Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by idiotsecant 83 days ago
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.

1 comments

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 Repeating the same 60 years later with outdated technology at outrageous costs for pork barrel spending, while far superior launch systems have been available for a decade, is about as far away from being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.