thought ducks were a preparation of chicken until my early teens. I was wrong.
We have never flown this deep-space life-support system on the ISS together. In parts, yes. But that doesn’t substitute for a real mission. As for simulations, how would you rate your experience from a role play versus the real deal?
But it's hard, at least for me personally, to get really excited about it...
We are all painfully aware of the things that make it imperfect.
It's still joyous and exciting.
Try to let it be.
If you ask 100 people in 1969 what humans would be doing in space in 57 years I can guarantee not a single person would guess that we've done nothing of substance. And that the most exciting thing we have done that involved human space travel is simply flying around the moon, people wouldn't believe it
This thread is pretty much how people felt back then too.
That's beyond exciting.
This link, for example, "first glimpse of far side...[video]", is a video of the crew inside the craft. yawn It seems like every article I've read is like this. Like they're trying to encourage conspiracy theories.
We're talking about the unseen, far side of the moon, and they can't scrape together at least a still image of it?
The launch was in lower resolution than many shuttle launches I've watched.
Looking at the NASA.gov site, it is pale comparison of what it used to be. They seem to have opted for a few well polished articles and images, and they've jettisoned any semblance of passing along the data itself.
Remember that social media is a distortion of reality driven by whoever is willing to dedicate the most time and effort to dominating it.
https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-system/#/sc_artemis_2
So does this suggest the BBC is wrong and it’s the side of the moon we’re used to seeing, but just it’s “dark”?
But then the astronauts are saying it’s weird seeing the moon in a whole new light (excuse the paraphrasing pun).
I don’t understand.
They're already at a point where they see the moon from a different angle than we see it from Earth, enough to see a bit of the side that we can't see from here.
That's my guess. They're seeing parts of the dark-side of the moon because they're now close enough that they have a different viewing angle than we do on Earth. Remember, they're not flying straight at the moon. That's not how transfer orbits work.
There is no dark side.
They did, 3 days ago! Maybe this is being pedantic (?) but the trans-lunar injection burn they did on April 2 put them on the complete trajectory including return to Earth. Though there are still possible correction burns that can be done to increase precision (the first 2 of these were already canceled).
> In an interview with NBC News from space, NASA astronaut Christina Koch described seeing the moon out the window of the Orion capsule and realizing that it looked different from what she was accustomed to on Earth.
> “The darker parts just aren’t quite in the right place,” she said. “And something about you senses that is not the moon that I’m used to seeing.”
They are not on the other side of the moon seeing the full dark side, but from their position they're seeing the moon at a slight angle, meaning that SOME of what they now see is "the dark side", or the part we can never see from earth since the same side always faces us
Almost philosophical /S
Also, the dark side of the Moon is often illuminated but we call it dark because it’s also hidden from earth due to the Earth and Moon being tidally locked (the same side of each always faces the other body).
The same side of the moon always faces the Earth. If the same side of the Earth always faced the moon, then only one hemisphere would be able to see the moon. Since you can see the moon from everywhere on Earth (not at the same time...), we know that the same side of the Earth does not always face the moon.
Unless you're thinking of the "outside" of the Earth. /s
Illustrated: https://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/comments/1sd797j/the_moon...
So, let's make some guess, but IANAA. Orion is in the middle of the trip going to the meeting point to the Moon in a quite straight line but the Moon is still not there. It will be there in 2 or 3 days, that is like 45° of the orbit.
Using some sloppy Math and sloppy Astronomy, I estimate that the difference between our point of view and their point of view is 20° or 30°. So the visible surface has like a 10% difference, that is consistent to call it a "glimpse". My estimation is also similar to the graphic posted in Reddit, but I'm not sure what was the problem.I actually can't tell the difference in the photo to save my life, but I have a friend that is astronomer and I'm sure that if I show the photo to him, he could use a sharpie to mark the difference on my screen without any problem.
Your illustration is about right, but the angle they're catching now is even a bit further than you've shown.
Source: NASA's YT channel + way too many hours playing KSP. Skipping the course correction burn yesterday gave them the opportunity to try and unclog the liquid waste valve
So I guess they see it differently than us, eg from the side but not from the back.
No course adjustment is necessary (at least in the sense of an engine burn). The moon's gravity will sling them around and back toward Earth.
Photo and video gallery: https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/journey-to-the-moon/
I wish this mission took greater risks. Or, just at least go as far as Apollo 8, but stay for a bit longer, and try out new things. It would be fun to take a finicky low mass radio telescope experiment to the far side of the moon.
It's already risky enough: https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....
It has always been a touch-and-go affair
Who downvotes that? It is true.
Edit: maybe you can illuminate why you downvote?
Matter of fact, it's all dark
*heartbeats*
Better information density.
No, you can see both the dark side & have line of sight to earth, at the same time. The key insight, probably, is that they're not behind the moon (yet) from Earth's PoV, and/or "seeing some of the dark side" vs. "seeing only the dark side"; currently, they are seeing only some of the dark side, assuming I'm interpreting the tracker correctly.
