Why Doesn't Anybody Realize We're Going Back to the Moon?

I grew up admiring the Apollo mission and the likes.

Nowadays, I recognise that it is heavy engineering, but I am not so impressed by the fact that we are throwing so much resources at something that we already know we can do. In fact, we have had humans surviving in space for decades now. It's costing a lot, it's not bringing much.

But more than that: we have much more important problems to solve, starting with our survival. Sure, sending robots to Mars is interesting, for science. Sending people to Mars is useless. Hoping to become an "interplanetary species" is preposterous. Thinking that Mars is "just a next step, but we'll go further" is absolutely insane.

Life is literally, measurably dying on Earth (the current mass extinction we are living in is happening orders of magnitude faster than the one that killed the dinosaurs). We have a huge energy problem, and more and more global instability.

Sure, watching four humans happily travelling to the Moon in a spaceship that literally does not need them is fun, like watching the Superbowl. And like for the Superbowl, there are big fans for whom it is the most important event of the year. However, most people don't care. We're not in 1969 anymore, now it's just a matter of wasting enough money for some people to have the time of their life.

> the cost of everything thanks to a poorly planned war against Iran.

The war in Iran doesn't help at all. But it's a much broader problem.

we're going back to Moon and going to Mars too on Starship, and it is just a normal roadmap of the SpaceX. And that makes me excited about space future - normalcy of it just being a business, a good profitable business. Where is existence or not of Artemis wouldn't change much our space future.

Artemis program and hardware is a huge government money appropriation program, and even if the program makes it to the landing phase, it would still be an unsustainable one-off with probably even less landings than the Apollo program.

Establishing of Moon bases, commercial travel and development there - it is all Starship (naturally predicated on SpaceX success at getting it to $5-10M/launch - if not SpaceX, somebody else would anyway do it)

As i wrote couple days ago the Artemis/SLS will never be able to get to that commercial level https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47583438

Exactly. I'm happy to see NASA get back in the game, but this is basically just a test flight. I'll get excited for the next one.

("Hey, kids! We're going to Disneyland! We're going to drive all the way around it before we head home!")

"Back to the moon" sounds deceptive since we're not actually going to the moon, we're just sending a rocket around it. An actual moon landing will get a lot more attention. What's far more impressive about this launch to me is that it will be the farthest out into space people have been. I think the NASA PR team would have done better making that the headline rather than all this "to the moon!" talk