Artemis II is competency porn
lizplank.substack.com
lizplank.substack.com
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My money's on M2c A8n: he claims to be from France, but I suspect he's actually from Remulak.
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.
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.
'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?
Dunning-Krueger in effect here. Because you aren't educated, you think it's simple and hasn't changed.
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.
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.
Why is this obvious?
That is from the article
People are too lost in their political hysteria to appreciate what a amazing achievement that was.
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.
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
I told him that it seemed quite absurd and unattainable, at present or near-future levels of technology. I told him, we could probably send a crew, as long as we didn't expect to get them back!
Going to LEO with the ISS has been an amazing achievement, and we (mankind) have proven that it's a sustainable thing: to maintain a crewed station in orbit, and send regular resupply missions up there. It's been a landmark of cooperation, even while USA-Russian relations are frosty.
Now, getting to the Moon and landing on it is also an achievement. Putting a crewed station in permanent orbit around the Moon, or a permanent crewed Moonbase, would be an important milestone, but we must understand that those goals are orders-of-magnitude harder than what the ISS has done.
Humans going to Mars, on the other hand, is absurd, and would be so performative in the first place. You could, hypothetically, send all your cargo up to Mars first, in advance of the crew, and then the crew could utilize the cargo upon arrival. Perhaps.
But we simply couldn't count on the survival of a return-crew mission to Mars. It's a full 6 months in transit, one-way! Anyone who has ever seen an ISS Expedition get dragged out of their capsule, loaded onto gurneys, and wheeled into the hospital, you will know that a 6-month weightless journey will incapacitate each and every person who goes. I once heard an ISS astronaut describe the things they're "not allowed to do" by NASA after arriving home. They need to re-learn many gravity-bound skills. They aren't even allowed to go jogging! They would hit Mars and be utterly useless as human beings, much less scientists or explorers.
The reality of the mythical Mars mission is that it's a pipe-dream which is sold to us by the military-industrial complex in order to fund their current missions and current science, which achieves achievable things, mostly with robots. And I'm fine with sending robots to Mars and Europa and Uranus. Sending humans is counterproductive.
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.
[citation needed]
> Reignite only the second stage.
Baby delta-v. Weaker than my Uno Mille with a staircase on top.
> right orientation
Trying to re-orient a low earth orbit into a reentry-from-moon-insertion is like trying to bend the path of a bullet.
Get your shit together, play some Kerbal Space Program at least.
> The shield doesn't care what's inside the Orion - it cares about mass.
[citation needed]
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Buddy, I don't have time for Elon fantasies.
I assumed you had actual knowledge of how orbital mechanics work. Please, continue playing your kideogames.
A Falcon Heavy can deliver more than 20 tons to GEO and an Orion capsule weigths about 10 tons. GTO is usually about 10 km/s at perigee of 200 km, meaning even with a full payload, a FH can place an Orion at an orbit that coasts above most of the atmosphere at about 90% of the speed of a returning Orion - and that on a stable-ish orbit - a suborbital trajectory would allow a higher apogee and a higher return speed. Now assume my mechanical design skills allow me to mount the capsule with less than 10 tons of material - this would mean we still have enough propellant on the second stage to give the ship a sizable boost if we so wanted. As for the maximum thrust, a high apogee suborbital trajectory would allow plenty of time for that - a good couple hours at least. That's way more than the longest burn the Merlin engine is rated for. I could dig up the exact numbers for these parts, but the margins seem more than ample enough.
> Buddy, I don't have time for Elon fantasies.
I'm not impressed by your insults. Bring in the math.
It's not an insult. You're overestimating SpaceX capabilities and I'm correcting you. There's no shame in that. I do find strange that you're insisting on it though.
> Bring in the math.
Falcon Heavy never carried anything similar to Orion. It never performed a second-stage "second burn trick" [sic]. There has never been a shield test like you described. Those things were never even hypothesized formally.
You made the claim that it can do those things with insufficient evidence. You need to back that up. I'm not going to fall for a reversal of an onus that you, and you alone, should prove.
There never was a shield test like this. The only other crewed capsule in operation today has had a few uncrewed flights without incident before taking astronauts on board, under much more forgiving reentry profiles. I sincerely hope the Artemis II shield shows no chipping and is well within the expected behaviors according to their current understanding, but, then, again, Artemis III will carry a new design, with changes informed by the first Artemis flight (and near failure - it was uncomfortably close to burning through the hull). And it will have astronauts on board on its first flight.
Doing a shield study on the lines I proposed would be politically complicated for NASA and would undoubtedly serve as an argument to further cut funding to Orion, as it would show they don't trust their designs, or don't completely understand them. I would also delay the next launch, which is, again, a politically charged thing.
I trust their math, but there are incentives for cutting corners here. Both Challenger and Columbia were lost because people forgot they were experimental vehicles operating under conditions we don't fully understand. They were treated like 737s.
That is just incorrect. Fuel tank design and arrangement, for example, is full of internal mass dynamics.
> would be politically complicated for NASA
Let me repeat this again: Falcon Heavy cannot carry Orion. There is no complication here.
NASA and SpaceX collaborate heavily. NASA doesn't build rockets, they're administrators. If SpaceX could be used, they would have used it (as they did with Dragon and so many other projects).
Stop trying come up with makeshift excuses for the lack of technical background you failed to provide.
> Both Challenger and Columbia were lost because people forgot they were experimental vehicles operating under conditions we don't fully understand.
Irrelevant attempt at misdirection. This has nothing to do with whether Falcon Heavy can or cannot test Artemis shields.
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You're desperately trying to pivot the discussion from a technical one (in which you demonstrated lack of basic knowledge about several important topics) to a political one (which is murky and easier to navigate into a tarpit).
Why? Explain your reasoning.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730179
Initially, I presented it as "please elaborate" questions. A courtesy, to give you the benefit of the doubt.
So far, you were not able to answer them with the same kind of courtesy that I initially offered.
Instead, you doubled-down on answering vaguely, hoping that I would slip at some point to a defensive position in which I would offer math and numbers, which are totally YOUR responsibility to provide, since YOU MADE THE CLAIM.
I don't need to prove that something that never happened is impossible. You need to prove that what never happened is possible (because you said it is). Capisce? It's basic science communication.
I don't need to do anything here. I'm right until you're able to prove otherwise.
At an enthusiast-level of knowledge (which is the level we're discussing here), I am way far ahead of you on this.
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.
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!