18 ms·

It's been 54 years since humans last visited the Moon. Hopefully, in a few years we will get boots back on the surface.

by LorenDB 7mo ago

CoastalCoder 7mo ago
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.
- xattt 7mo ago
  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.
  - WalterBright 7mo ago
    > when executed in a non-profit form For-profits are of no benefit to society? Are SpaceX rockets a loser for society?
    - anonymous_user9 7mo ago
      > 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.
      - WalterBright 7mo ago
        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?
        _DeadFred_ 7mo ago
        To your last point, because DOGE shut down programs in a such a way as to make that impossible, to the point they chose to let food rot, let medicines go bad, and stranded Americans overseas working on the projects without a way home.
        WalterBright 7mo ago
        It's still a non-profit.
        tombert 7mo ago
        That's debatable. Musk bought his way into politics and shut down USAID very specifically because USAID was investigating him [1]. Oh, and he used his position in DOGE to assist in making sure that government contracts went to his companies, or licensing out his SpaceX workers when his idiocy led to a shortage of air traffic controllers [2], which was very obviously a publicity stunt if nothing else. So it's a product that was bought and used to enrich a single person. Sure seems like a for-profit to me, at least in this administration. [1] https://www.newsweek.com/usaid-elon-musk-starlink-probe-ukraine-2027054 https://www.newsweek.com/usaid-elon-musk-starlink-probe-ukra... [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/elon-musk-spacex-air-traffic-control-b2700192.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
        WalterBright 7mo ago
        Still non-profit
    - xattt 7mo ago
      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.
      - WalterBright 7mo ago
        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.
    - LightBug1 7mo ago
      Maybe ... depends on the net net ... some people have internet access and can throw some satellites into space ... on the other hand, wealth and influence accrues to a specific kind of destabilising wanker
- chasd00 7mo ago
  > 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.
- nancyminusone 7mo ago
  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.
  - runarberg 7mo ago
    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.
    - bee_rider 7mo ago
      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.
      - runarberg 7mo ago
        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).
        sarchertech 7mo ago
- hatmanstack 7mo ago
  Think of all that cheese.
  - NetMageSCW 7mo ago
    But we already learned there is no cheese there, that’s why we never went back.
- floxy 7mo ago
  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.
- _moof 7mo ago
  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...
  - Rebelgecko 7mo ago
    NASA is something like the third biggest space program in the US
    - _moof 6mo ago
      I don't know what conclusion you expect me to draw from this information.
- LogicFailsMe 7mo ago
  Because inevitably the Earth will have yet another ELE. And it's a better use of tax dollars than warmongering, YMMV.
- anon291 7mo ago
  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.
- _DeadFred_ 7mo ago
  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.
- hypeatei 7mo ago
  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.
  - foltik 7mo ago
    [dead]
- openasocket 7mo ago
  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 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.
  - TheOtherHobbes 7mo ago
    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.
- ordu 7mo ago
  > 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.
- dylan604 7mo ago
  How many days of a war with Iran could be funded with the Artemis budget?
- jedberg 7mo ago
  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.
- trothamel 7mo ago
  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."
- postalrat 7mo ago
  Simply because Earth is too small a place for humanity to limit itself to.
- lukan 7mo ago
  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.
- longislandguido 7mo ago
  You're right. The future of humanity is not in space, but in venture-backed smartphone apps.
- gwbas1c 7mo ago
  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.)
- unselect5917 7mo ago
  It's a better thing to strive for than war.
- smsm42 7mo ago
  Because one day, far far in the future, the humanity would reach out to the stars, and these are the first tiny steps to enable this. There's always the question of directing the resources, and this program is not that expensive, really - around $100bn. Given that fraud at COVID time alone is estimated to have cost the Treasury twice as much, seems like a worthy investment into the future.
- buzzerbetrayed 7mo ago
  Man I’m tired of people only caring about money when it comes to space. Meanwhile they lose their shit when someone suggests that tax payers shouldn’t pay for people’s Coca-Cola.
- sensanaty 7mo ago
  I always found this framing interesting. Sure, if we lived in a purely utilitarian world, there's some merit to the argument that space exploration is a waste of resources that could be more efficiently used elsewhere. We don't live in a utilitarian world though, and instead we have the same (and in reality much, much larger) amounts of money and resources that get spent on this moon mission being spent instead on bombing the Middle East with nothing to show for it other than an impending global economic crisis. Could the money spent on Artemis be spent somewhere better? Probably, but how about we start with not burning through 38 billion (and rising!) on a farcical boondoggle of a military operation whose only effects so far are increases in the cost of literally everything? The first WEEK of the war cost 11 billion[1], but when it comes to NASA we're suddenly penny-pinching? And that's talking pure monetary expenditure, without even going into the human lives lost, the lessening of sanctions on Russia (which will in turn cause even more suffering in Ukraine), or the halting of trade through the Suez, etc. etc. etc. From where I'm standing, even if Artemis turns out to be a complete and utter disaster with not a single benefit of any kind coming out of it, the worst possible case scenario is a few astronauts die and we wasted a few billion (and I guess NASA gets shut down). That's of course us working under the assumption that there won't be a single novel scientific discovery of any kind, or that we will learn absolutely nothing from these missions. The current unjustified war the US is waging on the other hand has already killed thousands of people, and will continue harming every single person on this earth through the economic fallout alone. The US is quite literally setting money on fire with every single bomb they drop over Iran. And the true worst case scenario that I can easily imagine happening is nukes getting dropped and all the consequences that follow from that. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/world/middleeast/iran-war-costs-pentagon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/world/middleeast/iran-war...
dotancohen 7mo ago
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.
- _moof 7mo ago
  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.
  - dotancohen 7mo ago
    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.
risc_taker 7mo ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582043
- palata 7mo ago
  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.
  - randomNumber7 7mo ago
    Why do they need to convince low IQ people?

