"forcing them to live on a shorter and shorter term outlook" -> social media?
Rather than assigning blame I think it's fair to ask the people here to behave. Maybe it's not their fault they spend their day doom scrolling and have the attention span of a cat but they do have agency to change that. [EDIT: This is an attempt at humor]
Isn't "Focus on the people who foment and benefit from this division" asking for politics? The way we get at "those people" (and let's not even argue about who they are) is to regulate ourselves (or for the moderators to do that) and have a more substantive and positive discussion regardless of our perceptions.
It’s just my experience over the last 15 years. If it doesn’t align with yours, that’s nice to know.
> "forcing them to live on a shorter and shorter term outlook" -> social media?
Sure, but it could be lots of other things like 24hr news or the emergence of the gig economy.
> Isn't "Focus on the people who foment and benefit from this division" asking for politics?
No it’s not, it’s asking for agency, personal accountability and self-awareness, as you yourself allude to. If that means politics for you, that’s up to you. I don’t imply to “get at” anyone, but to do best by ourselves instead of doing best by those who benefit from dividing or distracting us.
I know it's the narrative that times are bad. But me, my coworkers, my neighbors, my local mall, etc. all seem to be doing really great. And look, moon mission! I would think that there are a lot of people in tech who are doing better than ever. We've also seen layoffs and I know it's hard for people to find a job. This is why I'm asking for metrics because I don't think it's actually as clear as the narrative that this is the worse over 15 years. The pandemic was pretty bad? We had the financial crisis? Gas prices were a lot higher in 2021 ... I guess as they say perception is 99% of reality ...
I'm not American but I work with many Americans who are doing really well (also long careers in tech).
I'm old and I own my house but when I was younger I never leased a car, I always bought used cars that I could afford. So the question of making a car payment wasn't there. I always saved and compared prices in good times and bad times. I rented a cheap enough place to have enough safety margin.
Anyways, being a software engineer through the golden era of software engineering is not your typical person experience.
I still think we need to be more data driven in how we evaluate the state of the economy. The parent was suggesting it's the economic difficulties faced by people on this forum (presumably many in tech) that lead to shallow and political discussion and it's hard for me to gauge that.
were still there. They've been notably missing/further and further out of reach depending on where you started these past 15 years. I would argue actually closer to 20.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1970/demo/p60-72... https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/nrs/tables/time-ser... https://www.thezebra.com/resources/home/housing-trends-visua... https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-american-income-vs-... https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe... https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo... https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-is-spent-on-personal-... https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/life-expectancy-vs-healt... https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year https://educationdata.org/average-student-loan-debt-by-year https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/is-the-stem-job-shortage-ov... https://issues.org/what-shortages-the-real-evidence-about-th... https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/stem-crisis-or-ste... https://www.whatjobs.com/news/shocking-entry-level-job-exper... https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20198/s-e-labor-market-conditi... https://issues.org/stem-workforce-shortage-data-hira/ https://listwithclever.com/research/home-price-v-income-hist...
First, are you not doing just that - blaming the people here for making you unhappy?
Second, you're welcome to demand this, but they/we are just as welcome to tell you to piss off.
> First, are you not doing just that - blaming the people here for making you unhappy?
I don't think so?
> Second, you're welcome to demand this, but they/we are just as welcome to tell you to piss off.
If the majority of people around here just want to argue politics non-stop and turn everything into that there's little I can do.
I use https://hackersmacker.org to mark them with a red dot so I can skip those comments. It's like slashdot's friend/foe system (including social aspect). There are also plugins that allow blocking and filtering users.
I'm, personally, here to interact with people interested in tech. I feel no shame in curating my experience to fit that. If I wanted to be saturated in politics, I would make a Reddit account.
Much of the current environment is driven by the SF Bay Tech Elite/Culture.
Peter Thiel funded and enabled Curtis Yarvin, whose work was the backbone of the modern alt right, project 2025, etc. Plenty of tech VCs/elite are investing huge amounts in fighting effective government, pushing models of city states immune from regulation, policing the discourse, and more. Musk gets more press coverage than most but tons of folks who are either on HN, are connected to startups talked about here, etc. are primary forces driving what America has become.
your comment is entirely politcal, i.e. contributing more to the problem.
qui bono? we for sure don't bono.
is a political statement. It says: "don't talk about the actual issue, instead let's go after the enemies, we know who they are." It doesn't say "let's find them", it assumes we know who they are.
Taken as a whole, the 60’s were far more intense and violent. The Vietnam War. The draft. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Racial inequality and protests. Several major assassinations. Nixon in the White House. And that’s just the US.
The world is net-better even if certain areas still need improvement. But there’s really no point to hyperfocusing on just the things that are worse.
