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.)
When I’ve brought up my excitement about Artemis II with liberal friends and family, I’ve gotten from them the exact sort of dismissive crankiness and talk about “wastes of money” as you’re doing now.
The thing is, if we want to abolish money, we should try not to think of wastes of government money to begin with. We aren’t DOGE, right? We can think of wastes of government resources, but in that case how do you define waste? The way I see it, a waste of resources is basically anything that furthers an oppressive system. It’s wasteful because you’re hurting people to prop up a system that’s already on borrowed time.
This is the big difference between Artemis II and the military: You can argue that Artemis II vaguely furthers oppressive systems because it’s a vanity project slash display of strength of a dying empire, a way to push the narrative that capitalists can destroy the Earth because “we can just colonize the stars” when they’re done, or the first steps to putting nukes on the moon, or something like that; but I’d argue that manned space travel will exist under any current or future mode of production, that the nukes aren’t on the moon yet, and that everything narrative about Artemis II can be countered with our own narrative.
If there was no Artemis II there still wouldn’t be “money for healthcare and housing”.
Edit: A flaw in my thinking pointed out elsewhere in this thread is that the mission essentially serves as a middleman for transferring superprofits to Lockheed, Boeing etc. So even if the mission itself doesn’t hurt anyone, it still gives funding to people who do, and to that extent the choice of contractors if nothing else is wasteful.
I feel kinda depressed, to be honest. I’d been looking forward to this my whole life, but I can’t really enjoy it now because of the Context. It stinks. Maybe I should take a break from this site or something.
Artemis II is doing a couple pre-landing apollo missions worth of systems testing, e.g. if they get around to doing another crewed landing instead of giving up when china beats them to it, then that mission shouldn’t have the MS outlook (lol) or toilet issues.
Yeah, there’s gonna continue to be manned travel in the sense that there will be researchers in high orbit doing micro-gravity experiments. But crewed missions traveling to this or that celestial body? Landing on them? No way. Not this century. Probably not the next one either. There’s just… not really any reason to send people that far up the gravity well. Any research, any scientific breakthroughs to be had, will be exponentially cheaper, safer, and easier to do with specialized remote crafts and tools. Colonization is, of course, so laughably out of the picture for anyone at any point for the next seven generations (and probably the next seven after that), it hardly bears mentioning.
Maybe if Artemis II happened a few years ago, I’d be crankier about it. It’s pure boondoggle. Hogwash. A humbuggery of planetary proportions. It’s really really funny. Real dying empire hours. A cargo cult recreation, not understanding why the first half-dozen or so moon landings (both crewed and otherwise) were scientifically and historically important, but trying to manufacture that importance anyway.
ADVERTIZING! IN! SPACE!How can you not get a chuckle out of that? Americana absurdity par excellence.
these days the thing I’m really concerned about[1] is that company saying they’re gonna put mirrors in orbit so they can “sell sunlight at night”
at least, the broad view from 50,000, but looking out rather than in. Plenty of concerning things happening on the ground… ↩︎
Communism is a stateless, classless, moneyless society, but what tells you it will be “humbugless”? I know that research is far cheaper, safer and easier with specialized robots than with people, I just don’t see why that matters. My idea is that people will land on the moon under communism because (1) it is possible, and (2) it is really really cool.
Edit: To be clear about my biases here: I was born roughly midway between Apollo 17 and Artemis II, and the first time I ever said what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was that I wanted to be the first person to set foot on Pluto. So if you’re old enough to remember the '60s and '70s, then sure, I can understand finding Artemis II to be a complete wet fart compared to the Apollo program. You were there, you’d know. What I find less understandable is the certain majority of Hexbears who grew up in the '80s~'10s who have never in their lifetimes seen a human being go beyond LEO… I mean, yeah, sure, it’s Been Done Before, but you haven’t been there to see it happen, right?
So when I saw the Artemis II launch live, I was genuinely moved to tears. I felt connected to everybody else who saw the launch live with me, and to the past generations who saw the Apollo launches live. A launch like Artemis II is literally something I’ve been waiting two lifetimes to get to see happen, so when people go around making fun of it I get a bit irate. Like, there are many, many critiques of the program that are completely fair and that I don’t mind reading or hearing, but when people come across as actually accusing anyone genuinely emotionally moved by the mission of being stupid… Y’know? I just don’t like it. I don’t like feeling like people are calling me stupid for liking things.
I am in favor of going to space cause it’s cool. I’m more of a build a fuckload of orbital space stations kinda guy tho. The moon is cool but dammit I wanna leave on an orbital colony and die fighting for Zeon
It’s not cool. We don’t need to go up.
We need to go down. Defund all space programs. We need digging platforms.
How about we compromise and go sideways
We can go sideways once we’re underground. Or underwater.
Fun fact: theres more unexplored space inside the earth than in the whole galaxy
I agree with you that space travel would be a thing in almost any society that has the resources. Space and space travel are topics that interests humans across many cultures. Journalists consider the topics news value in itself, the most tiny discoveries in space get published by general media because even mentioning space (travel) generates interest. Allocating resources towards space travel is justified if it’s what people want to work for. In capitalist society every ‘cool’ thing will be tainted by the horrors of capitalism, same as sports and arts. I think most criticisms on space travel itself are misdirected, but the criticisms on this particular mission seem valid.
