It is a bit chilling to watch these astronaut profiles having just read yesterday about the heat shield issues observed on the prior mission, and that this will be the first time we can test the heat shield in the actual pressures and temperatures that it will have to endure.
> in the same way that you'll probably survive one round of Russian roulette
Is that with or without spinning the chamber between rounds? The odds are worse if you spin each time. They get worse as the game goes on if you don't spin.
I didn't think of the gun getting passed around. To me, "one round" is pulling the trigger once after spinning the cylinder with one bullet. 1-in-6 chance of dying, you'll probably live. That's how I feel about this mission, I think they'll probably live, but man I'm nervous.
I mean, that's how these heat shields work. They aren't reusable, you can't test them and then use them again. Or do you mean the design? We already did Artemis I.
It says that it is not safe to fly. They are sending humans without having tested in real conditions that their design was sound, GIVEN that the first time they did that (without humans), it turned out that their design was unsafe.
They've changed the AVCOAT to be less permeable and altered the re-entry profile.
One of the findings of Artemis I is that lack of permeability led to trapped gas pockets which expanded and blew out pieces of heat shield. The reason for the change to be less permeable is to make it easier to perform ultrasonic testing, not to improve performance.
> Another chart which the Artemis Tiger Team did not intend to show on Jan. 8th, was the figure showing the spallation events as a function of time during the skip entry heating profiles (Figure 6.0-4 of NESC Report TI-23-0189 Vol. 1). In this figure, it was quite clear that the Program narrative they were feeding to the press, that it was the dwell time during the skip which allowed the gases generated to build up and cause the delta pressures which caused most of the spallation was, again, patently false. In fact, during the first heat pulse (t ≈ 0 to 240 sec), approximately 40-45% of all the medium to large chunks of ablator spalled off the Artemis I heatshield.
> Hence, varying the trajectory would do little to prevent spallation during Artemis II. I was never shown the new, modified trajectory at the Jan. 8th meeting.
I suppose "this will be the first time we can test this slightly modified heat shield in the slightly different pressures and temperatures that it will have to endure." isn't quite as eye catching.
I mean, sure. But that's like equipping a sub with a screen door and claiming that in the grand scheme of things, it's a slightly different door with slightly different permeability characteristics.
We already did Artemis I and the heat shield lost a lot more material than it was supposed to on that flight. "Specifically, portions of the char layer wore away differently than NASA engineers predicted, cracking and breaking off the spacecraft in fragments that created a trail of debris rather than melting away as designed. The unexpected behavior of the Avcoat creates a risk that the heat shield may not sufficiently protect the capsule’s systems and crew from the extreme heat of reentry on future missions."
Fixes have been made to the design, but they haven't been tested in flight.
Yes, a robot car that drives on its own will be a better driver than most humans who text and drive, or have 400ms reaction times.
But making a machine that can beat a 110ms reaction time human with 2SD+ IQ, and the ability to override the ground controllers with human curiosity is much harder. Humans have high dexterity, are extremely capable of switching roles fast, are surprisingly efficient, and force us to return back home.
So in terms of total science return, one Apollo mission did more for lunar science and discovery than 53 years of robots on the surface and in orbit.
Yeah. Doesn't really make sense. The entire mission could be done remotely.
Even with a goal of eventually putting humans on the moon, it'd be better to do an automated run, measure everything in the cockpit, and put in sandbags and/or something to consume O2 to make sure the CO2 scrubbers are working correctly. It's maybe cruel, but a few dogs would work fine for that sort of thing. A flame would be better, but it's pretty dangerous.
The first mission in decades doesn't need to have humans in it.
Independent of how scientifically awesome this is, this is probably the most cost effective long term propaganda. Why waste money on posters when you can orbit the moon.
We're commenting on NASA's live stream that exists to get us pumped up about the tens of billions of dollars we overpaid for this launch.
I'm probably much more happy than the next guy about getting to see a flyby of the moon this week even if I really wish we'd gotten here another way, but the accusation is a bit funny in this thread in particular.
You could just re-use the studio where they faked the Apollo 11 landing except it was in 7 WTC which was destroyed in a controlled demolition to hide the evidence.
I will be watching the launch from Europe, so it will be not earlier than half past midnight for us. My kids (9 and 10) are sleeping on the couch in front of the projection screen, so that they do not even have to get up when I wake them up at midnight, which I promised.
Just wanted to add my grain of positivity here. Godspeed Artemis 2!
Even though you could question the whole Artemis concept, it's still extremely exciting watching the countdown with my son. I just missed the original Apollo flights and had assumed I would never see a moon landing in my lifetime. We may well not have a landing for quite some time yet, but it's still cool to see a Moon bound rocket standing on the launchpad...
I lived in Port Orange FL until i was 12, during night launches my dad would take the family to New Smyrna Beach or some where a short drive South where we watched the shuttles come up over the water somehow. I can't remember the details it was a lonnnng time ago haha. I do remember the launches sounding like popcorn popping.
I live in Dallas now and will be turning 50 soon, i want to catch the next Starship launch live but would have to time it perfectly to get time off of work ahead of time.
You probably watched from the Florida side of the intercoastal waterway between the main part of Florida and Cape Canaveral. Because of the 3-mile minimum and Patrick AFB it is pretty hard to find a good watching place that is actually on the cape.
I don't know if it's feasible for you, but if you can, try to take your kid to see a live rocket launch. The TV is grossly unable to display how awesome these things are in person.
It is one of the things I regret not ever getting to see a shuttle launch. The closest I ever got was when I flew over Florida while a shuttle was on the pad.
It's even more exciting when you realize that the last crewed mission beyond Low Earth Orbit was 1972 and each person on that spacecraft today are younger than that.
There is a LOC (Loss of Crew) number that is typically calculated for these missions. I'm curious what that is? Early Apollo missions were on the order of 4%.
Before the Apollo launch, von Braun was asked what the reliability of the rocket was. He asked 6 of his lieutenants if it was ready to fly. Each replied "nein". Von Braun reported that it had six nines of reliability.
The joke that made the rounds of NASA was that the Saturn V had a reliability rating of .9999. In the story, a group from headquarters goes down to Marshall and asks Wernher von Braun how reliable the Saturn is going to be. Von Braun turns to four of his lieutenants and asks, "Is there any reason why it won't work?" to which they answer: "Nein." "Nein." "Nein." "Nein." Von Braun then says to the men from headquarters, "Gentlemen, I have a reliability of four nines."
In 2014 an independent safety panel estimated 1:75, but I think it's slightly better now. The shuttle program officially had a limit of 1:90 but in practice achieved 1:67.
In the early days of the Shuttle program, the probability was supposedly estimated as low as 1:100,000. Challenger brought on a more realistic approach.
Out of curiosity, why do you see this as a worthwhile endeavor?
My personal perspective is that the resources are better used for other purposes, but it's possible that I just haven't encountered some compelling reason yet.
Do you watch sports, football, the Olympics? If not I'm sure you know someone who does. Same category as this. Each of the 32 NFL team is worth about the cost of 1-2 Artemis launches. The entire league could fund the whole Artemis program nearly twice. Hosting the Olympics is worth about 3-10 launches.
Like sports, the objective is ultimately useless except as a showcase of what humanity has to offer, and people like to see that.
I think in general space exploration is a great use of taxpayer money, but the artemis program doesn't seem great from either a "science per dollar" or "novel accomplishment per dollar" standpoint.
If the goal was just to flex on the rest of the world I would've much rather we focused on going somewhere new or returning to the moon in a more sustainable way
Each Artemis launch costs something like $4b (that's the incremental cost of a new rocket, it's much higher if you amortize the design costs).
IMO the program is not optimized for cost or sustainability, it's optimized for creating jobs in various congressional districts. Of course that provides a certain amount of political sustainability to the so-called Senate Launch System.