Didn't this just describe the robber barons of the Gilded Age? Moguls and oligarchs of the day, yes. Amassed their fortunes on the emerging frontier technology of the time, I'd say so. Wielded enormous power over political discourse and essentially owned the law makers of the day. Rhymes, for sure.
It doesn't really matter whether you live in a democracy if the the very issues that are even allowed to be voted on are decided by an elite, wealthy and politically connected group.
Note that Nixon was actually impeached by his own party and would have been removed for what would now be a single day of news cycle, only on a few networks/papers, and completely ignored by a major political party.
This comment also isn't positive and the cycle continues. I agree that people are often too negative and this is a good example of how that negativity is contagious.
For an alternate perspective, the development for this (which includes future launches) was only 80% the cost of ~500 miles of railway in California! [1]
[1] https://www.kabc.com/2026/04/06/high-speed-rail-cost-now-at-...
There are negative things to observe about this project. They should not be ignored
They’re almost exclusively related to political reasons. “There are problems in the world, therefore I can’t enjoy this” is flawed reasoning and isn’t even something that they apply to any other interest. It’s just special pleading.
If you don't mind me asking, what did they do for NASA?
Submit threads that are apolitical and guide conversations to be positive.
I quickly browsed the top 10 comments, didn't see much negativity.
And maybe this is because this is a forum of "tech/geeks/nerds/stem people" that you'd expect some educated and critical comments.
Or are you considering this for the first time?
Emotional maturity is balancing both the good and bad in life and not letting either completely dominate your reality.
Russian invaded Ukraine, and people are on board with helping Ukraine defend itself - because Russia is trying to reconstitute the soviet union, and Ukraine is just one stop along the way.
Then you say well they were Russian backed so Russia were involved from the beginning.
Then I say well, where were these separatists born, what language do they speak, and how do they identify?
And then you say something about propaganda, then I say something about propaganda.
Then I say what I said in the beginning which was maybe if you’re not actually there, and involved, you should stay out of other people’s shit.
Not randomly for no reason - the reason is to bring the former soviet bloc nations back under Russia's control, to rebuild the Russian empire. Putin has even spoken openly how he does not recognize Ukraine as a real nation or a real identity and that all of Ukraine, it's land, resources and people belong to Russia. And he's on a genocidal mission to manifest that reality.
Putin is happy to use separatist movements (organic or not) as tools and thin pretexts for his expansive imperial ambitions, sure - but separatists aren't the reason for the war - Putin's imperialist ambitions are.
Let me put it this way. Imagine you’re at school and there are two kids that have a long history starting to shout and even throw fists at each other. You come over from the other end of the playground, try to understand the situation the best you can… and start throwing fists at the kid you think is wrong?
You’re acting like a proper ape and seem to lack any imagination or ambition for a peaceful future. You know there are other ways? Smarter ways. We have mind blowing technology that is optimised for death and destruction but you don’t reckon we can, like, maybe just ASK the people what they want? Nobody ever asks. Nobody talks.
Everyone’s sold this skewed reality that bombing people is the only way we can resolve conflict and you’ve been sold it by massive companies that make bombs.
Anyway this conversation is causing way too much negative emotion in me and it’s not like you’re even understanding what I’m saying so I’m just gonna bow out I think. At least for you there are plenty of people like you and there will be plenty more wars for you to drool over and completely understand with your big brain.
Some people feel their outlook on the world takes precedence. And they'll shit in other people's celebrations to get their point across. Best to downvote or ignore them and embrace what nuance you can find.
Many decades later, our institutions are in need of rebuild, for the common good. Maybe this event is a "small step" in that direction.
The popularity of Apollo is fictional. Artemis has dramatically better popularity than Apollo.
The discussion on HN simply reflects the rhetoric which comes from NASA.
Maybe we should revive Pamela Anderson's career, or bring Mike Tyson out of retirement to fight a youtube influencer in an effort to re-live past glory. Oh, yeah, that's right. America already did that. America did that and it was sad.
After the resurrection of Twitter, the conservative-leaning contingent left for X. This place was left to the miserable left, and as you would expect, is now mostly intolerable.
It isn’t always the purist motivations that push the human race forward, but forward it moves us.
How much do we think that it should have cost, if everything was perfectly optimized, to get to the moon? 50b instead of 100b? so ok, 50% was pork, and that's bad, but let's not overstate it and instead allow a little joy in our lives.
also the original apollo program was about 300b in today's dollars, so seems like things have always been a little porky.
Everything about SLS, and most of Artemis, has been dictated by Congress, often overriding expert advice.
Why not just give NASA the money and let them get on with it?
