I grew up admiring the Apollo mission and the likes.
Nowadays, I recognise that it is heavy engineering, but I am not so impressed by the fact that we are throwing so much resources at something that we already know we can do. In fact, we have had humans surviving in space for decades now. It's costing a lot, it's not bringing much.
But more than that: we have much more important problems to solve, starting with our survival. Sure, sending robots to Mars is interesting, for science. Sending people to Mars is useless. Hoping to become an "interplanetary species" is preposterous. Thinking that Mars is "just a next step, but we'll go further" is absolutely insane.
Life is literally, measurably dying on Earth (the current mass extinction we are living in is happening orders of magnitude faster than the one that killed the dinosaurs). We have a huge energy problem, and more and more global instability.
Sure, watching four humans happily travelling to the Moon in a spaceship that literally does not need them is fun, like watching the Superbowl. And like for the Superbowl, there are big fans for whom it is the most important event of the year. However, most people don't care. We're not in 1969 anymore, now it's just a matter of wasting enough money for some people to have the time of their life.
> we are throwing so much resources at something that we already know we can do.
No, "we" knew how to do it with 10x more money and people on the board, in a very unsafely manner. It was a few times muscle flex and thats why it stopped.
Making entire thing routine, cheap and safe is something else, and "we" don't know yet how to do that, or we would have at least few scientists constantly on the Moon.
It's a difference between running a marathon and dropping dead, and doing it all the time.
> we have ...[other]... problems
This kind of thinking is nonsensical. With so many people around, there can be arbitrary group of people working on any kind of problem, without them needing to point to other groups as doing imaginary problems. You talk like unless everybody works on solving specific problem, its not going to get solved. Life simply doesn't work that way, mythical man month explained it well why for one, and then, you can't know what unexplored spaces bring (maybe game changing discoveries).
I’m not sure I’m following. Do most people not care because of the environment? Because that’s certainly not the case. Most people don’t care about the environment either.
Plus, do you not have any other interests besides the state of the world? No interest in entertainment or sports or tech news at all? I doubt that if you’re on HN.
My bet is that you wouldn’t care even if the world was objectively better than ever. You’re just coming up with excuses for why you don’t care. It’s fine if you don’t care, but it’s certainly not because of the state of the world. Otherwise you wouldn’t have any interests at all, including HackerNews.
> it's just a matter of wasting enough money for some people to have the time of their life.
That's such a cynical viewpoint. We are not doing this so that astronauts can have fun.
Yes, we have been screwing up our planet. On that note alone, we should develop capabilities to access resources beyond our planet. We could have made that same argument before we had the capability of launching satellites ("why are we wasting resources sending something to space that can only beep while people are dying of hunger?"). Nowadays, they are crucial if we want to have a chance at saving what remains of our planet.
Moon missions may not give an immediate benefit, but we have always benefitted from scientific and technological advancements from space missions. I doubt it's going to be different this time.
I'd certainly prefer countless more moon missions than a new aircraft carrier.
> the current mass extinction we are living in is happening orders of magnitude faster than the one that killed the dinosaurs
Fascinating. My naive perception of the extinction event was that it was relatively sudden, on a personal rather than geological timescale - decades or maybe generations. But it looks like it might be "_rapid extinction, perhaps over a period of less than 10,000 years_" [0]. Goes to show how unintuitive geological and evolutionary timelines are!
It kinda depends on what you mean by “much”, but we’ve certainly had advances from the ISS in the last decade.
Several experiments with microgravity manufacturing such as ZBLAN fiber optics, 3D bioprinting, and other medical technologies. Microgravity manufacturing can offer some significant quality improvements and prevent settling.
There are other improvements as well. Foundational research is very important and space has a solid track record of delivering science that we turn into very useful technology on earth.
Something that we know we could do. I think of it as the third act of a movie when the main character is pulling himself out of the gutter.
That being said, I agree with you. America has bigger, nearer problems to solve with that sort of money. It reminds me of Gil Scott-Heron's poem about how it feels to struggle while "whitey's on the moon". It was brilliantly used in First Man.
I question the choice of the phrase "to the Moon". I get it, it's technically true, but ~100% of normal people hear that and assume it means boots on the ground. Every single time it gets mentioned, it's immediately followed by a clarification that disappoints the audience. This isn't the sort of marketing choice that a self-confident program makes.
So we're re-creating the Apollo 8 Mission 60 years later. 60 years after swinging around the moon, we are going to attempt the feat again. I'm having a hard time getting excited... Especially when some say it may not survive reentry because of politics (https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....)