I just don't see a future where NASA can afford multiple SLS launches per year to maintain a continuous Lunar presence
I think that is the point, but whether this mission will actually do that is rather unconvincing.
After (and if) Artemis III lands on the moon and brings home the astronauts there seems to be very little planned on how we actually get to the moon base which NASA is claiming this will lead to, let alone the manned Mars mission that is also supposed to follow.
In other words, I think NASA is greatly exaggerating, and possibly lying, about the utility of this mission.
Even if you think Space travel is worth the money (which I personally do), adding humans to the mix makes projects incredibly more expensive. Even in the realm of space travel and research, sending humans is a questionable use of the money.
The most important (if not entertaining) things you can do in space don't involve humans. Telescopes, communications, earth observation, sending probes to distant bodies, etc.
It's nice that we can send humans to space and it's good to keep that capability going so that the knowledge doesn't die. But the unmanned missions tend to pull the weight of actually accomplishing useful things. Humans just get in the way.
I think there is a major difference though. Sports events are not pretending to be anything else. The Artemis mission claims to be advancing science and claims to be a stepping stone for an eventual moon base and a manned mission to Mars. I personally have serious questions about all of these.
Do you really disagree that it’s advancing science? Surely actually testing hardware, building knowledge on how to run this type of mission, learning to use lunar resources, figuring out how to keep people alive, etc. will teach us things we couldn’t learn any other way.
Fwiw do share your concerns about the methods (sending humans on this specific mission is questionable, SLS is questionable compared to SpaceX approach).
It's not science, it's engineering. I don't think it's advancing science in a way that wouldn't be possible with a fraction of the cost without sending humans there.
Do you think we will learn more from Artemis or the Asteroid Redirect Mission? Because that's a concrete example of how funding this mission caused other experiments to be cancelled.
Fair point, but that’s an argument about prioritization within NASA’s budget (and its size relative to other spending), not the scientific value of the mission.
The fact that we hope to get some new tech with this whereas sports aims for nothing is just icing on the cake. I think big space missions are worth it every now and then on a humanitarian level; even if no new discoveries are made, a new generation of engineers will become fluent in what we have already discovered. Humanity's education is not "done" when the last fact is written in a book, it needs to be constantly refreshed or it will disappear.
Even in sports you do not get "nothing", it has certainty helped advance the field of medicine.
> a new generation of engineers will become fluent in what we have already discovered.
We seem to have lost the technology of going to the moon we gained from Apollo. So without an actual follow-up and a tangible long term plan I suspect the exact same will happen this time around.
Whether a moon base is needed or even beneficial is a question I have not heard a convincing answer in favor. And even if moon base is indeed needed and/or beneficial to future space exploration / resource extraction why robots cannot more efficiently build (or assemble) such a moon base is another question I need an answer to.
We are sending humans to (or around) the moon now, but it may just turn out to be a wasted effort, done solely for the opulence (or more cynically bragging rights / nationalist propaganda).
The moon has about the same make up as the Earth when it comes to distribution of elements in the crust. If it's anywhere near 8% like Earth then it makes sense to mine aluminum and other metals on the moon in order to build megastructures in orbit. Since the moon has no atmosphere you can accelerate things using mechanical mass drivers. Basically rail systems. At 5,300 mph you hit escape velocity and can then move payload somewhere with no rockets. It would keep us from polluting Earth too. This is the precursor to O'Neil cylinder type structures. AI robots will probably be the play but you still want a transportation system that works and frankly building a landing zone would improve overall outcomes regardless.
The rocks at the surface of the Moon are richer in metals than the crust of the Earth. They are especially richer in iron and titanium.
Without oxidizing air, it is easier to extract metals from the Moon rocks.
There is little doubt that it would be possible to build big spaceships on the Moon.
However, what is missing on the Moon is fuel. For interplanetary spacecraft, nuclear reactors would be preferable anyway, which could be assembled there from parts shipped from Earth, but for propulsion those still need a large amount of some working gas,to be heated and ejected.
It remains to be seen if there is any useful amount of water at the poles, but I doubt that there is enough for a long term exploitation.
I imagine a foundry would use solar power and lasers to heat up the material. No atmosphere means less heat energy wasted. My thinking has been how to get enough actual build material to build something like an O'Neill cylinder. Well you'd need really thick metal plates. And then you'd want to get them into orbit without rockets. And these stations would likely be at the same orbit as Earth or nearby. Mainly because of how much sun energy you get around here. Going out to the outer solar system is a different beast all together.
We are nowhere near the capability to launch robots to the moon that can autonomously build or assemble a moon base for any useful definition of moon base.
> We are sending humans to (or around) the moon now, but it may just turn out to be a wasted effort, done solely for the opulence
My 4 year old is extremely excited to watch the launch tonight because it’s manned. I’d say a few billion is worth it if all it does is inspire a new generation of astronauts, engineers, and scientists.
And neither are we anywhere near the capability to lunch construction workers to the moon which can build or assemble an equivalent moon base with their human labor. So this answer does not satisfy me one bit.
> inspire a new generation of astronauts, engineers, and scientists
This is a good point. And I would like it to be true. However when you have to lie about (or exaggerate) the scientific value of the mission, that is not exactly inspiring is it. Your 4 year old could be equally inspired by the amazing photos James Webb has given us, and unlike Artemis, James Webb is providing us with unique data which is inspiring all sorts of new science.
> And neither are we anywhere near the capability to lunch construction workers to the moon which can build or assemble an equivalent moon base with their human labor. So this answer does not satisfy me one bit.
We have the capability to do that. We don’t have the will to do it, but we have the technology. We don’t even have autonomous robots that are capable of building a moon base on earth.
> Your 4 year old could be equally inspired by the amazing photos James Webb has given us, and unlike Artemis, James Webb is providing us with unique data which is inspiring all sorts of new science.
He’s not though. People gather around as a family and watch manned space missions. It’s exciting in a way that a telescope or a probe isn’t.
Indeed, in 1969, as a small child, I watched the Moon landing together with my parents, in Europe, like also the following missions, in the next years.
They have certainly contributed to my formation as a future engineer.
This argument comes up a lot, about whether a space program is “worth it” in some sense. One problem I’ve found is that these discussions often treat this in the abstract. And then we get into the nature of human endeavor, the economic benefits of that R&D, etc.
Let’s talk about this in terms of practicalities. The NASA budget for 2026, per Wikipedia, is $24.4B. I often find it hard to really reason about the size of federal budgets, and the impact on tax payers, but I have a thought experiment that I think helps put it into perspective. Suppose we decided to pay for the NASA budget with a new tax, just for funding NASA. And we did that in the simplest (and most unfair) possible way: a flat rate. Every working adult in the US has to pay some fixed monthly rate (so excluding children and retirees). Again, per Wikipedia, that’s around 170M people. Take the NASA budget, divide by 170M, and you get … $11.96/month.
Obviously, there’s lots of flaws in this. That’s not we pay for NASA, we have income tax as a percentage with different tax brackets. But it is a helpful way to frame how much a country is spending, normalized by population. And I think it puts a lot of things in perspective. $11.96/month is comparable to a streaming service. And we talk a lot about whether NASAs budget is better used for other purposes, but we don’t do the same thing for a streaming service.
Hell, look at US consumer spending: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm (note that that spending is in dollars per “consumer unit,” which is I think is equivalent to an adult US worker, but there might be some caveats). Based on that, the average US consumer spends around $26.17/month on “tobacco products and smoking supplies”. I just feel it’s a little silly to worry about the NASA budget when the US consumer spends twice that on what is objectively a luxury good. At least NASA won’t give you cancer.
NASA isn't expensive. The science parts and the job creation parts almost certainly return a significant economic multiplier. The spend is very good value for around 0.5% of the federal budget.