The same happens with the US military, Congress constantly deleting funding for programs they don't like to fund ones they do.
The new NASA administrator, Isaacman, seems to have done a very good job of convincing the various Senators to, if not get rid of the pork, allow him to allocate it in a way that benefits the lunar program.
The result was the Ignition event, which looks like it's planning to send up 17 small and 4 crew-capable landers by 2028, along with a fleet of orbital assets.
You can find out more https://www.nasa.gov/ignition/ , especially the "Building the Moon Base" section. The cost is $10B spread out over 3 years.
We tend to look at pork as unambiguously bad because it's wasteful or often has more than a whiff of corruption, but the picture for political scientists is more mixed.
Turns out it's easier to bargain with legislators when policy can give them a win in their districts or states. It greases the wheels for negotiation or provides levers to flip opposition party members. Legislatures often become more sclerotic and dysfunctional after reforms to pork barrel spending.
I don't want to call pork good, but there are real trade-offs to pork-free government that we haven't figured out how to solve any other way
The first question for me is always is this a thing worth doing - which has an aspect of price involved, but isn't the definitive answer.
In the 60s we weren't going to land in the darkness because we couldn't see to land.
But the shadows are probably where the water might be, and that's where we're going next!
Artemis feels a bit more "Beat the Chinese, and show the world we still got it." I think cost-effectiveness[1] is a fig-leaf for what are SpaceX fanboys: had the same mission been on a Starship, HN would be awash with how other companies (Blue Origin) were late to earth-orbit, and the gap had widened beyond Earth's orbit.
1. In contrast, I haven't seen any complaints about Military-Industrial pork on any of the Iran threads, even when contrasting the cost of interceptors vs drones. Let slone have pork dominate the thread.
I had a great Prof during my bachelor from Russia - this is what he always told -> and it makes sense: Back then was cold war
So to call the entire thing “political” ignores the purpose of those involved and critical to the outcome at the expense of just labeling it all “political”.
If the USA successfully sends people to the Moon, achieves all of NASA's technical goals, and the astronauts make it back in one piece, isn't that literally the opposite of failure?
It might be expensive and you can argue that it's wasteful. But even to that point, the $11B cost of SLS is nothing for the US Gov. For example the F35 is a >$1T government program. That doesn't seem a lot to explore a new frontier and expand the scope of humanity.
Same as Mercury/Gemini/Apollo except this time China instead of Russia.
Step away from your screens. Framing everything exclusively in these hard terms isn’t healthy (or true).
There is no gain in knowledge from this mission. It's more like cheering for your favorite soccer team.
This is wrong. We’re learning a lot about the new life-support systems. (Courtesy of the ESA.) We’re also going to learn more about the heat shield on 10 April.
They are functionally obsolete. Chances that we’re still using SLS in ten years is slim. Any resources going towards refurbishment are better spent on Starship and Blue Moon.
Each time the government looked at existing stock, thought "hmm surely we can save money by refurbishing these old firearms".
And just about each time they at best ended up with a subpar weapon that cost as much as a brand new model designed from scratch. And often something which cost way more...
The idea looks better on paper than it usually is.
Most of science has always had this dual use purpose.
No senator ever would have voted for any kind of space program just to send a few tourists to the moon. It's a way to have a substantial workforce, spread across a wide area (so they can't all be hit by the same bomb), that knows how to make and launch rockets and to do weird stuff in space and to work with very energetic materials.
But I agree that it feels hollow right now because of the war abroad and also the needless disrespect we've shown to our Canadian friends at home.
It reminds me a little bit of The Man in the High Castle, it's like these videos are sent from some happier timeline that we don't live in. Hopefully they inspire some people to bring the spirit of curiosity and friendship they present back to our earth.
Florida is because there's no other safe place in the US to launch a big rocket on an easterly trajectory* than Florida. Or the extreme southern tip of Texas, which SpaceX uses.
Houston is because NASA needed LBJ's support. They even named the place after him.
* Why easterly? Because that's the direction Earth rotates. If you orbit in that direction you get some free momentum from the planet itself.
In general, pork is an overstated problem. We've had far less so-called pork in legislation the past 20 years or so, but that reality has actually contributed to grid-lock and dis-empowerment of the legislature. Pork often functioned as a kind of grease on the wheels and, while gross, gave legislators incentives to bargain and levers with which to do it. The war on pork is one part of the story of how the US congress has calcified.
No, it wasn’t. The real world seldom has single causation. Some people supported Apollo as a messaging exercise. Most had other reasons.
And in any case, there are easy ways to demonstrate ICBM competence. Pyongyang isn’t going to the Moon to prove it can bomb Alaska.
