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Artemis II is competency porn

lizplank.substack.com

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Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#41

Post by guilhas »

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…

> "...oh, they had women and non white people on board..."

That is from the article

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#42

Post by aaron695 »

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…

[dead]

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#44

Post by throw0101a »

tomjen3 wrote: post #35
HPsquared wrote: post #10

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.

> We validated that Outlook is no good :)

"Help Keep Thunderbird Alive": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700388

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#45

Post by glimshe »

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…

Throughout the years we've heard concerns that we could no longer go back to the moon because of skill atrophy. This is, at a minimum, a great step towards recovering some lost skills while developing new ones.

People are too lost in their political hysteria to appreciate what a amazing achievement that was.

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#47

Post by matt_kantor »

mrtksn wrote: post #34
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…

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 p…

> TBF there’s very little change on what we can do more than what was achieved in the 60s.

People could do backflips and write moving poetry and memorize thousands of digits of pi in the 60s too. Such things were impressive then and they're impressive now.

I could understand someone thinking that the Apollo program was more impressive than the Artemis program, but to think that the Artemis missions are not impressive is completely foreign to me.

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#48

Post by egeozcan »

mrtksn wrote: post #34
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…

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 p…

Why not up the ante a bit; I'll be impressed when they bio-engineer special humans who don't need a dome to live there. Come on, it's been 60 years!!

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#49

Post by jFriedensreich »

As a german, seeing you go to the moon under trump feels like celebrating the olympics in the dawn of the german reich, it cannot be taken for what it is. It does not matter what we feel, what we want to feel, we can enjoy it for a second and then swallow it down and not write an article like that.

Re: Artemis II is competency porn

#50

Post by moffkalast »

eigenspace wrote: post #22
moffkalast wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Space travel is not safe and never will be, you can always get randomly sideswiped by a piece of debris in LEO and that's that, even if everything goes perfectly. If the astronauts understand the risks involved then I would say it's their call. Living on Earth isn't safe for that matter, driving has a 1 in 100 chance of death throughout your lifetime, so that margin isn't significantly more given that you get to go to the frickin Moon.

I don't really buy the "if they die, it strands human spaceflight for years out of PR reasons" argument since what that argues for and against has the same result: nobody goes space for a while. In the end there will always be someone willing to roll the dice. ESA is already playing it 100% safe, that niche is covered.

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