See [this tracker](https://issinfo.net/artemis.html) for a diagram of their position.
Currently, the arrangement is like this:
The line I've put here is the moon's orbit. Everything ⬃ of the line is the dark side, as it faces away from Earth. From this diagram, if you drew a vertical line through the moon, Orion sees the right half. Some of that is what the Earth sees, and some of it is not — the portion that isn't is the dark side.(Also note that "the dark side of the moon" is a specific term meaning the far side of the moon, not the literal dark portion. The "dark side of the moon" is lit 50% of the time.)
The “far side” of the moon refers to the hemisphere that can’t be seen from Earth.
and since launchpad is in the north hemisphere, Moon has to be at the south part of its orbit
Still think what he said is worth hearing.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWvRjeEgecb/?igsh=MXZoYjZobDM...
I still liked what he had to say so gonna leave up the link itself
Love seeing our Ontario native Jeremy Hansen on the microphone, and those two flags properly positioned beside each other.
I'm not a Christian today, but was raised that way. This is the hopeful message I want to see on this day, and the true meaning of the symbol. Hope for all humankind. Working together.
(The moon has an albedo of 12%)
Wallis and Gromit would be a partial substitute, but the boomers are still around.
https://www.ign.com/articles/2015/08/05/nasa-releases-a-gif-...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo
We still should cut down (ideally to zero) on war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace, but the reason is because those things are unqualified evil on their own, not because doing so is necessary to fund healthcare and other priorities, which it very much is not.
Now war. They think that's worth it, even if it's also bad.
The bad things should make you even more thankful for the good. It’s perfectly healthy to allow yourself to enjoy the positive things in life, especially during the dark times.
But the Mars missions, the ISS, and all the rest was not indecent. You were not wrong to enjoy those things back then. And you wouldn’t be wrong to enjoy this now.
It’s perfectly healthy to accept that the world is not perfect AND to still enjoy things in life. If you feel otherwise I highly encourage you to change. Those who improve the world do not feel defeated.
It is the moon.
> Also didn't realize we could capture an image like this in what I assumed was total darkness.
The "Dark Side of the Moon" is a misnomer. It gets as much light as the side we can see.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4tDZye57D4
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELslc6O4UVk
Many of the founders were specifically anti-Christian. They were deists, and believed in a higher power, but specifically rejected the idea of a divine intervention of God or Jesus.
Christians do not own the idea of being nice to others and trusting others.
Jefferson also was a deist, but he wasn't present at the constitutional convention of 1787 (though he earlier authored the Declaration of Independence).
[0] M. E. Bradford. Founding Fathers: Brief Lives of the Framers of the United States Constitution, second edition. University Press of Kansas, 1994.
note: only 39 delegates signed the resulting document
Do you value separation of state and religious authority? Women's rights? Minority rights? Human dignity? Equality before the law? Sanctity of life? Individual moral responsibility? Monogamous marriage? The objective study of history? Fair trial? Witnesses at trial? Tolerance of alternative viewpoints?
Those are all Christian values. For what it's worth, I'm not Christian.
And I said:
> Christians do not own the idea of being nice to others and trusting others.
But let's look at your list:
> Do you value separation of state and religious authority? Women's rights? Minority rights? Human dignity? Equality before the law? Sanctity of life? Individual moral responsibility? Monogamous marriage? The objective study of history? Fair trial? Witnesses at trial? Tolerance of alternative viewpoints?
First of all, these are all Jewish values that Christian's adopted. And secondly, none of these are exclusive to Christianity. In fact they appear in many religions worldwide, as well as secular societies.
These are all just common decency, which is why they appear in most religions, and non-religions.
This is why I mentioned the importance of high trust society.
There's really no such animal in practice. Over time Christian values have included charity for the poor, rapacious capitalism, slavery, the abolition of slavery, anti-science, science, war, peace, and the rest.
I believe most of the founders expressed disdain at the notion that the United States was built on Christian values. They were privately Christian. But publicly American. They were trying to break the cycle of history that building countries on religious values brings.
Saying we were built on Christian values is arguing for a continuing role for Christian values. Which, in turn, leads to a Christian state. And then we’re back to popes and mullahs in charge, and the SecDef and Speaker of the House giving sermons.
It does mean being deeply sceptical of anyone importing a religious value system, or building religious institutions.
"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports."
"It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favors." "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." "The Bible contains the most profound philosophy, the most perfect morality, and the most refined policy that ever was conceived upon Earth." "I hold the precepts of Jesus, as delivered by himself, to be the most pure, benevolent, and sublime which have ever been preached to man." "Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep forever."Well done
Authoritarian, fine, but far from communist.
https://premierchristian.news/en/news/article/there-are-no-a...
Don't shoot the messenger