Maybe we really have just been jaded by hours of youtube and tiktok shorts? I watched it on a 9" B/W crt and I was amazed! Of course I hadn't seen 2001, StarWars, Contact, or The Expanse.
That’s why we are working on alternatives like refueling in space or reusable ships.
The Artemis missions are testing things that we still have a lot of area to improve upon — materials (a huge one), international standards for things like docking ports, computing, radiation safety, and a lot more.
Sharing because this seems to capture the je ne sais quoi that seems off about Artemis for me.
1. https://github.com/RICLAMER/Artemis_II_2026
NASA's Artemis II Live Views from Orion, 04 - Day 1-2 - 03-04-2026 - 1645-Transcript-EN.txt: "03/04/2026 - 18:57:27 (-3 TMZ) | 01:23:22:27 (Artemis Clock) "No joy seeing the device in the list of available devices when I attempt to re-pair it after doing the Bluetooth forget."
Funnily I absolutely despise Musk at the same time for being absolute buffoon
Now also Neuralink.
It’s hard to imagine anyone else who’s done more for the planet with his money than Musk.
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
If a death toll like that was real and attributable it would be the only thing in the news, 24/7, until the next election.
The fact is, it’s not. Aid was relocated to other departments and continued. Significant insider pork was cut leading to a lot of very loud people complaining with hyperbole in their outrage.
Elon remains the most effective person in history at wielding wealth for the benefit of mankind. It is not particularly close and he has banked more credibility for moon-shot efforts (pun intended) than anyone on the planet.
Source?
All the recent data I can find shows a more than 80% decline in global food aid, education, and vaccinations, as of February 2026.
Education aid for 23 million children, 95 million lost access to basic healthcare, and from March 2025 to Feb 2026, an estimated ~3 million preventable deaths caused by this.
Sources: https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/issues/making-foreign-a...
https://firstfocus.org/resource/fact-sheet-usaid-cuts-total-...
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/chikungunya/quick-takes-death-tol...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/02/04/africa-trump...
https://www.rescue.org/article/innovation-vs-cuts-humanitari...
Hate the guy all you want, even for this, but don't try and juice it another 20% with emotional words that are ultimately incorrect.
There is a direct line from his decisions to more than ten times the number of Americans KIA in the entirety of the Vietnam war.
Argue about how it happened all you want, the bodies are at his fucking feet. CEOs and leadership of organizations are accountable for their decisions.
"Emotional"
How about get a fucking working conscience.
Hundreds of thousands are dead, two thirds of which were kids. Children.
Sometimes the flaws of someone make him completely predictable. Very trustworthy to repeatedly pour billions in an attempt to become someone he fantasizes to be.
There are innumerable amount of assholes in history that sold things we use daily, sometimes at the expense of original inventors. It is hard to cope with the idea that greed, ambition and ruthlessness are the building blocks of everything that stands around us.
Sometimes it makes me want to reject everything I know of good and human and feed these traits until they fill the hollow parts of mind with wealth, empty fame and too many lonely sunsets on a private island.
It doesn't seem to be about personal aggrandizement. He has built no monuments to himself, has not named his company "Musk Inc", he doesn't run for office, etc.
Musk does not own a yacht or even a house.
> lonely
If he feels lonely, he can message me and I'd treat him to dinner.
I don’t think I need to remind you how he treated his transgender daughter and that’s just single example
George Washington declined being crowned king and set the tone for a modest and limited Executive branch. Yet he also owned slaves.
Saint Thomas More burned people at the stake.
You'll have a hard time finding any faultless people.
On the other you have an old drug addict, still functional, thankfully, dead set on antagonizing every possible person alive. (I guess dems will probably shut his space program down after they win? Can he even get on good standing with them at all after everything that has transpired?)
Shit CEO vs Money pit
Who meets your criteria?
Buffoonery is harmless, why despise him for that?
Besides, that's not what "buffoonery" means.
google sez: "The World Health Organization (WHO) is the UN's specialized agency for health, aiming to ensure the highest possible level of health for all people. It acts as a global leader, directing health emergencies, promoting healthier lives, expanding universal health coverage, and setting international health standards based on science."
Why isn't the WHO stepping up?
Depending on the outcome, that’s also a way to say less overengineered.
Now, it's not the reason I'm an atheist, but "getting from the blue one to the grey one" (and hearing nothing) is so big that to me it disproves at the very least the existence of a personal god.
You may think it ridiculous, but I'm trying to convey why some people would think that it does change their life.
Most world events don't change 99.99% of people's lives, and yet they matter too. The only big world event, maybe in my entire life, that affected my life was covid. Because I lived in a lockdown country.
Knowing what the far side looks like and floating there looking at it are completely different things
If we as a species had more of our ducks in a row we may be able to better celebrate this as the achievement for humankind that it is.