The real answer is that one of a kind single-launch Moon mission is not all that interesting. If you read anyone who participated in the Apollo program (engineers or mission control people like Gene Kranz), everyone knew that the only thing that kept the program afloat was novelty. It's not there anymore. I would say JPL is way too underrated compared to the moon flights, as it's the main reason we know so much about the Solar System.
Also, not a lot of tech from Apollo was reused after its termination, and this program is very similar. Original Soviet plan (orbital assembly and Venus/Mars flyby) and SpaceX's one much later were/are a lot more pragmatic, as they led to a lot more practical tech and infra even if not fully realized (orbital stations and heavy reusable launchers).
The Apollo program was the triple-back-handspring exclamation mark on a century of American technological transformations, during which Americans had electrified their cities, filled their streets with cars and their skies with airplanes, split atoms, and invented digital computers.
And look at America now. Erratic, belligerent, applying tariffs on a whim, threatening to annex Canada and Greenland, threatening to leave NATO, alienating itself from allies.
Don't underestimate the reputational damage America has done and is still doing to itself.
Used to love space stuff, although some of it was horrible (old enough to remember watching the challenger blow up on TV as a pre-teen). Don't really understand this moon effort. Space is uniquely hostile to humans, our tech just isn't ready IMO and probably won't be for 100 years. Our personas certainly aren't ready - I can tolerate far more isolation than most people, I often go 1-2 weeks without any real human contact at all, routinely go days without speaking to anyone. And yet the idea of living on a moon or mars colony gives me serious pause for the isolation it would involve. Space station has a different problem in that i'd be wanting to push people out of the airlock after a few weeks, or eject myself that way.
Anyway this moon trip seems totally pointless. I can get why other countries want to land there but for the US, moon expeditions have zero value, especially when we are burning so much money on stupid wars and and the same time cutting healthcare and food support for citizens.
We do. But the relative purchasing power and command over purchasing essentials for a middle class life from 1969 to now has shifted so dramatically people are not comfortable enough to care.
This whole thing is nerd fantasy come to life but its not particularly useful and right now the world for most people is about trying to figure out how to deal with the cost of everything thanks to a poorly planned war against Iran.
The language is weird about it. Because it’s not a landing. Most people don’t think of Apollo 8 as “going to the moon” — for the public, that’s Apollo 11.
What exactly are we supposed to get excited about?
- The headline mission “Going to the moon” was done 60 years ago
- Any scientific research could be done better and cheaper with robots. No humans required.
- If it’s supposed to be a step forward in space travel, well, it’s just a step forward. Let’s get real space travel going and people might be excited for that.
- If it’s the technological progress then we are seeing a lot of technological progress all the time. It’s questionable that any of it is making our lives better.
"Back to the moon" sounds deceptive since we're not actually going to the moon, we're just sending a rocket around it. An actual moon landing will get a lot more attention. What's far more impressive about this launch to me is that it will be the farthest out into space people have been. I think the NASA PR team would have done better making that the headline rather than all this "to the moon!" talk
Everything that has made my country great has been or is being destroyed. The life I have tirelessly worked for is a shadow of the life my parents and grandparents had. I realize we're going to (orbit) the moon, and I think it's great, but I'm tired. Why would I even talk about this thing?
Because we are not going back to the moon. A flyby is going to the moon in the same way that driving by the Anaheim exit on I-5 is going to Disneyland.
It hasn't been very well marketed. NASA lost a lot of their budget and they're not spending so much on outreach. I didn't know it was happening at all until launch day.
We're not going to the moon. We're going around the moon. You wouldn't say you went to Chicago if you drove in a circle around it without entering the city.
To everyone saying "we've done this before" or "we're not even landing" - we have sent humans to the Moon a total of 9 times. This is the 10th. Nobody has been out there in 50+ years. We've only landed on the Moon 6 times, and this mission is a stepping stone to future manned landings.
Do people really feel like "yeah, we went 9 times, that's enough, no need to ever send anyone again"?
$93 billion over 13 years doesn't feel like a great deal for a program that has started to align around a single person's ego, when most of the US is struggling to make ends meet.
I think Artemis will be cancelled by the end of the year, unfortunately. If the heat shield doesn't hold up as some observers fear/have warned, perhaps by the end of April.
I think the intent is there. I do not have faith that people, politics or events will cooperate with us. I also think this is NASA's last hurrah before space flight is subsumed by commercial interests, which will be the end of the dream of space science for the common good of mankind.
