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Artemis II is competency porn

lizplank.substack.com

31–40 of 96 posts

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#33

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?

you should not ask why they went to the moon again, but ask about why they went to the moon again NOW.

you will see why the whole ordeal was super polished etc.

not to the detriment of nasa nor astronauts or anyone involved. they are doing science and pretty epic things.

so then maybe you can allow to detach your sentiment from the science and acheivement and place it on the appropriate point. (us leadership and their wars needing to give ppl a bit of dopamine because the populus is getting saturated with bad news).

Also, i kinda doubt as a nation or humanity you would do better. i dont know who you are , but this is saying you will be better than some of the brightest minds working at esa, spacex, nasa and chinese, indian, russian equavalents etc

as humanity ... yeah. good luck getting people to work together more than they already do... do you think no one is trying it??? what is your grand plan? how would you do it better?

you cant just make such claims willynilly..show credentials and proof you can do it.

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#34

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…

TBF there’s very little change on what we can do more than what was achieved in the 60s. The current space boom is a re-do with better tooling. We can put better computers in space and that’s what gives us anything more than what we had before. The moon and Mars are PR stuff and would be cool and maybe inspire engineers or scientists but its still slight incremental upgrade to what we had so far since 60s.

Even the photos are not that much better so far, people compare the OG and many like the old stuff better. Obviously its impressive engineering but we have seen it before.

I will be impressed when we have a large city sized space station with a large transparent dome.

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#35

Are there any big technological advances from this program?

We validated that Outlook is no good :)

Seriously though, this is mostly a PR and validation win. I enjoyed watching the new Earthrise (Earthset) image - https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/art002e00928... - camera technology has come a long way since the 70s and seeing the moon this close is Weird to me.

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#38

They didn’t even land the rockets for recovery. Regressing :(

This is a good point - in the space shuttle era, the SRBs were recovered, refurbished and re-flown. The boosters flown on Artemis 1 and 2 are now lost. There are only enough space shuttle era parts to fly another seven SLS rockets and the current plan to replace them with new hardware is still on-going.

I could not find out exactly why the SRBs of SLS are not worth recovering. If anyone knows why, that would be interesting to find out.

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#39

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…

> they had women and non white people on board

I thought this was a straw man, because surely wtf is even the point of this comment, but nope, sure enough, ctrl+f and there are comments like that here. Wow.

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#40

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…

While it is obvious that the fact that except for the commander, the crew was composed of a woman, a Canadian and an African-Caribbean-American, cannot have happened by chance, I think that for this kind of mission also achieving a diversity target is perfectly fine.

There is no doubt that the members of the crew were at least equally qualified with the possible members of a less diverse crew, even if their provenance must have influenced the final selection.

Perhaps instead of doubting that it was right to choose crew members belonging to historically disadvantaged minorities, like Canadians :-), one should wonder why only the crew members are diverse, but not their chief, which is a more stereotypical American, as chiefs are expected to be in USA.

A conspiracy theorist can argue both ways, either that choosing a diverse crew was done as a favor to those kinds of people, or on the contrary, that choosing a diverse crew was done as a disfavor to them, to show them who is really their boss.

So no matter what choice is done, people can criticize it for more or less imaginary reasons.

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