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Artemis II is competency porn

lizplank.substack.com

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Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#21

Post by newsclues »

ArcHound wrote: post #19

I can't believe the comments here. "I could have done it better, it's not a big deal, oh, they had women and non white people on board, what even is the shareholder value of this mission, oh it was almost done 50 years ago..." These people went literally to the moon and back. Furthest anyone has ever been. That's an achievement. I know things suck right now. Even more reasons to appreciate what is possible with techn…

It’s a 50 year old achievement.

I couldn’t do it personally but as a nation or humanity, we can do better, even if it was hard.

What year did nasa land on the moon again?

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#22

Post by eigenspace »

moffkalast wrote: post #3
daymanstep wrote: post #2

I can't stop thinking about this article while reading this: https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....

Clearly in retrospect they made the right call to go ahead though. The heat shield held up fine. Arguably NASA played it extremely safe this time round, high first orbit, no direct TLI, no lunar orbit that you can't come back from if the engines don't fire back up. I think they're very aware of the poor quality of modern manufacturing they're working with, which is why it's all the more impressive that everything wen…

Just because the heat shield held up fine does not mean it was the right call. Nobody who knew anything was saying there was a 100% chance of catastrophic heat-shield failure, they weren't even saying there was a 50% chance. They were saying that there was a small chance of failure which was nonetheless unacceptably large.

Quote from the blogpost about it being unsafe: "It’s likely—hopefully very likely—that Artemis II will land safely. But do we really have to wait for astronauts to die to re-learn the same lessons a third time?"

NASA themselves set a safety target of a 1 in 30 chance of crew mortality for the mission. That's an insanely high risk tolerance for something that'd be so public, and would have been so incredibly demoralizing and tragic if the world had to watch this crew die on re-entry.

With everything dark going on in the world right now, a lot of people saw this whole thing as a small glimmer of light and something to just be happy and excited about. Having them burn up and die after inspiring that hope would have been crushing.

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#23

Post by PaulHoule »

Yeah, but they still don’t have a realistic plan to land astronauts there.

Like the space shuttle before it, Artemis proves that nobody can beat the US at spending money on boondoggles.

Lunar missions are inconsequential to problems here on Earth like we can’t afford to build high-speed rail and transit, that we can’t build housing affordable or otherwise, that we already lost the next war to Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, won’t build affordable electric cars, etc.

What we need is affordability porn!

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#25

Post by PaulHoule »

rbanffy wrote: post #16
irdc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now all I can think of is the toilet. Which is not a small thing by the way.

They might have found a way of having two versions of Outlook and at least one of them working. A lot of it is relearning what was forgotten after the Apollo and shuttle programs. The technologies changed so much it’s a whole new spacecraft that looks like what existed only because that’s the best possible shape.

If I am not careful I wind up with two Outlooks running in my computer. ‘Classic’ is fine, but God forbid I start the other one because when I try to send an email with it is spinner… spinner… spinner… spinner… spinner…

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#27

Post by ArcHound »

newsclues wrote: post #21
ArcHound wrote: post #19

I can't believe the comments here. "I could have done it better, it's not a big deal, oh, they had women and non white people on board, what even is the shareholder value of this mission, oh it was almost done 50 years ago..." These people went literally to the moon and back. Furthest anyone has ever been. That's an achievement. I know things suck right now. Even more reasons to appreciate what is possible with techn…

It’s a 50 year old achievement. I couldn’t do it personally but as a nation or humanity, we can do better, even if it was hard. What year did nasa land on the moon again?

Thanks, edited my comment to reflect this reply.

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#29

Post by saidnooneever »

ArcHound wrote: post #19

I can't believe the comments here. "I could have done it better, it's not a big deal, oh, they had women and non white people on board, what even is the shareholder value of this mission, oh it was almost done 50 years ago..." These people went literally to the moon and back. Furthest anyone has ever been. That's an achievement. I know things suck right now. Even more reasons to appreciate what is possible with techn…

ofc very much the american way, outside of the region maybe its more read like propaganda... not in all regions people are like this, but its not a bad thing i suppose. Good things can also be leveraged for bad things etc. (not by the ppl involved ofc, but by others and their framing of the facts)

it'd be nice if people gave eachother a little space to be :) and look past the politics of things.

maybe then we would not feel the need to go the furthest out into space ever done and we can remain sometime in each other's proximity without feeling the need to develop nuclear weapons.

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