The Artemis program has an estimated cost of 93B since 2012 [0].
As a comparison:
"Between 2020 and 2024, $771 billion in Pentagon contracts went to just five firms: Lockheed Martin ($313 billion), RTX (formerly Raytheon, $145 billion), Boeing ($115 billion), General Dynamics ($116 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($81 billion). In comparison, the total diplomacy, development, and humanitarian aid budget, excluding military aid, was $356 billion."[1]
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#cite_note-NASA...
1. https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/economic/us-federa...
You’re either emotionally consumed by the human struggle or not, it’s a personality thing - in my opinion. You’re allowed to be poor and a nerd, unless I missed the memo. I’ve met poor and wealthy people that are excited by space.
Some people think that if we can just eliminate our 'struggles' by building AI tools to do the hard thinking or robots to perform all our labor; that civilization would become some kind of utopia. I don't believe that. Progress happens when we do hard things.
Since the first life appeared.
If it makes you feel better, the amount of money the United States spends on space is a very small percentage compared overall entitlement spending. There is always going to be some level of inequality, so your maxim that we should only spend money on space exploration when those problems are solved just isn't workable. The enormous amount of money the United States spends on "solving" inequality and poverty begs the question of if that's even an effective or efficient allocation of resources in the first place.
2. What would you rather the money be spent on?
2. I don't understand the question. What money?
2. The money you mentioned as basis of the comment I replied to. But if you have a cognitive disability which precludes the ability to follow a conversation's thread, I can summarize the previous state at the start of each response.
That's not something to mock people for; it's a problem to apply your mind to and fix.
In kids, sure. In adults, not sure it’s worth the effort on a society wide basis.
We have our 'ducks in a row' more now than in the 1960's when we went to the moon because of a cold war and nuclear annihilation / escalation.
My grandparents were born on farms with no electricity, plumbing, there was no real 'police' no social services, no healthcare, no antibiotics, 10% of children did not make it past age 1. That's in living memory.
Despite the insanity on the news, it's mostly drama, and we still have more people coming out of abject poverty than ever.
We have 'modern world problems', they are real problems for sure, but they are of a different scale entirely.
Frankly, it may never even get that much better as we may be hitting diminishing marginal returns on 'progress' - we now have to figure out how to live 'long lives and stay healthy'.
It's a fine time to go to the moon.
They are like 50 companies making robots right now that will soon do a lot of work.
There are advances in many fields.
Headlines are dominated by something else, the 'news' is not a good reflection of reality.
The industrial revolution moved almost 95% of people away from direct agrarian labour.
We'll find ways.
It won't be pretty in some cases, but we'll figure it out.
The 'industrial revolution' upended the ancien regime of basically feudal order.
For the fist time, it created actual 'surplus' in the economy, and that surplus went into all sorts of things: education, leisure, the arts, medicine, travel.
The very concept of 'working people' taking a vacation - very modern idea.
Then that broke through into basic real emancipation, universal suffrage.
Then medicine, healthcare, social services etc.
All of that only happens because of elevated productivity that's not captured by a passive elite.
The game is different now for sure, but there's almost no argument that can be made for 'less surplus'.
It's almost like saying 'what if energy were free, that would be bad'. No - it would mostly be good.
Well figure it out
Landing on the Moon South Pole and start setting up the lunar station there will be a huge step, especially after 50 years of nothing!!
But this flight has already been done without a crew. Doing it with a human crew is important, but it achieves nothing new and exciting.
I thought this but have since changed my mind. On board, real humans tax life-support systems in a way that’s difficult to simulate. And real human astronauts garble processes and communications with ground control in ways that a nation that hasn’t done deep spaceflight in a generation could probably do with practice on.
I thought ducks were a preparation of chicken until my early teens. I was wrong.
We have never flown this deep-space life-support system on the ISS together. In parts, yes. But that doesn’t substitute for a real mission. As for simulations, how would you rate your experience from a role play versus the real deal?
But it's hard, at least for me personally, to get really excited about it...
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon
Her face and arms began to swell
And whitey's on the moon
I can't pay no doctor bills
But whitey's on the moon
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still
While whitey's on the moon
The man just upped my rent last night
Cause whitey's on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But whitey's on the moon
I wonder why he's upping me?
Cause whitey's on the moon?
Well I was already giving him fifty a week
With whitey on the moon
Taxes taking my whole damn check
Junkies making me a nervous wreck
The price of food is going up
And as if all that shit wasn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon
Her face and arm began to swell
And whitey's on the moon
Was all that money I made last year
For whitey on the moon?
How come I ain't got no money here?