That doesn't mean Moon shots are the best possible use of that budget. There are strong arguments for creating more space stations first, and then using them as staging for other projects.
Mars and the Moon are ridiculously hostile environments. Hollywood (and Elon Musk) have sold a fantasy of land-unpack-build. There aren't enough words to describe how utterly unrealistic that is.
Current strategy is muddled, because it contains elements of patriotic Cold War PR fumes, contractor pork, and more than a hint of covert militarisation. Science and engineering are buried somewhere in the middle of that.
I would like to watch a new Moon landing, but in my opinion more useful would be to build a space station with artificial gravity.
At some point it may become cheaper to build a spacecraft on the Moon and launch it in interplanetary missions than to do it from Earth. It might also be useful to build some bigger telescopes on the Moon than it is practical to launch from Earth, because due to the pollution of the sky extraterrestrial telescopes become more and more necessary.
Despite the fact that there may be some uses for bases on the Moon, it is likely that those bases should be mostly automated and humans should stay in such bases only for a limited time, much like staying on the ISS. The reason is that it is very likely that the gravity of the Moon is still too low to avoid health deterioration. According to the experiments done on mice in the ISS, two thirds of the terrestrial gravity were required to avoid health issues and one third of the terrestrial gravity provided a partial mitigation.
So even the gravity of Mars is only barely enough to avoid the more severe health problems, but not sufficient.
For long term missions, there is no real alternative to the use of a rotating space station, to ensure adequate gravity.
While with underground bases on Moon or on Mars it would be much easier to provide radiation protection, there remains the problem of insufficient gravity. It may be necessary to also build a rotating underground base, at least for a part where humans spend most of the time.
That’s a very fair point. Frankly I don’t know enough about the Artemis mission and general path, and would like to learn more. I’m certainly open to the argument that NASA’s budget isn’t properly allocated to the right priorities. I was responding just to the classic argument of “why spend money on NASA when we could be spending on …”
> Out of curiosity, why do you see this as a worthwhile endeavor?
to me it's inspiring and gives people something to cheer for. It also keeps a lot of people employed, productive, and at least has the possibility for new innovation. When looking at the mountains and mountains of wasted taxpayer dollars I dislike these the least.
Because humans are destined to colonize space, and this is just an early step in a journey that will take hundreds or thousands of years.
More importantly, challenges like space exploration help drive knowledge and our economy; and are critical for national prestigue.
(And, most people don't focus on this, space exploration is a way for the US to demonstrate its military technology in a non-antagonistic way. There's a lot of overlap in space exploration technology and miliary technology.)
The moonshot is a halo program that, when executed in a non-profit form, ends up benefiting society as a whole due to smart people being cornered and forced to solve hard problems that typically have applicability elsewhere on Earth.
Edit: remember the Kennedy speech — We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.
That remains to be seen. By giving Musk the prominence to set up DOGE and destroy USAID, they've indirectly led to the deaths of almost a million people.
By launching starlink, they're also increasing the amount of aluminum in the upper atmosphere, which may have catastrophic effects on the ozone layer.
Specific innovations tend to be protected via IP when they are developed privately and, as a result, “butterfly effect” developments in a completely different field from cross-pollination are less likely to occur later down the line.
> My personal perspective is that the resources are better used for other purposes, but it's possible that I just haven't encountered some compelling reason yet.
Well, people are often obsessed with rationality, and seek reasons to do something, but there is one reason that works almost for anything: just because. If we want to go forward, we'd better try a lot of things, including those that do not look very promising. We don't know the future, the only way to uncover it is to try. Did you hear about gradient descent? It is an algo for finding local maxima and to do its work it needs to calculate partial derivatives to choose where to go next. In reality doing things and measuring things are sometimes indistinguishable. So society would better try to move in all directions at once.
A lot of people believe that to fly to the Moon is a good idea. Maybe they believe it due to emotional reasons, but it is good enough for me, because it allows to concentrate enough resources to do it.
> the resources are better used for other purposes
It is much better use for $$$ than the war with Iran. I believe that the war have eaten more then Artemis already, and... Voltaire said "perfect is an enemy of good". The Moon maybe not the perfect way to use resources, but it is good at least.
It is great to advance of what is humanly possible. Sending a robot? Great! Good data. If it dies, who cares, it does not live anyway. All abstract.
But sending a human? That feels more real. If we have the power to go alive to the moon, we also have the power to go even further. And we lost it, now we are reclaiming it.
And it doesn't matter to me what I think of the US government - this is progress for all of humanity. Also the comment section on the youtube stream is interesting - lot's of different flags are posted, sending good wishes from all around the world, low effort comments otherwise of course, but largely positive. (Very rare I think)
So, more rockets into space please and less on earth.
I want humanity to continue to be explorers. The Moon is a good next thing, then asteroid mining, humans on Mars and Venus, and eventually colonizing the Milky Way.
Because it is good for humans to have a thing to do. Not sure why this is not considered a valid reason. A lot of these 'it would be better to do X' assumes everyone has the same psychological profile as you. They don't. Many people are driven to explore and would go mad otherwise.
I do much better with things to look forward to, or when I have a feeling that progress can be made. An interesting movie coming out, new music coming out. Or even better reminding me what humans are capable of above just grinding to get by or grinding to exploit others. Haven't been many moments of feeling progress lately.
It's quite telling that all the replies you're getting are about "hope" and "jobs" with no actual scientific reason. I guess we're taxing people for vanity space missions and jobs programs. Makes sense.
Hopefully, in a few years we will figure out that hydrogen rockets can not reliably launch on time and we'll switch to less leaky fuels. Then maybe we won't need to pull 40 year old engines out of museums to dump in the ocean.
I'm all for human spaceflight, but the Senate Launch System seems the best argument for shutting down human spaceflight programs.
Well, we should have figured that out with the STS. That's what the STS was for - figuring out what technologies made for inexpensive, rapid spaceflight and which technologies don't.
Then the senate mandates the new rocket to use specifically the most expensive, problematic, least reliable technology. Completely designed to fail.
But they need to convince the people that it's worth the money, and the people are more excited when humans risk their lives, even if it is for nothing.
I tuned in for 60 seconds, the presenter got everything wrong, and I just tuned out until liftoff.
She called the top of the ET (well, it's no longer an ET, but it's the stage that was the STS ET) the "upper stage". She said that the propellents are stored at thousands of degrees below zero. And so on. This is a NASA presenter?
You are not the target audience for this sort of presentation. Media directed at the laity is more about being directionally than quantifiably correct, and is full of metaphor and embellishment to capture the imagination rather than communicate something with precision.
People who want the actual details and numbers will read.
> She called the top of the ET (well, it's no longer an ET, but it's the stage that was the STS ET) the "upper stage". She said that the propellents are stored at thousands of degrees below zero. And so on. This is a NASA presenter?
To be fair to her, she seemed to explicitly refer to what sits on top of the core stage, it just wasn't in the diagram she was gesturing to the top of at the time.
To be fair to you, I think the cryogenic comment was worse and she actually said "thousands of degrees below Fahrenheit".
The problem is they're trying to run hours of programming leading up to this launch for some reason, but aren't willing to force the experts to come in to do the commentary. They should have given her a script.
Jesus! Why is there a presenter? Why isn't it just a livestream of the mission control radio chatter? That sort of shit belongs on some 24/7 news broadcast.
Wish them all the best and safe travels. I’ll be tuning in as you never know when the next crewed mission will be, probably not another 50 years if advancements in space travel happen.
> “the expert evidence we have heard strongly suggests that the use of autonomous robots alone will very significantly limit what can be learned about our nearest potentially habitable planet” (Close et al. (2005; paragraph 70).
>
> Putting it more bluntly, Steve Squyres, the Principal Investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, has written:
>
> “[t]he unfortunate truth is that most things our rovers can do in a perfect sol [i.e. a martian day] a human explorer could do in less than a minute” (Squyres, 2005, pp. 234-5).
