[ArcHound]

I can't believe the comments here.

"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.

[glimshe]

Throughout the years we've heard concerns that we could no longer go back to the moon because of skill atrophy. This is, at a minimum, a great step towards recovering some lost skills while developing new ones.

People are too lost in their political hysteria to appreciate what a amazing achievement that was.

[wookmaster]

We're in this mix of living in a time of mass hysteria and so many bots on the internet that it's tough to tell if the comments are real. I want to hope most comments I see aren't real people. It's sad if they are.

[mrtksn]

TBF there’s very little change on what we can do more than what was achieved in the 60s. The current space boom is a re-do with better tooling. We can put better computers in space and that’s what gives us anything more than what we had before. The moon and Mars are PR stuff and would be cool and maybe inspire engineers or scientists but its still slight incremental upgrade to what we had so far since 60s.

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.

[matt_kantor]

> TBF there’s very little change on what we can do more than what was achieved in the 60s.

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.

[mrtksn]

Doing it the second time is so less impressive that soviets cancelled their whole human moon landing and Americans stopped paying attention on Apollo 13 and cancelled the program after 17.

Obviously it is huge engineering achievement each time, just not as impressive as it was done before.

[wookmaster]

"Even the photos are not that much better so far"

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.

[mrtksn]

They are impressive photos, the earthrise is my background on my phone and the eclipse is my background on my laptop but they are derivatives of what we had before.

[themadturk]

Is one picture of a mountain derivative of another? Are two pictures of a specific human being derivative? No, they are individual creations, even if made using the same camera by the same photographer. Each is an individual work of art, the vision of a particular person capturing a unique, unrepeatable moment.

They are not derivatives, because the photographers are different people and the time and place were decades separated from one another. To call them derivative is to belittle the humans experiencing the events.

[prewett]

In the same way that Cassini was a derivative of Galileo, but around Saturn and with a working antenna. Or Perseverence is a derivative of Curiosity, which is a derivative of Opportunity. Or philosophy is just footnotes on Plato. Or classical music is everyone trying to escape from the shadow of Bach. Or fantasy is just a poorer version of Tolkien.

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.)

[mrtksn]

They are not essentially the same, just not as big deal as the first ones.

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.

[wookmaster]

Must be tough to enjoy any photo if you see it that way. Even if they launched to Mars, are new photos derivatives of the robot and probe cameras?

[_DeadFred_]

Those not impressive/'I don't see progress' images were sent across a brand new optical downlink. Far from boring or 1960s stuff and very much expanding our capabilities type stuff. https://www.nasa.gov/goddard/esc/o2o/

'I want the I can feel it exponential curve part of progress without the slow, long, hard work part at the start of the curve like new boring optical space communication capabilities'

Most things we do are slight incremental upgrades until we put in enough to get to the more exponential/experiential progress that people 'think' is what progress has too look like. Look at cars. They were pretty basic shit boxes with sheet metal/slight tire changes forever (basically my whole life) and suddenly they got way way way better to the point a grocery runner station wagon Rav4 can have insane performance specs and good mpg from a fairly affordable 250,000 mile capable boring vehicle. It took boring incremental work/infrastructure to make workable, slightly larger tires/brake rotors/pads/engine tolerances, then now with toxic components, then slightly larger again, then a little less toxic, repeat.

Are you expecting one day 'Bob's Refractory' decides you know what, let's start making city/county sized impact resistant high stress transparent domes light enough to ship to the moon for dirt cheap, that would be cool, why haven't we been doing that yet?

[egeozcan]

Why not up the ante a bit; I'll be impressed when they bio-engineer special humans who don't need a dome to live there. Come on, it's been 60 years!!

[DonHopkins]

We could drop Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen out there to see if they're smart enough to evolve.

My money's on M2c A8n: he claims to be from France, but I suspect he's actually from Remulak.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DUr929pbZ0

[Rekindle8090]

"TBF there’s very little change on what we can do more than what was achieved in the 60s."

Dunning-Krueger in effect here. Because you aren't educated, you think it's simple and hasn't changed.

[mrtksn]

ok

[saidnooneever]

ofc very much the american way, outside of the region maybe its more read like propaganda... not in all regions people are like this, but its not a bad thing i suppose. Good things can also be leveraged for bad things etc. (not by the ppl involved ofc, but by others and their framing of the facts)

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.

[adrian_b]

While it is obvious that the fact that except for the commander, the crew was composed of a woman, a Canadian and an African-Caribbean-American, cannot have happened by chance, I think that for this kind of mission also achieving a diversity target is perfectly fine.

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.

[thankyoufriend]

> While it is obvious that the fact that except for the commander, the crew was composed of a woman, a Canadian and an African-Caribbean-American, cannot have happened by chance

Why is this obvious?

[MrSkelter]

Musk and his ilk have mesmerized a lot of people.

It’s easier for them to believe in the fantasy superiority of a rocket which hasn’t achieved orbit than the real achievements of NASA and other space agencies.

It’s supercharged by a desire to politicize science to defend their sexist and white supremacist worldview. It pains them to see people they dismiss achieving great things. There are no able minorities. Just unfairness. A fair world to them is white men on top, everyone else below.

What’s funny is how different they are from the people they idolize. Just as SS officers would be disgusted by your average ICE recruit, you average NASA engineer from Apollo would have seen through Musk in an instant.

A rocket that requires tens of fueling trips to make a single moon run would be an anathema to them and they would call it out of the bad engineering it is.

There is so much anger that reality is stronger than prejudice and whatever they say and do women, brown and disabled people will be increasingly prominent, powerful and influential whatever they wish the case was.

[stavros]

> they had women and non white people on board

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.

[guilhas]

> "...oh, they had women and non white people on board..."

That is from the article

[newsclues]

It’s a 50 year old achievement.

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?

[ArcHound]

Thanks, edited my comment to reflect this reply.

[saidnooneever]

you should not ask why they went to the moon again, but ask about why they went to the moon again NOW.

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.