It's been 54 years since humans last visited the Moon. Hopefully, in a few years we will get boots back on the surface.

by LorenDB 7mo ago

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.

xattt 7mo ago
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.
- WalterBright 7mo ago
  > when executed in a non-profit form For-profits are of no benefit to society? Are SpaceX rockets a loser for society?
  - anonymous_user9 7mo ago
    > 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.
    - WalterBright 7mo ago
      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?
      - _DeadFred_ 7mo ago
        To your last point, because DOGE shut down programs in a such a way as to make that impossible, to the point they chose to let food rot, let medicines go bad, and stranded Americans overseas working on the projects without a way home.
        WalterBright 7mo ago
        It's still a non-profit.
        tombert 7mo ago
        That's debatable. Musk bought his way into politics and shut down USAID very specifically because USAID was investigating him [1]. Oh, and he used his position in DOGE to assist in making sure that government contracts went to his companies, or licensing out his SpaceX workers when his idiocy led to a shortage of air traffic controllers [2], which was very obviously a publicity stunt if nothing else. So it's a product that was bought and used to enrich a single person. Sure seems like a for-profit to me, at least in this administration. [1] https://www.newsweek.com/usaid-elon-musk-starlink-probe-ukraine-2027054 https://www.newsweek.com/usaid-elon-musk-starlink-probe-ukra... [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/elon-musk-spacex-air-traffic-control-b2700192.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
        WalterBright 7mo ago
        Still non-profit
  - xattt 7mo ago
    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.
    - WalterBright 7mo ago
      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.
  - LightBug1 7mo ago
    Maybe ... depends on the net net ... some people have internet access and can throw some satellites into space ... on the other hand, wealth and influence accrues to a specific kind of destabilising wanker
chasd00 7mo ago
> 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.
nancyminusone 7mo ago
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.
- runarberg 7mo ago
  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.
  - bee_rider 7mo ago
    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.
    - runarberg 7mo ago
      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).
      - sarchertech 7mo ago
hatmanstack 7mo ago
Think of all that cheese.
- NetMageSCW 7mo ago
  But we already learned there is no cheese there, that’s why we never went back.
floxy 7mo ago
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.
_moof 7mo ago
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...
- Rebelgecko 7mo ago
  NASA is something like the third biggest space program in the US
  - _moof 6mo ago
    I don't know what conclusion you expect me to draw from this information.
LogicFailsMe 7mo ago
Because inevitably the Earth will have yet another ELE. And it's a better use of tax dollars than warmongering, YMMV.
anon291 7mo ago
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.
_DeadFred_ 7mo ago
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.
hypeatei 7mo ago
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.
- foltik 7mo ago
  [dead]
openasocket 7mo ago
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 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.
- TheOtherHobbes 7mo ago
  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.
ordu 7mo ago
> 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.
dylan604 7mo ago
How many days of a war with Iran could be funded with the Artemis budget?
jedberg 7mo ago
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.
trothamel 7mo ago
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."
postalrat 7mo ago
Simply because Earth is too small a place for humanity to limit itself to.
lukan 7mo ago
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.
longislandguido 7mo ago
You're right. The future of humanity is not in space, but in venture-backed smartphone apps.
gwbas1c 7mo ago
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.)
unselect5917 7mo ago
It's a better thing to strive for than war.
smsm42 7mo ago
Because one day, far far in the future, the humanity would reach out to the stars, and these are the first tiny steps to enable this. There's always the question of directing the resources, and this program is not that expensive, really - around $100bn. Given that fraud at COVID time alone is estimated to have cost the Treasury twice as much, seems like a worthy investment into the future.
buzzerbetrayed 7mo ago
Man I’m tired of people only caring about money when it comes to space. Meanwhile they lose their shit when someone suggests that tax payers shouldn’t pay for people’s Coca-Cola.
sensanaty 7mo ago
I always found this framing interesting. Sure, if we lived in a purely utilitarian world, there's some merit to the argument that space exploration is a waste of resources that could be more efficiently used elsewhere. We don't live in a utilitarian world though, and instead we have the same (and in reality much, much larger) amounts of money and resources that get spent on this moon mission being spent instead on bombing the Middle East with nothing to show for it other than an impending global economic crisis. Could the money spent on Artemis be spent somewhere better? Probably, but how about we start with not burning through 38 billion (and rising!) on a farcical boondoggle of a military operation whose only effects so far are increases in the cost of literally everything? The first WEEK of the war cost 11 billion[1], but when it comes to NASA we're suddenly penny-pinching? And that's talking pure monetary expenditure, without even going into the human lives lost, the lessening of sanctions on Russia (which will in turn cause even more suffering in Ukraine), or the halting of trade through the Suez, etc. etc. etc. From where I'm standing, even if Artemis turns out to be a complete and utter disaster with not a single benefit of any kind coming out of it, the worst possible case scenario is a few astronauts die and we wasted a few billion (and I guess NASA gets shut down). That's of course us working under the assumption that there won't be a single novel scientific discovery of any kind, or that we will learn absolutely nothing from these missions. The current unjustified war the US is waging on the other hand has already killed thousands of people, and will continue harming every single person on this earth through the economic fallout alone. The US is quite literally setting money on fire with every single bomb they drop over Iran. And the true worst case scenario that I can easily imagine happening is nukes getting dropped and all the consequences that follow from that. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/world/middleeast/iran-war-costs-pentagon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/world/middleeast/iran-war...

dotancohen 7mo ago

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.

_moof 7mo ago
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.
- dotancohen 7mo ago
  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.

risc_taker 7mo ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582043

palata 7mo ago
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.
- randomNumber7 7mo ago
  Why do they need to convince low IQ people?