Yes, a robot car that drives on its own will be a better driver than most humans who text and drive, or have 400ms reaction times.
But making a machine that can beat a 110ms reaction time human with 2SD+ IQ – and the ability to override the ground controllers with human curiosity – for exploration is much harder. Healthy, smart humans have high dexterity, are extremely capable of switching roles fast, are surprisingly efficient, and force us to return back home.
So in terms of total science return, one Apollo mission did more for lunar science and discovery than 53 years of robots on the surface and in orbit.
Is there any website that gives me updates mirroring the livestream but in plain text? I won't be able to tune in for the launch but this is exciting and I'd like to follow the developments! I'm sure the answer is "Twitter" but I don't understand how that platform works.
Found a stream on YouTube earlier (which presumably wasn't an official one because it disappeared 15 minutes later after a claim by "FUBO TV") and it had a poll attached: "Will the Artemis astronauts land on the moon?"
40% of people had voted yes. Which is somewhat worrying given the mission plan and hardware.
That's your own thing. Think about it to applause the dedicated work of people who have spent their life building these missions and have to do this work through multiple different administrations.
What a sad, disappointing instinct. It completely divorced from reality to assume that "enjoy[ing] anything that comes from [the] USA" implies any sort of political allegiance to whoever happens to sit in the Oval office at that particular point in time.
There's no way you're "a big space fan" if the first thing you think of when you see a rocket launch that was announced 9 years is Donald Trump.
I'm just SO HAPPY we can talk about something that doesn't involve the Iran war, ICE etc. This is a really historic moment, I hope that the current and future administrations continue investing in space exploration. I've waited my whole life for this as the entire "action" happened before I was born. Hubble/James Webb/ISS are cool but Artemis is something else!
Really hoping those of us who think NASA has jumped the shark won't have to keep ourselves from saying "I told you so" next week out of respect for the dead.
This is four people putting their lives at risk for poor engineering and bad project management.
The "right stuff" applies to the engineers too, but they've all unfortunately left Boeing and NASA.
This opinion may be unpopular here but it's hard to get excited about a colossal waste of taxpayer money after all the damage DOGE did. I don't understand how these NASA missions with questionable scientific value and obscene budgets get off the ground.
I mean I do understand, NASA funding is important to oligarchs. But still.
I personally find the grind easier when there also big things happening. You can't just cook the same, most basic, cheapest meal every day for your family and expect them to be happy. Who wants to join a club that doesn't do anything interesting? Same with society. It sometimes needs to dream, to aspire and inspire. To lift peoples head from the toil and look up.
Artemis was already set in stone well before DOGE came about and IMO if the federal government is going to set mountains of cash on fire I'd rather it be to NASA than half the crap the government wastes every year.
My point is that DOGE killed a bunch of government programs that help people while saving no money, yet this giant waste of money survived. Cancelling Artemis II alone in favor of III would save a billion dollars by itself.
It was never intended to save money. It was about a crusade against remote work, eliminating civil servants who might be loyal to the Constitution rather than the president, and planting a seed of government dysfunction for later years.
It is a bit chilling to watch these astronaut profiles having just read yesterday about the heat shield issues observed on the prior mission, and that this will be the first time we can test the heat shield in the actual pressures and temperatures that it will have to endure.
Godspeed crew of Artemis II.
It'll probably turn out fine (in the same way that you'll probably survive one round of Russian roulette.) I am quite nervous about this though.
Get nervous in 10 days, they won't need a heat shield until reentry.
10 days? Hope they brought snacks
Seriously though I hope they're able to get up and walk around
I don't know if I could handle that 10 days in that small room
They can move around after they switch from launch to spaceflight config. Apparently they also have some exercise gear for the journey.
It is just the capsule though? There's no stage under them/another cylinder? Module
Trying to imagine how big the thing is like 10x10 feet room
> in the same way that you'll probably survive one round of Russian roulette
Is that with or without spinning the chamber between rounds? The odds are worse if you spin each time. They get worse as the game goes on if you don't spin.
> The odds are worse if you spin each time.
How do they get worse if you spin? It’s still 1/6 odds of dying,iid events.
Erm no. If it goes a round and gets passed without spinning, the chances change of course. It is 1/6, 1/5, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, .. 1
I didn't think of the gun getting passed around. To me, "one round" is pulling the trigger once after spinning the cylinder with one bullet. 1-in-6 chance of dying, you'll probably live. That's how I feel about this mission, I think they'll probably live, but man I'm nervous.
... 1/0
It's 6/11 overall chance of dying if spinning, no?
From a quick search, this page explains it: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/RussianRoulette.html
Dude, it's a nerd-snipe conversation derailing attempt. Don't take the bait.
Talk about space stuff here, not the statistical nature of Russian roulette.
How about don't tell other people what they can and can't talk about, and just ignore side threads you don't care about?
There are about 500 different HN browser extensions that let you collapse threads, btw.
I had to watch "go at throttle up" on replay on the news in 1986 for the entire year, like almost every newscast
I was only a teenager and it burned into my brain badly
To this day cannot watch any launch with people onboard live
I mean, that's how these heat shields work. They aren't reusable, you can't test them and then use them again. Or do you mean the design? We already did Artemis I.
See this recent blog post about it (I am not the author): https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....
It says that it is not safe to fly. They are sending humans without having tested in real conditions that their design was sound, GIVEN that the first time they did that (without humans), it turned out that their design was unsafe.
I mean the design.
They've changed the AVCOAT to be less permeable and altered the re-entry profile.
One of the findings of Artemis I is that lack of permeability led to trapped gas pockets which expanded and blew out pieces of heat shield. The reason for the change to be less permeable is to make it easier to perform ultrasonic testing, not to improve performance.
They altered the re-entry profile on the theory that the skip period contributed to spalling, but Charles Camarda disagrees in this doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
> Another chart which the Artemis Tiger Team did not intend to show on Jan. 8th, was the figure showing the spallation events as a function of time during the skip entry heating profiles (Figure 6.0-4 of NESC Report TI-23-0189 Vol. 1). In this figure, it was quite clear that the Program narrative they were feeding to the press, that it was the dwell time during the skip which allowed the gases generated to build up and cause the delta pressures which caused most of the spallation was, again, patently false. In fact, during the first heat pulse (t ≈ 0 to 240 sec), approximately 40-45% of all the medium to large chunks of ablator spalled off the Artemis I heatshield.
> Hence, varying the trajectory would do little to prevent spallation during Artemis II. I was never shown the new, modified trajectory at the Jan. 8th meeting.
The heat shield is a bit different, and the reentry profile is a bit different as well.
I suppose "this will be the first time we can test this slightly modified heat shield in the slightly different pressures and temperatures that it will have to endure." isn't quite as eye catching.
I mean, sure. But that's like equipping a sub with a screen door and claiming that in the grand scheme of things, it's a slightly different door with slightly different permeability characteristics.
We already did Artemis I and the heat shield lost a lot more material than it was supposed to on that flight. "Specifically, portions of the char layer wore away differently than NASA engineers predicted, cracking and breaking off the spacecraft in fragments that created a trail of debris rather than melting away as designed. The unexpected behavior of the Avcoat creates a risk that the heat shield may not sufficiently protect the capsule’s systems and crew from the extreme heat of reentry on future missions."
Fixes have been made to the design, but they haven't been tested in flight.
Truly. I'm not sure why anyone needs to be on the rocket at all, let alone our best and brightest.
Because human beings are remarkably capable, especially the best and the brightest. There's a great paper called the "dispelling the myth of robotic efficiency." https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article-abstract/53/2/2.22... // https://lasp.colorado.edu/mop/files/2019/08/RobotMyth.pdf
Yes, a robot car that drives on its own will be a better driver than most humans who text and drive, or have 400ms reaction times.
