Hacker News Reader

Comment by nasretdinov | Hacker News Reader

I like how most people's reactions at this point are "yeah, whatever", as if it's every day that humans observe the far side of the moon with a naked eye through a window :). We do know what it looks like and we have photos from the surface, yes, but seeing the reaction from real people who're actually there does hit different, at least for me

View on HN

Speaking for myself (who has been fascinated with the space program since I was a small child), any joy I might feel around Artemis II feels tainted, by the immense amount of pork involved (SLS is called "Senate Launch System" for good reason) to the point where Artemis is more corporate welfare that happens to involve the Moon than a real space program, and by my belief that it is intended to be little more than a quick, dirty, and vainglorious Apollo repeat by a failing government.

I ran across this video[0] yesterday with Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about how it’s always been political. The first moon landing was more about global politics than science. As a child you likely weren’t concerned about that side of it, or were shielded from it.

It isn’t always the purist motivations that push the human race forward, but forward it moves us.

[0] https://youtu.be/j_AlXChA9F4

I don't think OP's problem with it is that it's "political" but that it's a product of pork and corporate welfare. The political thrust of the Apollo program was more "beat the Russians" and less "funnel money into dozens of already-rich corporations in favored districts." Even thought there was a lot of that, too. Modern space (and defense) projects seem to be almost 100% "pork funnel" and zero anything else.

The pork funnel is going to exist unless something major changes; so I'd rather get moonshots out of the pork.

But how many Moonshots could we have got out of $100 billion of vegetarian non-pork?

Everything about SLS, and most of Artemis, has been dictated by Congress, often overriding expert advice.

Why not just give NASA the money and let them get on with it?

The same happens with the US military, Congress constantly deleting funding for programs they don't like to fund ones they do.

We're about to find out.

The new NASA administrator, Isaacman, seems to have done a very good job of convincing the various Senators to, if not get rid of the pork, allow him to allocate it in a way that benefits the lunar program.

The result was the Ignition event, which looks like it's planning to send up 17 small and 4 crew-capable landers by 2028, along with a fleet of orbital assets.

You can find out more https://www.nasa.gov/ignition/ , especially the "Building the Moon Base" section. The cost is $10B spread out over 3 years.

Also, if you dont think Apollo had pork in it, you're not aware enough of the history, the various assembly plants were placed mostly for political support, the shuttle and now SLS follows the same pattern.

Possibly none, until we can figure out how to engineer political institutions that function without pork.

We tend to look at pork as unambiguously bad because it's wasteful or often has more than a whiff of corruption, but the picture for political scientists is more mixed.

Turns out it's easier to bargain with legislators when policy can give them a win in their districts or states. It greases the wheels for negotiation or provides levers to flip opposition party members. Legislatures often become more sclerotic and dysfunctional after reforms to pork barrel spending.

I don't want to call pork good, but there are real trade-offs to pork-free government that we haven't figured out how to solve any other way

The reality is that "anything" can be pork - if you have large amounts of money sloshing around, someone benefits from getting it, and you can use that benefit for negotiations.

The first question for me is always is this a thing worth doing - which has an aspect of price involved, but isn't the definitive answer.

we've also got 50 years of baseline tech improvement to try out.

In the 60s we weren't going to land in the darkness because we couldn't see to land.

But the shadows are probably where the water might be, and that's where we're going next!

> The political thrust of the Apollo program was more "beat the Russians" and less "funnel money into dozens of already-rich corporations in favored districts."

Artemis feels a bit more "Beat the Chinese, and show the world we still got it." I think cost-effectiveness[1] is a fig-leaf for what are SpaceX fanboys: had the same mission been on a Starship, HN would be awash with how other companies (Blue Origin) were late to earth-orbit, and the gap had widened beyond Earth's orbit.

1. In contrast, I haven't seen any complaints about Military-Industrial pork on any of the Iran threads, even when contrasting the cost of interceptors vs drones. Let slone have pork dominate the thread.

