31–40 of 1001 posts
Godspeed crew of Artemis II.
This opinion may be unpopular here but it's hard to get excited about a colossal waste of taxpayer money after all the damage DOGE did. I don't understand how these NASA missions with questionable scientific value and obscene budgets get off the ground. I mean I do understand, NASA funding is important to oligarchs. But still.
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Out of curiosity, why do you see this as a worthwhile endeavor? My personal perspective is that the resources are better used for other purposes, but it's possible that I just haven't encountered some compelling reason yet.
Do you watch sports, football, the Olympics? If not I'm sure you know someone who does. Same category as this. Each of the 32 NFL team is worth about the cost of 1-2 Artemis launches. The entire league could fund the whole Artemis program nearly twice. Hosting the Olympics is worth about 3-10 launches. Like sports, the objective is ultimately useless except as a showcase of what humanity has to offer, and people like…
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I tuned in for 60 seconds, the presenter got everything wrong, and I just tuned out until liftoff. She called the top of the ET (well, it's no longer an ET, but it's the stage that was the STS ET) the "upper stage". She said that the propellents are stored at thousands of degrees below zero. And so on. This is a NASA presenter?
You are not the target audience for this sort of presentation. Media directed at the laity is more about being directionally than quantifiably correct, and is full of metaphor and embellishment to capture the imagination rather than communicate something with precision. People who want the actual details and numbers will read.
The experience of hearing factual things presented with passion and obvious expertise is in itself inspiring. Why settle for less?
Even though you could question the whole Artemis concept, it's still extremely exciting watching the countdown with my son. I just missed the original Apollo flights and had assumed I would never see a moon landing in my lifetime. We may well not have a landing for quite some time yet, but it's still cool to see a Moon bound rocket standing on the launchpad...
Even though you could question the whole Artemis concept, it's still extremely exciting watching the countdown with my son. I just missed the original Apollo flights and had assumed I would never see a moon landing in my lifetime. We may well not have a landing for quite some time yet, but it's still cool to see a Moon bound rocket standing on the launchpad...
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Hopefully, in a few years we will figure out that hydrogen rockets can not reliably launch on time and we'll switch to less leaky fuels. Then maybe we won't need to pull 40 year old engines out of museums to dump in the ocean. I'm all for human spaceflight, but the Senate Launch System seems the best argument for shutting down human spaceflight programs.
Oh, don't worry, we did figure that out. What we haven't figured out yet is how to stop Congress from involving themselves in engineering decisions.
Then the senate mandates the new rocket to use specifically the most expensive, problematic, least reliable technology. Completely designed to fail.
Have such hopes for the Starship.