But making a machine that can beat a 110ms reaction time human with 2SD+ IQ, and the ability to override the ground controllers with human curiosity is much harder. Humans have high dexterity, are extremely capable of switching roles fast, are surprisingly efficient, and force us to return back home.
So in terms of total science return, one Apollo mission did more for lunar science and discovery than 53 years of robots on the surface and in orbit.
Are you referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troctolite_76535 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Schmitt#NASA_career)?
How does any of that matter for this mission, which will not be landing on the moon?
Yeah. Doesn't really make sense. The entire mission could be done remotely.
Even with a goal of eventually putting humans on the moon, it'd be better to do an automated run, measure everything in the cockpit, and put in sandbags and/or something to consume O2 to make sure the CO2 scrubbers are working correctly. It's maybe cruel, but a few dogs would work fine for that sort of thing. A flame would be better, but it's pretty dangerous.
The first mission in decades doesn't need to have humans in it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_I
Thanks. I should have looked this up before posting.
Because they want to be on the rocket. To see the moon up close with your own eyes? It's spiritual.
I understand why they want to fly. I don't understand why the people is fine paying taxes for that.
Independent of how scientifically awesome this is, this is probably the most cost effective long term propaganda. Why waste money on posters when you can orbit the moon.
That was the intent of the piece. It is impossible to assess the true intent of such a piece when it so blatantly is asking for attention.
Some people are great at self promotion.
> Some people are great at self promotion.
We're commenting on NASA's live stream that exists to get us pumped up about the tens of billions of dollars we overpaid for this launch.
I'm probably much more happy than the next guy about getting to see a flyby of the moon this week even if I really wish we'd gotten here another way, but the accusation is a bit funny in this thread in particular.
What’s the another way?
You could just re-use the studio where they faked the Apollo 11 landing except it was in 7 WTC which was destroyed in a controlled demolition to hide the evidence.
https://xkcd.com/1074/
Are you actually surprised that a livestream paid for my NASA would promote NASA? Geez, that’s innocent.
This is a NASA cover up:
https://youtu.be/pzZWs7CexYI?t=78
https://youtu.be/Wuao1LgO66w?t=218
I will be watching the launch from Europe, so it will be not earlier than half past midnight for us. My kids (9 and 10) are sleeping on the couch in front of the projection screen, so that they do not even have to get up when I wake them up at midnight, which I promised.
Just wanted to add my grain of positivity here. Godspeed Artemis 2!
> add my grain of positivity
The best of science, reason, research, engineering, training, expertise, co-operation...
The best of humanity. Le meilleur de l'humanité.
Even though you could question the whole Artemis concept, it's still extremely exciting watching the countdown with my son. I just missed the original Apollo flights and had assumed I would never see a moon landing in my lifetime. We may well not have a landing for quite some time yet, but it's still cool to see a Moon bound rocket standing on the launchpad...
We lived ~60 miles North of the Cape when I was a young boy, and watching the Saturn V's go on the way to the moon was a forming experience.
I lived in Port Orange FL until i was 12, during night launches my dad would take the family to New Smyrna Beach or some where a short drive South where we watched the shuttles come up over the water somehow. I can't remember the details it was a lonnnng time ago haha. I do remember the launches sounding like popcorn popping.
I live in Dallas now and will be turning 50 soon, i want to catch the next Starship launch live but would have to time it perfectly to get time off of work ahead of time.
You probably watched from the Florida side of the intercoastal waterway between the main part of Florida and Cape Canaveral. Because of the 3-mile minimum and Patrick AFB it is pretty hard to find a good watching place that is actually on the cape.
I don't know if it's feasible for you, but if you can, try to take your kid to see a live rocket launch. The TV is grossly unable to display how awesome these things are in person.
It is one of the things I regret not ever getting to see a shuttle launch. The closest I ever got was when I flew over Florida while a shuttle was on the pad.
And a landing! S Padre is great for kids and rockets.
For the more adventurous and/or bilingual the beaches on the Mexican side seem to have awesome views too.
Its going to be a first for me and my son as well. Looking forward to tonight to make an even over it.
It's even more exciting when you realize that the last crewed mission beyond Low Earth Orbit was 1972 and each person on that spacecraft today are younger than that.
Recent and related:
Artemis II is not safe to fly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582043 - March 2026 (598 comments)
Range is go after they worked to verify the FTS. Great news.
Fingers crossed that this https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly.... doesn't have any effect.
There is a LOC (Loss of Crew) number that is typically calculated for these missions. I'm curious what that is? Early Apollo missions were on the order of 4%.
Before the Apollo launch, von Braun was asked what the reliability of the rocket was. He asked 6 of his lieutenants if it was ready to fly. Each replied "nein". Von Braun reported that it had six nines of reliability.
I'm assuming this is fake but it's hilarious.
GitHub taking notes
Is that a real fact?
(I misremembered it slightly, so sue me)
From "Apollo The Race to the Moon" pg 102:
The joke that made the rounds of NASA was that the Saturn V had a reliability rating of .9999. In the story, a group from headquarters goes down to Marshall and asks Wernher von Braun how reliable the Saturn is going to be. Von Braun turns to four of his lieutenants and asks, "Is there any reason why it won't work?" to which they answer: "Nein." "Nein." "Nein." "Nein." Von Braun then says to the men from headquarters, "Gentlemen, I have a reliability of four nines."
You know why you chose 6 9s.
Reliability of 4 neins to be precise
The date checks
After the moon landing, Armstrong allowed that he had estimated the survivability at 50%.
In 2014 an independent safety panel estimated 1:75, but I think it's slightly better now. The shuttle program officially had a limit of 1:90 but in practice achieved 1:67.
In the early days of the Shuttle program, the probability was supposedly estimated as low as 1:100,000. Challenger brought on a more realistic approach.
The official minimum standard is 1:270
Hilarious!
It's been 54 years since humans last visited the Moon. Hopefully, in a few years we will get boots back on the surface.
Out of curiosity, why do you see this as a worthwhile endeavor?
My personal perspective is that the resources are better used for other purposes, but it's possible that I just haven't encountered some compelling reason yet.
Do you watch sports, football, the Olympics? If not I'm sure you know someone who does. Same category as this. Each of the 32 NFL team is worth about the cost of 1-2 Artemis launches. The entire league could fund the whole Artemis program nearly twice. Hosting the Olympics is worth about 3-10 launches.
Like sports, the objective is ultimately useless except as a showcase of what humanity has to offer, and people like to see that.
I think in general space exploration is a great use of taxpayer money, but the artemis program doesn't seem great from either a "science per dollar" or "novel accomplishment per dollar" standpoint.
If the goal was just to flex on the rest of the world I would've much rather we focused on going somewhere new or returning to the moon in a more sustainable way
I feel like these missions are just paving the way for billionaires to have a new vacation spot.
"returning to the moon in a more sustainable way"
Isn't this the point of this mission? If your point is "it shouldn't take this much money", then I agree. But also point to almost everything else.
Each Artemis launch costs something like $4b (that's the incremental cost of a new rocket, it's much higher if you amortize the design costs).
IMO the program is not optimized for cost or sustainability, it's optimized for creating jobs in various congressional districts. Of course that provides a certain amount of political sustainability to the so-called Senate Launch System.
I just don't see a future where NASA can afford multiple SLS launches per year to maintain a continuous Lunar presence
I think that is the point, but whether this mission will actually do that is rather unconvincing.
After (and if) Artemis III lands on the moon and brings home the astronauts there seems to be very little planned on how we actually get to the moon base which NASA is claiming this will lead to, let alone the manned Mars mission that is also supposed to follow.
In other words, I think NASA is greatly exaggerating, and possibly lying, about the utility of this mission.
The difference being that sports are not exclusively paid by taxes, I guess?