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.
getting mad at NASA doing stuff is generally crank shit. There’s like 6 Trillion dollars per year for war, “we” could fund literally everything else and still have the most lethal military in the world for that.
iirc what the government spends on healthcare now is more than what a public system should cost.
There’s definitely bigger wastes of money to be upset about than anything going on at NASA. Getting mad at Artemis II is alienating yourself from your peers and not being productive. Steer the conversation to how much SpaceX and Musk suck.
You want to be ahead of the curve but still be on the curve. Otherwise you’re just being an Ultra and not helping anyone.
it’s a real dying empire project. “oh, shit, the Chinese are up and coming, and we aren’t able to actually deliver on any of our grand ideas - let’s prove we’ve still sort of got it by doing something dumber and worse than we were able to do 50 years ago. And let’s cut every corner on the way.”
You’re being overly cranky imo. Yeah the space money could go to more humanist projects but the space money isn’t very much! NASA’s budget has steadily dropped since Apollo and is less than half a percent of the overall federal budget.
We spend more on corn subsidies.
Housing we should spend more on for sure, but healthcare would be cheaper under a single payer model, so the issue isn’t lack of funds.
Could the space money be spent more wisely? Definitely, but I have a hard time agreeing with takes that advocate for shrinking the space money pile.
The only reason the US is doing this is to try to get ahead of China and Russia’s own space programs, and eventually annex and weaponize the moon against them. Opposing the US space program is valid Revolutionary Defeatism, imo.
Unlimited setbacks on the empire’s efforts to capture the Moon.
I studied Astronomy in university and I find Artemis II to be somewhere between pointless and actively bad. The best I can figure is it might inspire some kids to be interested in space. The worst is pretty much everything you’ve already said. From what I understand, the science they’ll be doing is more cheaply done by a combination of unmanned lunar missions and experiments in Earth’s orbit, like on the ISS.
You know what, maybe because it’s a Monday but I’m going to go off the deep end with you.
The biggest argument is that NASA does not manufacture stuff so most of that money is going to contractors, to the same aerospace industry that’s making weapons and bombing people. People seem to think that NASA is a different thing than the defense industry and I’m not sure why. I went to Kennedy last year and Boeing owns the big space shuttle hangar (now being converted by private hands for other projects). Space X, Blue Origin, and Virgin all have their own infrastructure there. The old stuff is largely dismantled or being dismantled. Most of this money is not going to government employees nor is some last remnant of feel-good Keynesian spending. It’s just more graft for Boeing, Lockheed, etc.
I hate the Artemis program but I love the Chang’e program.
Artemis is flag waving nonsense on a gratuitously expensive dead end rocket with an almost completely untested crew module gambling lives on Senate graft and techbro nonsense, with no long term plan.
Chang’e (and the upcoming International Lunar Research Station) are careful, well planned steps towards long term research and habitation on the moon, in cooperation with the global South.
Their astronomy research vs our spaceslop grift
I can’t be bothered to give a shit either way. There are way bigger wastes of money right now being used to actively murder people.
With you on this one. In general the space stuff the way it’s done in the West seems like manufacturing false hope about a humanity in space while our home is roasting due to climate change.
I am probably doompilled from seeing how all the tech bros talk about space, but I really don’t care as long as on this planet immense suffering, exploitation and environmental destruction just goes on.
There’s no planet B. This space travel stuff is just like religion in the way it gives people an out: “Suffering now does not matter because you will go to heaven/Boiling the planet doesn’t matter, we’ll live on Mars”.
Exactly this. There is no evidence that Mars is even habitable for humans to my knowledge and the only planets that genuinely seem promising are light years away and not something we’ll even get to explore within the next few lifetimes.
West seems like manufacturing false hope about a humanity in space while our home is roasting due to climate change.
This is the immediate impression I had when I saw the preview for that Hail Mary movie
Also I’m sure that in a capitalist’s mind space is basically an infinite source of more resources to exploit
Whitey’s on the moon
only in the vicinity of the moon. also the pilot is black, which probably helps out some liberals and kids
Also has the first woman doing a lunar fly-by ever, Soviets had women in space for a while but they never did any fly bys. Dunno why.
i know they decided a moon landing was too dangerous to attempt
They couldn’t get the N1 to work and the other Soviet human launch systems don’t go that far
Nah, they’re stunting on Musk, and we can afford a modest steady effort to increase long term space capabilites without sacrificing socialist programs on Earth. The Soviets understood this, as does China now.
There is a decent argument to be made for that increase in capabilities. If we can get enough stuff up there to begin Orbital and Lunar manufacture, a lot of possibilities for energy generation and resource use open up. That will ultimately help people on earth, and eventually people off earth too.
“There will be apple blossoms on Mars” as the old Soviet Cosmonaut song said.