Hmm! Whitey's on the moon
Y'know I just 'bout had my fill
Of whitey on the moon
I think I'll send these doctor bills
Airmail special
To whitey on the moonIt’s a valuable perspective to hear. As someone prone to getting caught up in the breathless excitement about science, progress, human achievement, etc., it is a hard truth that these things are abstract and not relevant for people who are struggling with day-to-day life, particularly when those struggles are a result of the same government that is executing this mission.
However, the older I get, the less I bind to the idea of a single, correct truth. This perspective doesn’t invalidate the perspective that the mission is valuable. The complexity of the system in which this is taking place means that these things (moon missions and affordable healthcare) aren’t fungible for one another; his poverty wasn’t the result of the moon mission, it was the result of EVERYTHING that had happened over the 100 years prior.
So it’s useful to hear. It’s a sharp, valid reality check for those of us who like to think in big, abstract concepts. And, it’s one perspective among myriad valid perspectives.
Also, a cursory search says around 2 trillion are spent on healthcare (effectively or not is irrelevant in this context) and NASA moon exploration costs $90B. Doesn't feel like these are all mutually exclusive.
That’s precisely my point. Some stanzas in the poem suggest that there’s a direct connection between the moon mission and his poverty.
> The man just upped my rent last night > cause Whitey’s on the moon
> Was all that money I made last year > For Whitey on the moon?
And my point then was that I can see and empathize with his frustration, but I don’t feel it’s a singularly correct perspective to the exclusion of the perspective that the missions were of great value.
> The man just upped my rent last night > cause Whitey’s on the moon
Be interpreted as anything other than directly blaming his poverty on the moon mission?
This is why I consider it a useful perspective to hear. I read this as a human being simply saying “this is how I feel in these circumstances”.
It’s uncomfortable, and I don’t believe that space exploration should be gated on solving poverty and inequality, but it is important to understand that an intelligent, thoughtful human being arrived at this place.
In a sense I feel that this is actually an appeal to the same sense of curiosity that drives space exploration. Why do we explore space? To learn and understand. Why should we consider human perspectives we don’t agree with? To learn and understand.
Wait... Are you suggesting that "exploring the stars" is less of an endless and futile journey than dealing with poverty and inequality?
So like "whitey going to the moon" again on Artemis II?
I am saying that there we never be a world in which poverty and inequality do not exist, unless we are all dead. Maybe it's because I'm an American, but this perspective that grand adventure and exploration is pointless or not worth it is totally foreign to me.
"Grand" and "adventure" are subjective terms.
"Sorry, poor people; but I want to live on Jupiter so you're just gonna have to starve to death".
What a loser
It’s very telling that you think poverty can’t be solved.
—
I can't pay no doctor bills
But whitey's on the moon
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still
While whitey's on the moon
The man just upped my rent last night
Cause whitey's on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But whitey's on the moon
I wonder why he's upping me?
Cause whitey's on the moon?
Well I was already giving him fifty a week
With whitey on the moon.
Rest in peace Gil-Scott Heron.
The post was by a man, supposedly white, who had to pull his child or children from private school because he could not pay for it. His frustration was based on the fact that his taxes were higher than the school tuition, and that another student at the school, a black student, was having his tuition paid by the government. He implied that he was paying for another person's education, and could not afford his own child's education. He saw the same dichotomy as that expressed in the poem, in the other direction.
I’m sure that’s how the racist young Republicans would defend themselves too. It’s hard being a young man in America today.
If racism follows “eye for an eye,” sure. I don’t think most people feel someone being discriminated at when young is excused from being racist when older. If that is the case, everyone who had any poverty in their childhood is off the hook for horrible behavior. That isn’t true, at least for most voters anywhere.
I’ll stand by it. Frustration is genuine. Using it as an excuse for racism doesn’t have an obvious reason to scale with distress.
If you think I’m saying the input horror is similar, I’m not. But there isn’t a law of proportionality for racism. If you think being racist is okay because something in your past excuses bad behavior, I disagree with qualification.
Yes, there's a lot of government waste, but NASA ain't it.
And I would suggest that the billionaire class and unfettered capitalism are far more responsible for the modern day version of Scott-Heron's woes than the good ol' government scapegoat.
Fraud doesn't even begin to describe it.
They are not. You are imputing your own meanings into the word "subsidy". If you buy a Coke from a Coke machine, you are not "subsidizing" the machine's vendor.
No, I'm not holding my breath, the narrative if far too profitable for far too many people [2] to be put to rest.
[1] https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-black-astronaut-on-arte...
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11151740-racism-is-not-dead...
We are all painfully aware of the things that make it imperfect.
It's still joyous and exciting.
Try to let it be.
