"I could have done it better, it's not a big deal, oh, they had women and non white people on board, what even is the shareholder value of this mission, oh it was almost done 50 years ago..."
These people went literally to the moon and back. Furthest anyone has ever been. That's an achievement.
I know things suck right now. Even more reasons to appreciate what is possible with technology.
I agree with the premise of this article. This achievement is inspiring and re-assuring that competency brings results. The alternative is way too depressing AND it mostly is our reality right know.
People are too lost in their political hysteria to appreciate what a amazing achievement that was.
Even the photos are not that much better so far, people compare the OG and many like the old stuff better. Obviously its impressive engineering but we have seen it before.
I will be impressed when we have a large city sized space station with a large transparent dome.
We have an incredible eclipse photos with multiple planets in the background. If you don't find photos like that incredible to see I'd guess you need to do some soul searching.
I suppose there's truth to that, but it unfairly and unhelpful minimizes the accomplishment, and it collapses the awe that the article talks about. If you are viewing the photos as essentially the same, you are shortchanging yourself, because Artemis was not a means for producing photos, those are more like artifacts of production. Again, that would collapse the awe of Artemis.
(Also, technically, I don't think that Artemis is a derivative of Apollo, more like a re-implementation from scratch.)
Armstrong is the only cooler astronaut than Gagarin even though other astronauts technically achieved much more than Gagarin. Even Gene Cernan isn’t as cool as Gagarin despite spending more than 3 days on the surface of the moon and probably doing much more things outside of the earth than anyone. He’s cool in other ways of course.
People could do backflips and write moving poetry and memorize thousands of digits of pi in the 60s too. Such things were impressive then and they're impressive now.
I could understand someone thinking that the Apollo program was more impressive than the Artemis program, but to think that the Artemis missions are not impressive is completely foreign to me.
Obviously it is huge engineering achievement each time, just not as impressive as it was done before.
it'd be nice if people gave eachother a little space to be :) and look past the politics of things.
maybe then we would not feel the need to go the furthest out into space ever done and we can remain sometime in each other's proximity without feeling the need to develop nuclear weapons.
There is no doubt that the members of the crew were at least equally qualified with the possible members of a less diverse crew, even if their provenance must have influenced the final selection.
Perhaps instead of doubting that it was right to choose crew members belonging to historically disadvantaged minorities, like Canadians :-), one should wonder why only the crew members are diverse, but not their chief, which is a more stereotypical American, as chiefs are expected to be in USA.
A conspiracy theorist can argue both ways, either that choosing a diverse crew was done as a favor to those kinds of people, or on the contrary, that choosing a diverse crew was done as a disfavor to them, to show them who is really their boss.
So no matter what choice is done, people can criticize it for more or less imaginary reasons.
That is from the article
I couldn’t do it personally but as a nation or humanity, we can do better, even if it was hard.
What year did nasa land on the moon again?
you will see why the whole ordeal was super polished etc.
not to the detriment of nasa nor astronauts or anyone involved. they are doing science and pretty epic things.
so then maybe you can allow to detach your sentiment from the science and acheivement and place it on the appropriate point. (us leadership and their wars needing to give ppl a bit of dopamine because the populus is getting saturated with bad news).
Also, i kinda doubt as a nation or humanity you would do better. i dont know who you are , but this is saying you will be better than some of the brightest minds working at esa, spacex, nasa and chinese, indian, russian equavalents etc
as humanity ... yeah. good luck getting people to work together more than they already do... do you think no one is trying it??? what is your grand plan? how would you do it better?
you cant just make such claims willynilly..show credentials and proof you can do it.
I thought this was a straw man, because surely wtf is even the point of this comment, but nope, sure enough, ctrl+f and there are comments like that here. Wow.
Godwin's law...
> it cannot be taken for what it is. It does not matter what we feel, what we want to feel, we can enjoy it for a second and then swallow it down and not write an article like that.
As an American, I felt extremely proud seeing 4 astronauts (3 Americans, 1 Canadian) come back after 10 days in space and the amount of coordination it takes, regardless of politics.
https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/artemis/
tldr: for science and a stepping stone towards a crewed mission to Mars
Arguably NASA played it extremely safe this time round, high first orbit, no direct TLI, no lunar orbit that you can't come back from if the engines don't fire back up. I think they're very aware of the poor quality of modern manufacturing they're working with, which is why it's all the more impressive that everything went as planned, Outlook aside.
It's still extremely dumb they're throwing away RS-25 engines for this, but no competence survives contact with political management.