There's alot off reasons to not be interested other people are listing them. Space exploration in general has been taken over by billionaires as their hobby becasue they have to much money. I find it hard to care about someone else's expensive toys.
Trump attempted to significantly decrease NASAs budgets and cancel missions so this is happening despite him, and I cant feel joy for this when we are putting people in cages, manipulating stock markets, entering pointless wars, and raising prices of everything while Billionares massively increase their wealth through technically-legal manipulations of the system. This feels like a sad memory of what used to be more than anything else.
Maybe if we Americans had proper healthcare, that wasn't getting gutted to fund a pointless war that is both killing people and damaging our own economy, it would be easier to get excited about going back to the moon.
It's hard to get excited about an organization spending ?? on a pointless mission that's happening because of organizational inertia when kids don't have functional textbooks at school.
China built out their high speed rail for $300B over about the same period. Artemis is 1/3rd the cost of that. Theres lots of impressive engineering to do thats also cool and useful to ordinary people. Going to the moon is just vanity.
The American passive participation in what is widely considered as a genocide, and an active invasion of another country without a reason are all more spectacular. Overall the world is deeply tired of their shit.
The basic truth is, the vast majority of people couldn’t give less of a fuck about space and space exploration.
It’s just too abstract, too complicated, and too far away for them to feel connected to it. It’s not attached to national pride (anymore), it’s not connected to tragedy (typically), it’s not connected to celebrities they feel like they know (Katy Perry isn’t involved with this launch)… there’s just nothing for the average person to connect with.
Every other explanation is just an excuse from people who feel like they should care, but never have.
2) the article was an awful piece of hype, that felt like it was sponsored by the Whitehouse.
3) it's hard to see beyond the US imperialism that hangs heavy over space missions. Trump said "the US is winning in space" and he summed up the intent here
4) I might be a nerd but I really don't get the excitement from my fellow nerds. I wonder if they are simply taken in by the hype machine
151 comments
Nowadays, I recognise that it is heavy engineering, but I am not so impressed by the fact that we are throwing so much resources at something that we already know we can do. In fact, we have had humans surviving in space for decades now. It's costing a lot, it's not bringing much.
But more than that: we have much more important problems to solve, starting with our survival. Sure, sending robots to Mars is interesting, for science. Sending people to Mars is useless. Hoping to become an "interplanetary species" is preposterous. Thinking that Mars is "just a next step, but we'll go further" is absolutely insane.
Life is literally, measurably dying on Earth (the current mass extinction we are living in is happening orders of magnitude faster than the one that killed the dinosaurs). We have a huge energy problem, and more and more global instability.
Sure, watching four humans happily travelling to the Moon in a spaceship that literally does not need them is fun, like watching the Superbowl. And like for the Superbowl, there are big fans for whom it is the most important event of the year. However, most people don't care. We're not in 1969 anymore, now it's just a matter of wasting enough money for some people to have the time of their life.
> we are throwing so much resources at something that we already know we can do.
No, "we" knew how to do it with 10x more money and people on the board, in a very unsafely manner. It was a few times muscle flex and thats why it stopped.
Making entire thing routine, cheap and safe is something else, and "we" don't know yet how to do that, or we would have at least few scientists constantly on the Moon.
It's a difference between running a marathon and dropping dead, and doing it all the time.
> we have ...[other]... problems
This kind of thinking is nonsensical. With so many people around, there can be arbitrary group of people working on any kind of problem, without them needing to point to other groups as doing imaginary problems. You talk like unless everybody works on solving specific problem, its not going to get solved. Life simply doesn't work that way, mythical man month explained it well why for one, and then, you can't know what unexplored spaces bring (maybe game changing discoveries).
Plus, do you not have any other interests besides the state of the world? No interest in entertainment or sports or tech news at all? I doubt that if you’re on HN.
My bet is that you wouldn’t care even if the world was objectively better than ever. You’re just coming up with excuses for why you don’t care. It’s fine if you don’t care, but it’s certainly not because of the state of the world. Otherwise you wouldn’t have any interests at all, including HackerNews.
> it's just a matter of wasting enough money for some people to have the time of their life.
That's such a cynical viewpoint. We are not doing this so that astronauts can have fun.
Yes, we have been screwing up our planet. On that note alone, we should develop capabilities to access resources beyond our planet. We could have made that same argument before we had the capability of launching satellites ("why are we wasting resources sending something to space that can only beep while people are dying of hunger?"). Nowadays, they are crucial if we want to have a chance at saving what remains of our planet.
