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.
I’ve pondered my own lack of interest and I think it comes down to the Artemis program’s design being such a shitshow. Sure, if you throw enough brute force budget and a long enough time you can get astronauts back to the Moon. But they’re doing it in such a poor manner that I doubt anything will come of it long-term. It’s going to be another unsustainable flags-and-foot-prints stunt.
Some of the recent changes hint at NASA maybe finally getting their act together, but I’ll believe it when I see it - NASA doesn’t actually call the shots here. It’s a political program.
That’s an interesting point. There’s zero engineering elegance on display here, and while I’m sure there are some cool, new things going on under-the-hood, it mostly looks like every other big rocket we’ve launched in the last 60 years, and not half as cool as the (admittedly stupid) Shuttle. And the Shuttle did at least have a lot of clever engineering going on to compensate for the (again, stupid) design choices that were driven by so many different and conflicting potential mission profiles.