Even if you think Space travel is worth the money (which I personally do), adding humans to the mix makes projects incredibly more expensive. Even in the realm of space travel and research, sending humans is a questionable use of the money.
Sports would also be much cheaper without humans.
The most important (if not entertaining) things you can do in space don't involve humans. Telescopes, communications, earth observation, sending probes to distant bodies, etc.
It's nice that we can send humans to space and it's good to keep that capability going so that the knowledge doesn't die. But the unmanned missions tend to pull the weight of actually accomplishing useful things. Humans just get in the way.
Most people don't find those things interesting unless people are directly involved in them.
Turns out I don't understand the point sports either.
I think there is a major difference though. Sports events are not pretending to be anything else. The Artemis mission claims to be advancing science and claims to be a stepping stone for an eventual moon base and a manned mission to Mars. I personally have serious questions about all of these.
Do you really disagree that it’s advancing science? Surely actually testing hardware, building knowledge on how to run this type of mission, learning to use lunar resources, figuring out how to keep people alive, etc. will teach us things we couldn’t learn any other way.
Fwiw do share your concerns about the methods (sending humans on this specific mission is questionable, SLS is questionable compared to SpaceX approach).
It's not science, it's engineering. I don't think it's advancing science in a way that wouldn't be possible with a fraction of the cost without sending humans there.
Do you think we will learn more from Artemis or the Asteroid Redirect Mission? Because that's a concrete example of how funding this mission caused other experiments to be cancelled.
Fair point, but that’s an argument about prioritization within NASA’s budget (and its size relative to other spending), not the scientific value of the mission.
The fact that we hope to get some new tech with this whereas sports aims for nothing is just icing on the cake. I think big space missions are worth it every now and then on a humanitarian level; even if no new discoveries are made, a new generation of engineers will become fluent in what we have already discovered. Humanity's education is not "done" when the last fact is written in a book, it needs to be constantly refreshed or it will disappear.
Even in sports you do not get "nothing", it has certainty helped advance the field of medicine.
> a new generation of engineers will become fluent in what we have already discovered.
We seem to have lost the technology of going to the moon we gained from Apollo. So without an actual follow-up and a tangible long term plan I suspect the exact same will happen this time around.
Yeah, that's probably an indication that we waited too long.
I don’t have any questions about a mission to Mars, it is a stupid and pointless trip that I don’t want to ask any questions about.
The Moon, I dunno, it’s at least in Earth’s gravity well so it isn’t like we’re going totally the wrong direction when we go there, right?
At best it could be a gas station on the trip to somewhere interesting like the Asteroid belt, though.
Whether a moon base is needed or even beneficial is a question I have not heard a convincing answer in favor. And even if moon base is indeed needed and/or beneficial to future space exploration / resource extraction why robots cannot more efficiently build (or assemble) such a moon base is another question I need an answer to.
We are sending humans to (or around) the moon now, but it may just turn out to be a wasted effort, done solely for the opulence (or more cynically bragging rights / nationalist propaganda).
The moon has about the same make up as the Earth when it comes to distribution of elements in the crust. If it's anywhere near 8% like Earth then it makes sense to mine aluminum and other metals on the moon in order to build megastructures in orbit. Since the moon has no atmosphere you can accelerate things using mechanical mass drivers. Basically rail systems. At 5,300 mph you hit escape velocity and can then move payload somewhere with no rockets. It would keep us from polluting Earth too. This is the precursor to O'Neil cylinder type structures. AI robots will probably be the play but you still want a transportation system that works and frankly building a landing zone would improve overall outcomes regardless.
The rocks at the surface of the Moon are richer in metals than the crust of the Earth. They are especially richer in iron and titanium.
Without oxidizing air, it is easier to extract metals from the Moon rocks.
There is little doubt that it would be possible to build big spaceships on the Moon.
However, what is missing on the Moon is fuel. For interplanetary spacecraft, nuclear reactors would be preferable anyway, which could be assembled there from parts shipped from Earth, but for propulsion those still need a large amount of some working gas,to be heated and ejected.
It remains to be seen if there is any useful amount of water at the poles, but I doubt that there is enough for a long term exploitation.
I imagine a foundry would use solar power and lasers to heat up the material. No atmosphere means less heat energy wasted. My thinking has been how to get enough actual build material to build something like an O'Neill cylinder. Well you'd need really thick metal plates. And then you'd want to get them into orbit without rockets. And these stations would likely be at the same orbit as Earth or nearby. Mainly because of how much sun energy you get around here. Going out to the outer solar system is a different beast all together.
We are nowhere near the capability to launch robots to the moon that can autonomously build or assemble a moon base for any useful definition of moon base.
> We are sending humans to (or around) the moon now, but it may just turn out to be a wasted effort, done solely for the opulence
My 4 year old is extremely excited to watch the launch tonight because it’s manned. I’d say a few billion is worth it if all it does is inspire a new generation of astronauts, engineers, and scientists.
And neither are we anywhere near the capability to lunch construction workers to the moon which can build or assemble an equivalent moon base with their human labor. So this answer does not satisfy me one bit.
> inspire a new generation of astronauts, engineers, and scientists
This is a good point. And I would like it to be true. However when you have to lie about (or exaggerate) the scientific value of the mission, that is not exactly inspiring is it. Your 4 year old could be equally inspired by the amazing photos James Webb has given us, and unlike Artemis, James Webb is providing us with unique data which is inspiring all sorts of new science.
> And neither are we anywhere near the capability to lunch construction workers to the moon which can build or assemble an equivalent moon base with their human labor. So this answer does not satisfy me one bit.
We have the capability to do that. We don’t have the will to do it, but we have the technology. We don’t even have autonomous robots that are capable of building a moon base on earth.
> Your 4 year old could be equally inspired by the amazing photos James Webb has given us, and unlike Artemis, James Webb is providing us with unique data which is inspiring all sorts of new science.
He’s not though. People gather around as a family and watch manned space missions. It’s exciting in a way that a telescope or a probe isn’t.
Indeed, in 1969, as a small child, I watched the Moon landing together with my parents, in Europe, like also the following missions, in the next years.
They have certainly contributed to my formation as a future engineer.
This argument comes up a lot, about whether a space program is “worth it” in some sense. One problem I’ve found is that these discussions often treat this in the abstract. And then we get into the nature of human endeavor, the economic benefits of that R&D, etc.
Let’s talk about this in terms of practicalities. The NASA budget for 2026, per Wikipedia, is $24.4B. I often find it hard to really reason about the size of federal budgets, and the impact on tax payers, but I have a thought experiment that I think helps put it into perspective. Suppose we decided to pay for the NASA budget with a new tax, just for funding NASA. And we did that in the simplest (and most unfair) possible way: a flat rate. Every working adult in the US has to pay some fixed monthly rate (so excluding children and retirees). Again, per Wikipedia, that’s around 170M people. Take the NASA budget, divide by 170M, and you get … $11.96/month.
Obviously, there’s lots of flaws in this. That’s not we pay for NASA, we have income tax as a percentage with different tax brackets. But it is a helpful way to frame how much a country is spending, normalized by population. And I think it puts a lot of things in perspective. $11.96/month is comparable to a streaming service. And we talk a lot about whether NASAs budget is better used for other purposes, but we don’t do the same thing for a streaming service.
Hell, look at US consumer spending: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm (note that that spending is in dollars per “consumer unit,” which is I think is equivalent to an adult US worker, but there might be some caveats). Based on that, the average US consumer spends around $26.17/month on “tobacco products and smoking supplies”. I just feel it’s a little silly to worry about the NASA budget when the US consumer spends twice that on what is objectively a luxury good. At least NASA won’t give you cancer.
NASA isn't expensive. The science parts and the job creation parts almost certainly return a significant economic multiplier. The spend is very good value for around 0.5% of the federal budget.