If you ask 100 people in 1969 what humans would be doing in space in 57 years I can guarantee not a single person would guess that we've done nothing of substance. And that the most exciting thing we have done that involved human space travel is simply flying around the moon, people wouldn't believe it
This thread is pretty much how people felt back then too.
Only to the naive yet vocal minority, fortunately!
That's beyond exciting.
This link, for example, "first glimpse of far side...[video]", is a video of the crew inside the craft. yawn It seems like every article I've read is like this. Like they're trying to encourage conspiracy theories.
We're talking about the unseen, far side of the moon, and they can't scrape together at least a still image of it?
The launch was in lower resolution than many shuttle launches I've watched.
Looking at the NASA.gov site, it is pale comparison of what it used to be. They seem to have opted for a few well polished articles and images, and they've jettisoned any semblance of passing along the data itself.
Remember that social media is a distortion of reality driven by whoever is willing to dedicate the most time and effort to dominating it.
So does this suggest the BBC is wrong and it’s the side of the moon we’re used to seeing, but just it’s “dark”?
But then the astronauts are saying it’s weird seeing the moon in a whole new light (excuse the paraphrasing pun).
I don’t understand.
They're already at a point where they see the moon from a different angle than we see it from Earth, enough to see a bit of the side that we can't see from here.
They did, 3 days ago! Maybe this is being pedantic (?) but the trans-lunar injection burn they did on April 2 put them on the complete trajectory including return to Earth. Though there are still possible correction burns that can be done to increase precision (the first 2 of these were already canceled).
That's my guess. They're seeing parts of the dark-side of the moon because they're now close enough that they have a different viewing angle than we do on Earth. Remember, they're not flying straight at the moon. That's not how transfer orbits work.
There is no dark side.
> In an interview with NBC News from space, NASA astronaut Christina Koch described seeing the moon out the window of the Orion capsule and realizing that it looked different from what she was accustomed to on Earth.
> “The darker parts just aren’t quite in the right place,” she said. “And something about you senses that is not the moon that I’m used to seeing.”
They are not on the other side of the moon seeing the full dark side, but from their position they're seeing the moon at a slight angle, meaning that SOME of what they now see is "the dark side", or the part we can never see from earth since the same side always faces us
Almost philosophical /S
Also, the dark side of the Moon is often illuminated but we call it dark because it’s also hidden from earth due to the Earth and Moon being tidally locked (the same side of each always faces the other body).
The same side of the moon always faces the Earth. If the same side of the Earth always faced the moon, then only one hemisphere would be able to see the moon. Since you can see the moon from everywhere on Earth (not at the same time...), we know that the same side of the Earth does not always face the moon.
Unless you're thinking of the "outside" of the Earth. /s
I've just been reading Narnia stories to my son and lots of the language seems dated and initially confusing but very descriptive and more poetic. Even though that was just in the mid-20th century.
Illustrated: https://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/comments/1sd797j/the_moon...
So, let's make some guess, but IANAA. Orion is in the middle of the trip going to the meeting point to the Moon in a quite straight line but the Moon is still not there. It will be there in 2 or 3 days, that is like 45° of the orbit.
O . . o
Earth > . . . . Moon
Orion in 3 days
.
.
.
.
.
.
o
Moon
now
I actually can't tell the difference in the photo to save my life, but I have a friend that is astronomer and I'm sure that if I show the photo to him, he could use a sharpie to mark the difference on my screen without any problem.
Your illustration is about right, but the angle they're catching now is even a bit further than you've shown.
Source: NASA's YT channel + way too many hours playing KSP. Skipping the course correction burn yesterday gave them the opportunity to try and unclog the liquid waste valve
So I guess they see it differently than us, eg from the side but not from the back.
No course adjustment is necessary (at least in the sense of an engine burn). The moon's gravity will sling them around and back toward Earth.
Photo and video gallery: https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/journey-to-the-moon/
But, there's a chance this might happen though!
I wish this mission took greater risks. Or, just at least go as far as Apollo 8, but stay for a bit longer, and try out new things. It would be fun to take a finicky low mass radio telescope experiment to the far side of the moon.
It's already risky enough: https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....
It has always been a touch-and-go affair
Better information density.
In traditional definitions, Far side = Dark side
If, when you say Dark side, you mean the side not receiving sunlight, then you're using a less informed, though more literal, definition of 'dark'.
Far side from Sun is always.
The point is that we are all Earthlings, so the former applies.
Who downvotes that? It is true.
Edit: maybe you can illuminate why you downvote?
