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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Update: communications have been a bit glitchy but the craft has made a safe landing and is transmitting data.

Was watching NASA administrator Bill Nelson's congratulatory message; can't help wondering if he also recorded a commiseration one looking to the future in case it didn't work...

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I'm sure. That was very recorded. Reminds me of Nixon's speech written in the event the moon landing failed. https://www.archives.gov/files/presidential-libraries/events...

As I was watching it, I was thinking that if I were responsible for planning the scripts, I would have been kicking myself for not recording one for an ambiguous circumstance, or incomplete success. As it was it was a little disjointed.

Wow, I'm pleased to hear this. I watched the stream, but by the time I had turned it off there hadn't been any word and things looked pretty bleak.

It's still grim. All the "signals" we have are from the hypeworks. It's fascinating, actually, how basically nobody in the media had the guts to be honest & neutral, and state the obvious fact that things aren't looking _that_ good.

Maybe it had an AT&T SIM? ;)

But seriously, it's weird how this really didn't make a lot of news today overall. Did the cellular outage really overshadow this? Times have changes if so. Our idea of "wow!" has been desensitized I guess. Pretty impressive to me!

The JWST is on a similar level of impressive (if not more), and arguably more important than a single moon landing, and the general public doesn't have much interest in that either.

To defend the general public, landing an unmanned craft on the moon just doesn't sound impressive anymore, it's like SpaceX landing their boosters. The first time it's mindblowing, the Nth time, not so much.

EDIT: And for JWST for the average person it's just a new Hubble.

The average person is likely to not even know about Hubble or any space telescopes.

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