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.
It boils down to this: Going to the moon in the 60’s was political, though a massive technical feat.
Since then we’ve figured out how to send robots to fucking Mars to do the science we want to do, for a fraction of the cost (and none of the risk) of sending humans.
Artemis just isn’t where we should be spending money, never mind the political bullshit surrounding it, and the typical government vendors getting their hands in the cookie jar like they did for Apollo (looking at you, Boeing).
And I say all this as someone fascinated by Apollo, and as excited as anyone else by the prospect of humans on the moon. I just no longer see the cost/benefit of humans vs automation there.
We have remote rovers in the sea and on Mars. For the moon surely we could send all sorts of devices to do science there. It’s faster to reach, we have near real-time comms, it has a greater solar exposure so power is less of a problem. So where are those rovers?
We don’t have them because they would expose the pointlessness of sending humans.
The warcry of a capitalist. It’s the justification for ending park services, museums, or anything that isn’t specifically generating a porfit.
Eh, yes you’re right but seriously what are we gaining from this mission? As far as I’ve heard there’s nothing really new that were gaining from it, just… Because?
To the ops point, there are a multitude of more beneficial projects that money could have gone toward instead in the same realm.
Well, I guess that depends on what you define as an achievement.
In terms of skills and expertise there’s only a handful living people with lunar experience and all of them are 60+ years old. It’s important to pass these skills down from person to person as training manuals and videos aren’t the same as an actual person passing on this wisdom. This one shouldn’t really need any explanation.
For dick-measuring newspaper headlines, we did just send some humans farther into space than we ever have before. That’s a tangible thing that’s measurable; anyone can understand it.
For raw, practical science, somone who’s a bigger nerd than me will have to tag in for that. What I do know and understand is we’re launching more advanced technology with a ship that’s both smaller in size with more interior space. We’ve got measurements of the astronauts in deep space and data on the far side of the moon. Regular people arguing over the importance of this data isn’t going to produce anything conclusive.
What are you blathering about?
You are too focused on the dollar amount.