By all rights, this should be something I am deeply passionate about. I’ve been in tech/engineering my entire adult life and was obsessed with NASA as a kid. I even live on the east coast of Florida and can sometimes see the launches/landings over the ocean. But I just… don’t care at all. I’m not suffering from depression or any other malaise, and generally things are fine. But I haven’t clicked on a single link or looked at a single image. I know this has not been the case for many, many people, so I’m wondering what might be different about this launch (or really the whole program in general), and curious if anyone else has found themselves feeling the same.
for me its not only the glacier pace of progress… its also the lack of scientific motivation.
this didnt happen for science… its a political tool
The Apollo program was also a political tool, but it was astounding (not that I know first-hand, just hearing what my folks have said, and even they were fairly young at the time). Artemis doesn’t have the same caché, I guess.
fair… i grew up with the shuttle… we were constantly reminded about the science
even that sucked due to the politics… as i would later find out the shuttle was stupidly inefficient but profitable for some
And don’t forget that a big part of the shuttle sucking was caused by the military who forced nasa to make major design changes so that the shuttle could fulfill military tasks. Tasks which the shuttle never even wound up being used for because the military simply created their own separate rockets to do those tasks.
There are scientific targets and experiments being run
https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/artemis-ii-science/
100% there is a big political component to the effort, but there are also data that we can’t get without getting farther from Earth