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Because they want to be on the rocket. To see the moon up close with your own eyes? It's spiritual.
I understand why they want to fly. I don't understand why the people is fine paying taxes for that.
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See this recent blog post about it (I am not the author): https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly.... It says that it is not safe to fly. They are sending humans without having tested in real conditions that their design was sound, GIVEN that the first time they did that (without humans), it turned out that their design was unsafe.
An article written by a "Polish-American web developer, entrepreneur, speaker, and social critic" says it's not safe to fly. And? What do the astronauts flying on board with significantly more information say?
The takeaway, is that the software was fine, but other systems like the main engine used too much cutting edge technology and have a lot of unexpected failure modes and too many problems like partialy broken parts that should no get partialy broken. [For a weird coincidence, Artemis II uses the same engines.] He concluded that when you consider all the possible problems the failure rate was closer to 1/100, but management was underestimating them and the official value that was 1/100000. [Anyway, the engines didn't fail in Columbia, it was one of the other possible problems.]
The articles explain that the shield has problems but management is underestimating them again. Let's hope the mission goes fine, but in case of a explosion it would be like a deja vu.
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> this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement. How do you figure? The previous Moon missions certainly didn't accomplish that.
Sparked the environmental movement, to name but one major impact.
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> this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement. How do you figure? The previous Moon missions certainly didn't accomplish that.
Sparked the environmental movement, to name but one major impact.
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Sparked the environmental movement, to name but one major impact.
Also wrt. "climate mismanagement", pretty much all tools we get to measure climate exist because of space program, and many require it to function.
Regardless of whether this particular mission is perfectly planned, this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement. It is a noble endeavor - science, engineering and peaceful exploration hold the keys to our survival and prosperity. It is also important psychologically to our survival - a reminder there is a bigger pie, that we can solve h…
Godspeed!
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> this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement. How do you figure? The previous Moon missions certainly didn't accomplish that.
You don't solve these problems in a single step, but notice how space imagery and analogies pop up every time people try to talk about peace, global problems, mutual empathy, understanding, etc. The Pale Blue Dot, images of Earth from orbit or the Moon, etc. Those are anchors in public consciousness, competing in memetic space with usual divisive, dystopian, hope-draining pictures and soundbites - we need more of the…
Obviously, but there's no evidence that the previous Moon missions were a step toward solving the problems.
> notice how space imagery and analogies pop up every time people try to talk about peace, global problems, mutual empathy, understanding, etc.
You think these problems will be solved with... photos?
How many more photos do we need? Everyone has seen the photos already. I'm sure Putin and Trump have seen the photos of Earth.
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> this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement. How do you figure? The previous Moon missions certainly didn't accomplish that.
Sparked the environmental movement, to name but one major impact.
> Sparked the environmental movement, to name but one major impact.
It...really didn't. There was a new wave with a different political orientation (less conservative/elite) in the environmental movement roughly contemporary to the space program from—the 1950s through the 1970s—but it was driven by a variety of human driven (nuclear testing, oil spills, etc.) environmental disasters combined with more modern media coverage that occurred in that time than by the space program itself.
I know there are people who try to ignore all that and pretend that the whole thing was just the Earthrise photo in 1968 but much of the development of the new character of the movement happened before Earthrise, and even what happened after generally clearly had other more important causes.
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Also wrt. "climate mismanagement", pretty much all tools we get to measure climate exist because of space program, and many require it to function.
Okay well we have those already and it hasn't really changed anything.
These things do take time though.