Quote from the blogpost about it being unsafe: "It’s likely—hopefully very likely—that Artemis II will land safely. But do we really have to wait for astronauts to die to re-learn the same lessons a third time?"
NASA themselves set a safety target of a 1 in 30 chance of crew mortality for the mission. That's an insanely high risk tolerance for something that'd be so public, and would have been so incredibly demoralizing and tragic if the world had to watch this crew die on re-entry.
With everything dark going on in the world right now, a lot of people saw this whole thing as a small glimmer of light and something to just be happy and excited about. Having them burn up and die after inspiring that hope would have been crushing.
I don't really buy the "if they die, it strands human spaceflight for years out of PR reasons" argument since what that argues for and against has the same result: nobody goes space for a while. In the end there will always be someone willing to roll the dice. ESA is already playing it 100% safe, that niche is covered.
The heatshield issue is the latter.
$100 billion has been spent on this project. Ablative heatshield coatings have been used since the Atlas ICBM in 1957. Yet they still flew Artemis with significant technical risk on a political grandstanding mission that delivered no significant science.
To me, this was irritating. True competency and things that inspire real awe encapsulate “res ipsa loquitur” — they speak for themselves. Having some internet influencer try to hype me into getting awed, and implying that “we all” are feeling a certain way as she channels our collective zeitgeist is tiresome.
And personally, IMO although the mission was nice, it wasn’t groundbreaking technically or particularly awe-inspiring.
Ironically, I left feeling a tiny bit disappointed: if everyone is truly thinking this mission is the height of awesomeness or competency, we have a low-ish bar.
I bet that when the old-timers with their starched white shirts, pocket protectors, and horn-rimmed glasses that did the 60s missions got together to watch 2026 Artemis they privately had a good laugh about how little state-of-the-art has progressed.
There is ample delta-v for that.
I don't understand how the coupling between Orion and Falcon Heavy would be done (can't just put it inside the fairing).
I also don't understand how you plan to re-light the engines on the 3 falcon cores for a second burn (required for the delta-v you propose) and the fuel economics.
I also don't understand the trajectory you envision. Even if you could re-light the FH engines and couple Orion to it, I don't understand how you would get the re-entry angle correct.
Regarding the mass simulator, it's not clear by your description how the shields would be tested in that scenario.
Let's not leave it to the reader's imagination. If you're seeing something that I'm not, please, lay out the plan in more detail.
A mechanical coupling is not that difficult to design. There needs to be no communication between FH and Orion for this use case. It could be mounted with the shield on top to simplify the mechanism. Separation could be purely mechanical, with springs.
> I also don't understand how you plan to re-light the engines on the 3 falcon cores for a second burn (required for the delta-v you propose) and the fuel economics.
Reignite only the second stage. Instead of putting the payload in orbit, put it on a suborbital trajectory with a high apogee, then boost down to hit the atmosphere at the desired speed and angle.
> I also don't understand the trajectory you envision. Even if you could re-light the FH engines and couple Orion to it, I don't understand how you would get the re-entry angle correct.
You have the delta-v - just use it in the right orientation. An Orion is lighter than the payload to LEO of the FH, so there will be a lot of propellant for the boost up and the boost down.
> Regarding the mass simulator, it's not clear by your description how the shields would be tested in that scenario.
The shield doesn't care what's inside the Orion - it cares about mass. You might need some attitude control (you can use flywheels) and parachutes if you want to recover anything, but all the rest is optional.
A lot of it is relearning what was forgotten after the Apollo and shuttle programs. The technologies changed so much it’s a whole new spacecraft that looks like what existed only because that’s the best possible shape.
I would just love if my workplace let me use the normal Apple apps, but there are regulatory constrains Apple tools don't meet (such as spying on me to prevent data exfil)
Seriously though, this is mostly a PR and validation win. I enjoyed watching the new Earthrise (Earthset) image - https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/art002e00928... - camera technology has come a long way since the 70s and seeing the moon this close is Weird to me.
"Help Keep Thunderbird Alive": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700388
I could not find out exactly why the SRBs of SLS are not worth recovering. If anyone knows why, that would be interesting to find out.
The very next article suggested by this same author is "the patriarchy is living through it's last tantrum". Enough said...
Like the space shuttle before it, Artemis proves that nobody can beat the US at spending money on boondoggles.
Lunar missions are inconsequential to problems here on Earth like we can’t afford to build high-speed rail and transit, that we can’t build housing affordable or otherwise, that we already lost the next war to Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, won’t build affordable electric cars, etc.
What we need is affordability porn!
