NASA Names Astronauts to Next Moon Mission | Hacker News Reader

NASA Names Astronauts to Next Moon Mission

nasa.gov

40 pointsradley18 comments

They look like they came out of a Hollywood movie set, but they're the real deal.

They're going out there (or should I say "up there"?) to do important work, for the benefit of humankind:

> The approximately 10-day Artemis II flight test will launch on the agency’s powerful Space Launch System rocket, prove the Orion spacecraft’s life-support systems, and validate the capabilities and techniques needed for humans to live and work in deep space.

Congratulations to all of them!

I think that's just the results of a good photographer. They look like normal people to me but in very good lighting.

For more hollywoodism, NASA also released a short video clip. Especially the intro definitely captures that "dramatic" look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPyl6d2FJGw

Well not to mention, looking at their patches. They are military (active/retired), speculation would be military aviators. Reading the article a little, some are former fighter pilots, so it makes sense they look like they came off a movie set. Military aviators tend to be quiet fit. Niel Armstrong and many early astronauts were fighter pilots, Hollywood makes their actors look like the fighter pilots who went on the early missions. Sort of a self fulfilling prophecy?

But yes, congrats to them all! Look forward to seeing this mission happen!

Very unpopular opinion : every dollar spent on SLS is a dollar spent on pushing back Spaceflight. Artemis 2 is not a milestone but a monumental mourning.

I used to feel similar. Now I have a 2 year old who has a good chance of having live HD color images of humans walking on the moon as one of his first memories - like his grandfather did and his father didn’t. Once I internalized that, I stopped caring about the cost.

Gorillas avoid fighting if they can. They instead thump their chests and bare their fangs.

The Apollo program was a chest thumping and teeth baring program. It put a healthy fear of god in the Soviets, and lead to their ultimate defeat. Viewed as such it got a phenomenal bang for the buck.

Otherwise, in terms of science, it was quite useless.

The SLS program and the other heavy lift programs after Apollo (like the Space Shuttle) were primarily capability maintenance programs. If you look at them like that, then their success is not measured in how many launches they do, but in how few.

If you see these programs as a capability maintenance programs, they succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dream: they maintained a large and competent workforce and ecosystem which allowed startups such SpaceX to develop and flourish.

But now that SpaceX exists (and quite a number of other startups) there's less of a need a capability maintenance program.

Given that, my prediction is that these astronauts that were paraded in front of us today will never fly to the Moon.

I don't see how this is an unpopular opinion, this is the only sane opinion by any objective measurement. SLS is an incredible boondoggle.

The money would be much better spent flying with SpaceX, or trying to work with some other newer space startup.

You might be correct that NASA isn't spending the money efficiently, but you need to compare this to the alternative to Artemis, which is probably a bunch of smaller programs that will either be cancelled or forgettable.

That is more like very popular opinion.

But even more, SLS is still just a part of Artemis program. Notably Artemis is also planned to include Spaceship flights too.

As someone completely unfamiliar with SLS: why?

It's not perfectly efficient because it spends some of the budget on preventing congressional tampering and getting average americans interested in space.

Apparently, if the government can't make a commercially competitive space program, we should just not have one at all.

If anyone has done the job of getting Americans interested in space, it has to be SpaceX. They have a huge following of young nerds who are getting into aerospace engineering because they do such a good job publicizing their development efforts.

SLS is so embarrassingly outdated when compared to SpaceX, it has done the opposite for me, it just made me realize how antiquated and bloated government projects are. Maybe it's more a reflection on how poorly the contracts were managed, idk. But comparing SpaceX vs SLS launches, SLS is a marvelous failure by every metric.

> not perfectly efficient

That's a bit of an understatement! It's estimated to cost $4.1 billion per launch--about double the already impressive $2 billion per launch that was originally budgeted. https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-22-003.pdf

SLS is extremely expensive, has taken a long time, and will have a low mission frequency (if successful at all).

While it may eventually deliver results, the primary goal of the SLS is a massive jobs programme, across the states of the politicians that support it.

>So you think they possibly saved 9950 lives, yet a vastly greater number live in poverty and a huge proportion of them are children with no access to healthcare and education, many of them begging in the streets. But yes let's give India a round of applause for finding a minor benefit to their $2bn spending on space exploration (also ignoring the fact that they are not really achieving new science that is not or could not be done by more developed nations).

perhaps the time has come to ask a similar question. why is there a need to spend $93 billion on a vanity project when so many are begging in the streets?

An unpopular opinion I know, but NASA and the US is so broke that "NASA's Next Moon Mission" will never happen. Still, it's pleasant to dream.

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