Moon missions may not give an immediate benefit, but we have always benefitted from scientific and technological advancements from space missions. I doubt it's going to be different this time.
I'd certainly prefer countless more moon missions than a new aircraft carrier.
> the current mass extinction we are living in is happening orders of magnitude faster than the one that killed the dinosaurs
Fascinating. My naive perception of the extinction event was that it was relatively sudden, on a personal rather than geological timescale - decades or maybe generations. But it looks like it might be "_rapid extinction, perhaps over a period of less than 10,000 years_" [0]. Goes to show how unintuitive geological and evolutionary timelines are!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e...
> It's costing a lot, it's not bringing much.
It kinda depends on what you mean by “much”, but we’ve certainly had advances from the ISS in the last decade.
Several experiments with microgravity manufacturing such as ZBLAN fiber optics, 3D bioprinting, and other medical technologies. Microgravity manufacturing can offer some significant quality improvements and prevent settling.
There are other improvements as well. Foundational research is very important and space has a solid track record of delivering science that we turn into very useful technology on earth.
Sources:
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/iss-research/out-of-th...
https://issnationallab.org/press-releases/2024-iss-national-...
> at something that we already know we can do
Something that we know we could do. I think of it as the third act of a movie when the main character is pulling himself out of the gutter.
That being said, I agree with you. America has bigger, nearer problems to solve with that sort of money. It reminds me of Gil Scott-Heron's poem about how it feels to struggle while "whitey's on the moon". It was brilliantly used in First Man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVQuqQndsFA
Also, not a lot of tech from Apollo was reused after its termination, and this program is very similar. Original Soviet plan (orbital assembly and Venus/Mars flyby) and SpaceX's one much later were/are a lot more pragmatic, as they led to a lot more practical tech and infra even if not fully realized (orbital stations and heavy reusable launchers).
>
The Apollo program was the triple-back-handspring exclamation mark on a century of American technological transformations, during which Americans had electrified their cities, filled their streets with cars and their skies with airplanes, split atoms, and invented digital computers.And look at America now. Erratic, belligerent, applying tariffs on a whim, threatening to annex Canada and Greenland, threatening to leave NATO, alienating itself from allies.
Don't underestimate the reputational damage America has done and is still doing to itself.
Anyway this moon trip seems totally pointless. I can get why other countries want to land there but for the US, moon expeditions have zero value, especially when we are burning so much money on stupid wars and and the same time cutting healthcare and food support for citizens.
This whole thing is nerd fantasy come to life but its not particularly useful and right now the world for most people is about trying to figure out how to deal with the cost of everything thanks to a poorly planned war against Iran.
- The headline mission “Going to the moon” was done 60 years ago - Any scientific research could be done better and cheaper with robots. No humans required. - If it’s supposed to be a step forward in space travel, well, it’s just a step forward. Let’s get real space travel going and people might be excited for that. - If it’s the technological progress then we are seeing a lot of technological progress all the time. It’s questionable that any of it is making our lives better.
So, what are people supposed to be excited about?
Do people really feel like "yeah, we went 9 times, that's enough, no need to ever send anyone again"?
I think Artemis will be cancelled by the end of the year, unfortunately. If the heat shield doesn't hold up as some observers fear/have warned, perhaps by the end of April.
I hope I'm wrong.
1) it feels like a movie series, sensational, scientific and humane
2) comparing it with the previous attempt 5 decades ago leads to interesting conclusions about our technological progress and limits
3) it's almost useless and I didn't expect NASA and the Congress to pour billions for a 10-day ride
Wish them all good and safe return to home.
This is not exciting, it‘s embarassing.
Besides that it‘s a massive waste of money and brings no value to humanity, the USA or science. Why is this done again?
I feel like anyone excited about this is weird.
Well maybe because the context here is not great and we don't have much time and energy to focus on these useless endeavors
It’s just too abstract, too complicated, and too far away for them to feel connected to it. It’s not attached to national pride (anymore), it’s not connected to tragedy (typically), it’s not connected to celebrities they feel like they know (Katy Perry isn’t involved with this launch)… there’s just nothing for the average person to connect with.
Every other explanation is just an excuse from people who feel like they should care, but never have.
2) the article was an awful piece of hype, that felt like it was sponsored by the Whitehouse.
3) it's hard to see beyond the US imperialism that hangs heavy over space missions. Trump said "the US is winning in space" and he summed up the intent here
4) I might be a nerd but I really don't get the excitement from my fellow nerds. I wonder if they are simply taken in by the hype machine