I see this moon launch as an exorbitantly wasteful, nationalist project. No money for healthcare and housing, but plenty of money to boldly go where man has gone several many times before.
When I bring this up with liberal friends and family, they give me a sort of incredulous look and talk about how wonderful and scientific and non-political it is. I don’t mind being the “you’ve gone too far left” guy, but you talk to the same people about military spending and they’re right on board.
Is someone here able to diagnose my crankiness and explain why this is actually a good use of resources? (Will also accept echo-chamber validation and ways to use this to increase class consciousness, if offered.)
Basically any mission that sends actual human beings beyond low earth orbit before we have our shit figured out down here is a vanity project. It’s exponentially more expensive than unmanned craft and extremely dangerous for the astronauts, but provides no additional benefit to society vs. unmanned craft.
The fantasy of colonizing space is pushed by the ruling class to excuse the destruction of our environment on earth. Capitalism is our great filter and we will never leave this planet as long as it exists.
this is such a bad take
I’m not fully on board but robotic/drone-manned space crafts does make far more sense to me. I mean a central problem for every venture is the damn hygiene/plumbing system and that is before you factor in the dangers to the astronauts.
I’m glad to see the US public sector get some funding and publicity for a change - I definitely don’t want Space X calling all the shots when it comes to space exploration (or weaponization, more likely).
I assume you mostly disagree with capitalism having to be fully conquered before humanity beings to conquer the next frontier?
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why though
people can do stuff robots can’t, people doing it inspires the kids more than robots.
there’s a 0.0000001% chance i win some seat lottery and get to goyeah but i think theres the risk / benefit analysis. especially with things like going to mars, would the risks really be worth the science? people dying in space is not super inspiring.
Surely that risk/benefit calculation ought be left to the ones actually being put at risk, the Astro/Cosmo/Taikonauts in question.
I’m sure there’s a number of those who would be absolutely giddy to do a Mars Landing, so long as the risk was low enough to be possible at all.
I love astronomy, I have like 300 hours in Kerbal Space Program and I think it’s super cool that we are sending people to the moon - unfortunately, super cool is just about all there is to it. I realize that NASA’s budget is miniscule in comparison to all the other awful things our tax money is paying for, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is really only being done so we can say we did it.
Any kind of practical application to sending humans to other celestial bodies are hundreds of years away, at minimum, unless by some miracle we unlock the secret to FTL travel (which is likely impossible).
It made sense in the 60s and 70s to send crewed missions because we didn’t have robotics, computers and miniaturization that we do now - and even then they sent probes and stuff fo like Venus and we haven’t since then. I’ve heard there’s some very limited science stuff that could use a human crew close by, I can’t elaborate because I can’t remember. Otherwise, drones and rovers can do more for probably less cost and mass than sending people could. Besides the cool factor, I don’t get the need to send people either.
You’re thinking backwards. Building colonies on the moon and ultimately Mars would require science investment in recycling materials, air, waste, oxygen, etc. Do you not see the potential benefits of that on earth?
These projects provide vast investments in science here on earth, including creating jobs for the scientific community worldwide. Do you not see the potential benefits of that?
NASA’s budget is miniscule compared to how much you Americans pay for your wars. Iran has already blown through NASA’s total budget for the Artemis programme (which began over a decade ago), in a war that’s been going on for 2 months.
Nobody in NASA or the space community seriously believes in plans to colonise Mars to terraform it. If we could do that, we’d be technologically capable of fixing our own planet.
We wouldn’t have gotten microwaves in the 20th century if we hadn’t gone to the moon.
Stop these pessimistic reductive takes. This is a huge step for humanity to be visiting the moon again.
But we could just invest in science without going to the Moon. The Moon is utterly superfluous to the investment.
For real. We can do things in the ocean or inhospitable deserts or Antarctica or any other hazardous conditions here on earth without having to send thousands of pounds of stuff to keep people alive into space. We know we can already send people to the moon. This talk of building shit there is nonsense.
The issue being that the reason we’re running out of air and filling Earth up with waste is not a lack of science or investment.
We are far, far beyond capable of fully sustainable, high-standard living on a global scale with today’s technology, we just choose not to do it. Because instead the global system prefers to concentrate wealth on extremely wealth individuals and expensive vanity projects, like this one.
I’m a huge fan of space missions, and inventing stuff this way, but this mission is about 80% vanity, and 20% science. If the launch was purely for science and explorations sake, I’d be in favour. But as it is, it’s like burning a huge pile of coal to prove what a good country you are, but with the outward claimed justification it’ll help us discover renewable energy sources.
We already solved the problem, this is just making it worse.
I fully agree! Would have posted this myself, if you hadn’t already. I love the unmanned missions though. We learn awesome new stuff from those constantly. But they are getting defunded. I heard some engineers in NASA have to work from their own garages now.