That doesn't mean Moon shots are the best possible use of that budget. There are strong arguments for creating more space stations first, and then using them as staging for other projects.
Mars and the Moon are ridiculously hostile environments. Hollywood (and Elon Musk) have sold a fantasy of land-unpack-build. There aren't enough words to describe how utterly unrealistic that is.
Current strategy is muddled, because it contains elements of patriotic Cold War PR fumes, contractor pork, and more than a hint of covert militarisation. Science and engineering are buried somewhere in the middle of that.
They could be front and centre, but they're not.
I would like to watch a new Moon landing, but in my opinion more useful would be to build a space station with artificial gravity.
At some point it may become cheaper to build a spacecraft on the Moon and launch it in interplanetary missions than to do it from Earth. It might also be useful to build some bigger telescopes on the Moon than it is practical to launch from Earth, because due to the pollution of the sky extraterrestrial telescopes become more and more necessary.
Despite the fact that there may be some uses for bases on the Moon, it is likely that those bases should be mostly automated and humans should stay in such bases only for a limited time, much like staying on the ISS. The reason is that it is very likely that the gravity of the Moon is still too low to avoid health deterioration. According to the experiments done on mice in the ISS, two thirds of the terrestrial gravity were required to avoid health issues and one third of the terrestrial gravity provided a partial mitigation.
So even the gravity of Mars is only barely enough to avoid the more severe health problems, but not sufficient.
For long term missions, there is no real alternative to the use of a rotating space station, to ensure adequate gravity.
While with underground bases on Moon or on Mars it would be much easier to provide radiation protection, there remains the problem of insufficient gravity. It may be necessary to also build a rotating underground base, at least for a part where humans spend most of the time.
That’s a very fair point. Frankly I don’t know enough about the Artemis mission and general path, and would like to learn more. I’m certainly open to the argument that NASA’s budget isn’t properly allocated to the right priorities. I was responding just to the classic argument of “why spend money on NASA when we could be spending on …”
> Out of curiosity, why do you see this as a worthwhile endeavor?
to me it's inspiring and gives people something to cheer for. It also keeps a lot of people employed, productive, and at least has the possibility for new innovation. When looking at the mountains and mountains of wasted taxpayer dollars I dislike these the least.
Because humans are destined to colonize space, and this is just an early step in a journey that will take hundreds or thousands of years.
More importantly, challenges like space exploration help drive knowledge and our economy; and are critical for national prestigue.
(And, most people don't focus on this, space exploration is a way for the US to demonstrate its military technology in a non-antagonistic way. There's a lot of overlap in space exploration technology and miliary technology.)
The moonshot is a halo program that, when executed in a non-profit form, ends up benefiting society as a whole due to smart people being cornered and forced to solve hard problems that typically have applicability elsewhere on Earth.
Edit: remember the Kennedy speech — We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.
> when executed in a non-profit form
For-profits are of no benefit to society? Are SpaceX rockets a loser for society?
> Are SpaceX rockets a loser for society?
That remains to be seen. By giving Musk the prominence to set up DOGE and destroy USAID, they've indirectly led to the deaths of almost a million people.
By launching starlink, they're also increasing the amount of aluminum in the upper atmosphere, which may have catastrophic effects on the ozone layer.
Do government non-profit spacecraft not use aluminum?
SpaceX rockets also are re-usable, which is environmentally better. They also cost about 10% of what non-profit rockets cost to launch.
> they've indirectly led to the deaths of almost a million people.
DOGE is a non-profit entity. Besides, why can't other non-profit governments pick up the aid?
Specific innovations tend to be protected via IP when they are developed privately and, as a result, “butterfly effect” developments in a completely different field from cross-pollination are less likely to occur later down the line.
Patents expire. Also, engineers are pretty good about working around patents. Look at all the various AI implementations, for example.
P.S. I oppose patents.
> My personal perspective is that the resources are better used for other purposes, but it's possible that I just haven't encountered some compelling reason yet.
Well, people are often obsessed with rationality, and seek reasons to do something, but there is one reason that works almost for anything: just because. If we want to go forward, we'd better try a lot of things, including those that do not look very promising. We don't know the future, the only way to uncover it is to try. Did you hear about gradient descent? It is an algo for finding local maxima and to do its work it needs to calculate partial derivatives to choose where to go next. In reality doing things and measuring things are sometimes indistinguishable. So society would better try to move in all directions at once.
A lot of people believe that to fly to the Moon is a good idea. Maybe they believe it due to emotional reasons, but it is good enough for me, because it allows to concentrate enough resources to do it.
> the resources are better used for other purposes
It is much better use for $$$ than the war with Iran. I believe that the war have eaten more then Artemis already, and... Voltaire said "perfect is an enemy of good". The Moon maybe not the perfect way to use resources, but it is good at least.
It is great to advance of what is humanly possible. Sending a robot? Great! Good data. If it dies, who cares, it does not live anyway. All abstract.
But sending a human? That feels more real. If we have the power to go alive to the moon, we also have the power to go even further. And we lost it, now we are reclaiming it.
And it doesn't matter to me what I think of the US government - this is progress for all of humanity. Also the comment section on the youtube stream is interesting - lot's of different flags are posted, sending good wishes from all around the world, low effort comments otherwise of course, but largely positive. (Very rare I think)
So, more rockets into space please and less on earth.
It's a better thing to strive for than war.
Go take a look at how much this costs compared to the rest of the federal budget. I think you'll be surprised by how little money NASA gets.
Now, the military...
NASA is something like the third biggest space program in the US
I want humanity to continue to be explorers. The Moon is a good next thing, then asteroid mining, humans on Mars and Venus, and eventually colonizing the Milky Way.
Successful space travel is one of the few big news events where nobody has to be unhappy.
Most of the other big news events are ones where people get severely hurt, and political ones where one partly loses.
With this, we can look up at the moon, and say "Humanity did that."
Simply because Earth is too small a place for humanity to limit itself to.
You're right. The future of humanity is not in space, but in venture-backed smartphone apps.
It encourages kids to study science.
It unites Americans towards a cause.
The engineering advancements have commercial applications.
And at the most basic level, it's a jobs program. Look at how many Americans are working because of this.
Think of all that cheese.
Because inevitably the Earth will have yet another ELE. And it's a better use of tax dollars than warmongering, YMMV.
How many days of a war with Iran could be funded with the Artemis budget?
Because it is good for humans to have a thing to do. Not sure why this is not considered a valid reason. A lot of these 'it would be better to do X' assumes everyone has the same psychological profile as you. They don't. Many people are driven to explore and would go mad otherwise.
I do much better with things to look forward to, or when I have a feeling that progress can be made. An interesting movie coming out, new music coming out. Or even better reminding me what humans are capable of above just grinding to get by or grinding to exploit others. Haven't been many moments of feeling progress lately.
It's quite telling that all the replies you're getting are about "hope" and "jobs" with no actual scientific reason. I guess we're taxing people for vanity space missions and jobs programs. Makes sense.
Hopefully, in a few years we will figure out that hydrogen rockets can not reliably launch on time and we'll switch to less leaky fuels. Then maybe we won't need to pull 40 year old engines out of museums to dump in the ocean.
I'm all for human spaceflight, but the Senate Launch System seems the best argument for shutting down human spaceflight programs.
Oh, don't worry, we did figure that out. What we haven't figured out yet is how to stop Congress from involving themselves in engineering decisions.
Well, we should have figured that out with the STS. That's what the STS was for - figuring out what technologies made for inexpensive, rapid spaceflight and which technologies don't.
Then the senate mandates the new rocket to use specifically the most expensive, problematic, least reliable technology. Completely designed to fail.
Have such hopes for the Starship.
