Comment by feyman_r
4 days ago
Its true that innovation isn't clearly shown in this mission; we also haven't flown humans out that far in more than 50 years either and while we have memories of it, our ability to even execute something like this must be built again. I'd rather see us doing this and 'pick up from where we were last time', than giving up on it or just using a stack that's not currently set to do this.
What Artemis is doing is not impeding innovation: its building our muscle back to work on such things; the discipline, rigor, scale, and attitude needed to execute such missions is unimaginable and orthogonal to the technical innovation and stack used. I also believe that its completely fine to use a 2000s-era flight computer, if that suffices for this purpose. Somehow, for such critical missions, my mental model is to use at least 10 year old technology that has stood the test of time, before going into space. If there's a need for the latest technology - then yes, it should be leveraged.
Not impending innovation is IMHO debatable - Artemis has definitely potential to motivate a lot of lay population & young people to go do space stuff and tech in general.
On the other hand SLS and Orion have gobbled insane amount of money that could have been invested to other science missions or even more efficient human space flight.
> 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.
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
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.
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?"
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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.
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.
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.
I don't see them insinuating that, just that it certainly raises a question about what we value and how we allocate resources.
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.
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.