[KennyBlanken]

> our ability to even execute something like this must be built again

Why? Because "dreams"? "Reach for the stars"?

You know what I remember from the shuttle launches as a kid? I remember my school not being able to afford textbooks but apparently we had enough to spend billions on putting people in space for no reason.

[teepo]

I really resonate with this. I remember watching Comic Relief with Whoopie Goldberg as a kid, the whole show focused on homelessness in America, andshe said somthing like "why are we spending billions launching shuttles when people are sleeping on the streets?" That hit me hard. Especially because I was also the kid who was obsessed with space. It felt like a contradiction I couldn't square - I wasn't homeless, I think my school had books, but who remembers...

What shifted my thinking over tim was the actual numbers. NASA's entire budget during the shuttle era was roughly 1% of federal spending [1]. We chose to de-institutionalize heathcare which really impacted homelessness. We didn't have to, but it was choice. And we could of done both. The failure was our leaders choosing not to, and that choice had nothing to do with NASA.

And the shuttle era, for all its problems, gave us Hubble. That single telescope showed us the universe is 13.8 billion years old, that expansion is accelerating, that nearly every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. The shuttle crews serviced it five times to keep it running. I think it's hard to overstate what that one instrument did for our understanding of the universe.

I don't think the instinct you had as a kid was wrong at all! - And thanks for helping me re-activate some neurons- Whoopi made a real impession on me came from a real place. But I think we're lucky enough to live in a world where people fight to fix things on the ground and also point telescopes at the sky.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

[WaterRun]

Developing something like this would push the frontiers of human technology. Without the Apollo program, not to mention anything else, the personal computer boom in the 1970s might have been delayed by a long time.

[krapp]

We're redoing things we did before most people in this thread were even born, how would any of this "push the frontiers of human technology?"

[WaterRun]

The Space Shuttle’s technology is indeed quite old, but by today’s standards it is not exactly outdated. What matters is that we have lost the ability to carry out that technology — or even the ability to organize and coordinate a project like that. Otherwise, the price of the SLS as an “off-the-shelf product” would not be so outrageous, and it would not keep getting delayed again and again. Technology gets forgotten and capability is lost as people and suppliers disappear. The fact that we could build the Saturn V half a century ago does not mean we could still build it today; even the fact that we could build the F-22 twenty years ago does not mean we could still produce it now once the production lines are gone. Restoring that capability is always a good thing, considering the indirect effects.

[mulmen]

Because we have gone backwards so any advancement requires some repetition.

[p-e-w]

Strange that SpaceX doesn’t seem to be suffering from that limitation. Could it be that the real problem is pork barrel spending and government wastefulness?

[Larrikin]

Which mission went to the moon?

[p-e-w]

Why would they go to the moon? They’re far too busy doing things that actually matter, such as slashing launch costs by 80% or more, while achieving the highest reliability of any launch system ever.

[mulmen]

What are you talking about? SLS is on the way to the Moon now. Starship is still in development. SpaceX only exists because of massive NASA subsidy. Any success from SpaceX is thanks to NASA.

[NetMageSCW]

NASA provided SpaceX some money as a startup to bet they could just start commercial space, and they won to the tune of saving millions of dollars. There was never massive subsidies and there isn’t any subsidies at all today.

[dirasieb]

>We're redoing things we did before most people in this thread were even born

oh really? show me a picture of the dark side of the moon then

not a reconstruction, not touched up crap based on data like that black hole pic that went viral a few years ago, an actual photograph taken by an astronaut of the dark side of the moon

[krapp]

The first orbit of the moon by a manned spacecraft was Apollo 8 in 1968.

The first photos of the dark side of the moon were taken by the Soviet Luna-3 probe in 1959.

Nothing being done here is revolutionary.

[twoodfin]

Have you looked at US per pupil K-12 spending growth & absolute comparisons vs. peer nations?

The problem with US public schools is not funding.

[esnyder9]

If we're going to be idealists and say that the money that'd come out of space exploration would go into education, there is an awful lot more money being spent on the business of killing people that you could also say should go elsewhere.

[nirav72]

Do you honestly believe that by repurposing money from missions like these would suddenly free up money for text books? That’s not how it works. Especially not in 2026.

[heavyset_go]

I don't see them insinuating that, just that it certainly raises a question about what we value and how we allocate resources.

[idiotsecant]

I guess probably we should stop spaceflight until we can go back in time and buy you a textbook.

Spaceflight is cool. Its a awesome thing that people can exist outside our gravitational well. We don't need to solve every possible problem before we do anything cool.

[p-e-w]

Almost all of what makes spaceflight “cool” today is inherited excitement and nostalgia, most of it unearned by the current generation of space endeavors.

Apollo was a humanity-defining undertaking. Repeating the same 60 years later with outdated technology at outrageous costs for pork barrel spending, while far superior launch systems have been available for a decade, is about as far away from being “cool” as I can imagine.

The average ESA environmental observation satellite is a lot cooler (and a lot more important) than this launch.