Matter of fact, it's all dark
*heartbeats*
The “far side” of the moon refers to the hemisphere that can’t be seen from Earth.
and since launchpad is in the north hemisphere, Moon has to be at the south part of its orbit
No, you can see both the dark side & have line of sight to earth, at the same time. The key insight, probably, is that they're not behind the moon (yet) from Earth's PoV, and/or "seeing some of the dark side" vs. "seeing only the dark side"; currently, they are seeing only some of the dark side, assuming I'm interpreting the tracker correctly.
See [this tracker](https://issinfo.net/artemis.html) for a diagram of their position.
Currently, the arrangement is like this:
⌝ toward Earth
⋰
\ ⋰
\ ⋰ ⦙
Moon * * Orion
\ ⇣
\
(moon's orbit)
(Also note that "the dark side of the moon" is a specific term meaning the far side of the moon, not the literal dark portion. The "dark side of the moon" is lit 50% of the time.)
Still think what he said is worth hearing.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWvRjeEgecb/?igsh=MXZoYjZobDM...
I still liked what he had to say so gonna leave up the link itself
Love seeing our Ontario native Jeremy Hansen on the microphone, and those two flags properly positioned beside each other.
I'm not a Christian today, but was raised that way. This is the hopeful message I want to see on this day, and the true meaning of the symbol. Hope for all humankind. Working together.
(The moon has an albedo of 12%)
Wallis and Gromit would be a partial substitute, but the boomers are still around.
https://www.ign.com/articles/2015/08/05/nasa-releases-a-gif-...
We still should cut down (ideally to zero) on war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace, but the reason is because those things are unqualified evil on their own, not because doing so is necessary to fund healthcare and other priorities, which it very much is not.
Now war. They think that's worth it, even if it's also bad.
But the Mars missions, the ISS, and all the rest was not indecent. You were not wrong to enjoy those things back then. And you wouldn’t be wrong to enjoy this now.
It’s perfectly healthy to accept that the world is not perfect AND to still enjoy things in life. If you feel otherwise I highly encourage you to change. Those who improve the world do not feel defeated.
The bad things should make you even more thankful for the good. It’s perfectly healthy to allow yourself to enjoy the positive things in life, especially during the dark times.
It is the moon.
> Also didn't realize we could capture an image like this in what I assumed was total darkness.
The "Dark Side of the Moon" is a misnomer. It gets as much light as the side we can see.
Many of the founders were specifically anti-Christian. They were deists, and believed in a higher power, but specifically rejected the idea of a divine intervention of God or Jesus.
Christians do not own the idea of being nice to others and trusting others.
Jefferson also was a deist, but he wasn't present at the constitutional convention of 1787 (though he earlier authored the Declaration of Independence).
[0] M. E. Bradford. Founding Fathers: Brief Lives of the Framers of the United States Constitution, second edition. University Press of Kansas, 1994.
note: only 39 delegates signed the resulting document
Do you value separation of state and religious authority? Women's rights? Minority rights? Human dignity? Equality before the law? Sanctity of life? Individual moral responsibility? Monogamous marriage? The objective study of history? Fair trial? Witnesses at trial? Tolerance of alternative viewpoints?
Those are all Christian values. For what it's worth, I'm not Christian.
And I said:
> Christians do not own the idea of being nice to others and trusting others.
But let's look at your list:
> Do you value separation of state and religious authority? Women's rights? Minority rights? Human dignity? Equality before the law? Sanctity of life? Individual moral responsibility? Monogamous marriage? The objective study of history? Fair trial? Witnesses at trial? Tolerance of alternative viewpoints?
First of all, these are all Jewish values that Christian's adopted. And secondly, none of these are exclusive to Christianity. In fact they appear in many religions worldwide, as well as secular societies.
These are all just common decency, which is why they appear in most religions, and non-religions.
> These are all just common decency, which is why they appear in most religions, and non-religions.
This is why I mentioned the importance of high trust society.
There's really no such animal in practice. Over time Christian values have included charity for the poor, rapacious capitalism, slavery, the abolition of slavery, anti-science, science, war, peace, and the rest.
I believe most of the founders expressed disdain at the notion that the United States was built on Christian values. They were privately Christian. But publicly American. They were trying to break the cycle of history that building countries on religious values brings.
Saying we were built on Christian values is arguing for a continuing role for Christian values. Which, in turn, leads to a Christian state. And then we’re back to popes and mullahs in charge, and the SecDef and Speaker of the House giving sermons.
It does mean being deeply sceptical of anyone importing a religious value system, or building religious institutions.
> I suggest you look up the founding fathers' views on religion
"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports."
- George Washington
- George Washington
- John Adams
- John Adams
- Thomas Jefferson
- Thomas JeffersonWell done
Authoritarian, fine, but far from communist.
https://premierchristian.news/en/news/article/there-are-no-a...
Don't shoot the messenger