NASA is risking the Astronauts lives, and could have done the mission uncrewed to test what is being tested for the first time with humans:
Artemis II is not safe to fly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582043
But they need to convince the people that it's worth the money, and the people are more excited when humans risk their lives, even if it is for nothing.
You're supposed to have peanuts, not popcorn, tonight:
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/what-are-jpls-lucky-peanut...
Direct livestream link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf_UjBMIzNo
I tuned in for 60 seconds, the presenter got everything wrong, and I just tuned out until liftoff.
She called the top of the ET (well, it's no longer an ET, but it's the stage that was the STS ET) the "upper stage". She said that the propellents are stored at thousands of degrees below zero. And so on. This is a NASA presenter?
You are not the target audience for this sort of presentation. Media directed at the laity is more about being directionally than quantifiably correct, and is full of metaphor and embellishment to capture the imagination rather than communicate something with precision.
People who want the actual details and numbers will read.
I firmly believe you can have both exciting, inspiring, and factually correct communication if you make that a priority.
The experience of hearing factual things presented with passion and obvious expertise is in itself inspiring. Why settle for less?
Bring back John Insprucker.
I for one am begging God that this is merely April fools all the way down.
If it would be, then a fake explosion after start as climax before revealing it, would be quite a joke. Probably will yield mixed reception, though.
> She called the top of the ET (well, it's no longer an ET, but it's the stage that was the STS ET) the "upper stage". She said that the propellents are stored at thousands of degrees below zero. And so on. This is a NASA presenter?
To be fair to her, she seemed to explicitly refer to what sits on top of the core stage, it just wasn't in the diagram she was gesturing to the top of at the time.
To be fair to you, I think the cryogenic comment was worse and she actually said "thousands of degrees below Fahrenheit".
The problem is they're trying to run hours of programming leading up to this launch for some reason, but aren't willing to force the experts to come in to do the commentary. They should have given her a script.
Jesus! Why is there a presenter? Why isn't it just a livestream of the mission control radio chatter? That sort of shit belongs on some 24/7 news broadcast.
i'm sure the whole talk track was piped through an AI for clarity and excitement and the presenters were told to read the script.
Wish them all the best and safe travels. I’ll be tuning in as you never know when the next crewed mission will be, probably not another 50 years if advancements in space travel happen.
There is also a stream on ESA Web TV https://watch.esa.int/
There are tons of comments here that say, "this could have been a robot." And no, it really couldn't have.
The best of humanity is remarkably capable as compared to the best physical machines / robots. There's a great paper called the "dispelling the myth of robotic efficiency." https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article-abstract/53/2/2.22... // https://lasp.colorado.edu/mop/files/2019/08/RobotMyth.pdf
Yes, a robot car that drives on its own will be a better driver than most humans who text and drive, or have 400ms reaction times.But making a machine that can beat a 110ms reaction time human with 2SD+ IQ – and the ability to override the ground controllers with human curiosity – for exploration is much harder. Healthy, smart humans have high dexterity, are extremely capable of switching roles fast, are surprisingly efficient, and force us to return back home.
So in terms of total science return, one Apollo mission did more for lunar science and discovery than 53 years of robots on the surface and in orbit.
From here on the space coast of Florida: GODSPEED THE CREW OF ARTEMIS II
I'm watching it rapt, but also wondering which KIND of leaky will result in a scrub..
Can't understand why there doesn't seem to be much wider excitement at all, around "our Apollo 8", that I've been waiting decades for (late 40s here).
Apparently here in the UK our schools are hardly even hyping it.
Is there any website that gives me updates mirroring the livestream but in plain text? I won't be able to tune in for the launch but this is exciting and I'd like to follow the developments! I'm sure the answer is "Twitter" but I don't understand how that platform works.
https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2026/04/01/live-artemis-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601017
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c4g4ygw0r02t
Found a stream on YouTube earlier (which presumably wasn't an official one because it disappeared 15 minutes later after a claim by "FUBO TV") and it had a poll attached: "Will the Artemis astronauts land on the moon?"
40% of people had voted yes. Which is somewhat worrying given the mission plan and hardware.
If these astronauts land on the moon, something has gone seriously, seriously wrong.
Maybe they'll just stop for some pictures on the way back. I mean, it's a shame to go all that way and not at least get a cool selfie!
Even I'm a big space fan, at moment I just can enjoy anything that comes from USA. I just can't applause to a super bully.
That's your own thing. Think about it to applause the dedicated work of people who have spent their life building these missions and have to do this work through multiple different administrations.
What a sad, disappointing instinct. It completely divorced from reality to assume that "enjoy[ing] anything that comes from [the] USA" implies any sort of political allegiance to whoever happens to sit in the Oval office at that particular point in time.
There's no way you're "a big space fan" if the first thing you think of when you see a rocket launch that was announced 9 years is Donald Trump.
Gonna watch with my son if it doesn’t get postponed.
I'm just SO HAPPY we can talk about something that doesn't involve the Iran war, ICE etc. This is a really historic moment, I hope that the current and future administrations continue investing in space exploration. I've waited my whole life for this as the entire "action" happened before I was born. Hubble/James Webb/ISS are cool but Artemis is something else!
... federalized voting, birthright citizenship... it is amazing how space exploration can be a unifying moment of positivity.
>we can talk about something that doesn't involve the Iran war, ICE etc.
And yet, you did bring them up.
Why do this? Why look to space and understand Earth's smallness? So we can understand reality as Carl Sagan explains in his pale blue dot speech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g
Oh hell... Thanks for this reminder, I have almost forgot about it with all the problems I'm trying to solve now.
Safe trip to the crew. I do hope that they have ironed out all the issues.
4.5hrs to go
too windy outside for this to happen imo
You better run over there and let them know.
What is your opinion based on?
licked my finger and stuck it in the air
walking outside, and the surf report... they cancel all the time for less wind shear
They should switch out to a quad fin fish, it'll handle the chop much better.
Really hoping those of us who think NASA has jumped the shark won't have to keep ourselves from saying "I told you so" next week out of respect for the dead.
This is four people putting their lives at risk for poor engineering and bad project management.
The "right stuff" applies to the engineers too, but they've all unfortunately left Boeing and NASA.
This opinion may be unpopular here but it's hard to get excited about a colossal waste of taxpayer money after all the damage DOGE did. I don't understand how these NASA missions with questionable scientific value and obscene budgets get off the ground.
I mean I do understand, NASA funding is important to oligarchs. But still.
Good idea, we should divert taxpayer money to offshore wind and AI-powered food delivery startups instead.
I personally find the grind easier when there also big things happening. You can't just cook the same, most basic, cheapest meal every day for your family and expect them to be happy. Who wants to join a club that doesn't do anything interesting? Same with society. It sometimes needs to dream, to aspire and inspire. To lift peoples head from the toil and look up.
Artemis was already set in stone well before DOGE came about and IMO if the federal government is going to set mountains of cash on fire I'd rather it be to NASA than half the crap the government wastes every year.
My point is that DOGE killed a bunch of government programs that help people while saving no money, yet this giant waste of money survived. Cancelling Artemis II alone in favor of III would save a billion dollars by itself.
> government programs that help people
Like spending $1.5 million on DEI programs in Serbia? That actually happened.
It was never intended to save money. It was about a crusade against remote work, eliminating civil servants who might be loyal to the Constitution rather than the president, and planting a seed of government dysfunction for later years.
predicting malfunctioning systems (just a guess)
polymarket or gtfo :)
My opinion is 60/40 in favor of launch today. It's not unusual at all for something to come up in the final 10-30 minutes.
Kalshi is more optimistic. https://kalshi.com/markets/kxartemisii/artemis-ii-launch-dat...
I find it interesting the MSM is too busy sperging out about Trump to not treat this as page-three news and place it below the cut.
It's also the first woman and black guy to go to the moon, for those keeping score at home.
Trump scored an own goal. Military conflict tends to hijack the front page.