It's not "almost 100% pork funneling" and I know this because....they're there! they are at the moon! I don't like pork either, but let's not blow this out of proportion.

How much do we think that it should have cost, if everything was perfectly optimized, to get to the moon? 50b instead of 100b? so ok, 50% was pork, and that's bad, but let's not overstate it and instead allow a little joy in our lives.

also the original apollo program was about 300b in today's dollars, so seems like things have always been a little porky.

Only 300b for the Apollo program? That sounds downright lean.

Not when you consider how we got lucky on some aspects

> more about global politics than science

I had a great Prof during my bachelor from Russia - this is what he always told -> and it makes sense: Back then was cold war

It’s a weak take and here’s why. Huge tasks like going to the moon are made up of many different individuals that have different goals. Some are rocket scientists that want to innovate on the science of rocketry. Others are government admins with political goals.

So to call the entire thing “political” ignores the purpose of those involved and critical to the outcome at the expense of just labeling it all “political”.

this is why I mark the divide between the manned and unmanned space program. Historically the unmanned accomplishments have been less political (at least IMO) and made far larger advances. I don't need a human to take a photo of the dark side of the moon and then email it to me if a satellite can do it (with 1980's tech)

"far side of the moon"

Even if the Apollo program was similarly politically motivated, it at least was seriously cutting edge science and engineering. I mean, there were many people born before the Wright brothers’ first flight watching the moon landing on TV. Basically repeating Apollo 8’s much less iconic flyby decades later is obviously going to be less impressive.

The manned space program launches from Florida but is controlled from Houston. Why? Wouldn't it make more sense to have both in the same place?

Florida is because there's no other safe place in the US to launch a big rocket on an easterly trajectory* than Florida. Or the extreme southern tip of Texas, which SpaceX uses.

Houston is because NASA needed LBJ's support. They even named the place after him.

* Why easterly? Because that's the direction Earth rotates. If you orbit in that direction you get some free momentum from the planet itself.

I know the RS-25 engines[0] (aka SSME, Space Shuttle Main Engine) were "reusable" in an academic sense (needing a ton of refurbishment after each use) but it hurts my heart that we're dropping them in the ocean and it makes it hard for me to feel good about the Artemis program. It's irrational but it makes the kid who loved the Space Shuttle (which, itself, was a political pork barrel and a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none kind of program) sad.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25

You and me both. They don’t even put a parachute on the boosters to get them back. Some pieces on these boosters have been in use since the 80s.

And all of that reuse was so expensive that it set back reusable rocketry for decades as the common wisdom said it was uneconomical - even after it was demonstrated that you could have reuse without expensive refurbishment.

I'm reminded of Ian over at Forgotten Weapons which has presented several rifles which were converted from the old thing to the new thing, say bolt action to semiautomatic.

Each time the government looked at existing stock, thought "hmm surely we can save money by refurbishing these old firearms".

And just about each time they at best ended up with a subpar weapon that cost as much as a brand new model designed from scratch. And often something which cost way more...

The idea looks better on paper than it usually is.

> it hurts my heart that we're dropping them in the ocean

They are functionally obsolete. Chances that we’re still using SLS in ten years is slim. Any resources going towards refurbishment are better spent on Starship and Blue Moon.

> my belief that it is intended to be little more than a quick, dirty, and vainglorious Apollo repeat by a failing government.

If the USA successfully sends people to the Moon, achieves all of NASA's technical goals, and the astronauts make it back in one piece, isn't that literally the opposite of failure?

It might be expensive and you can argue that it's wasteful. But even to that point, the $11B cost of SLS is nothing for the US Gov. For example the F35 is a >$1T government program. That doesn't seem a lot to explore a new frontier and expand the scope of humanity.

> That doesn't seem a lot to explore a new frontier and expand the scope of humanity.

There is no gain in knowledge from this mission. It's more like cheering for your favorite soccer team.

> There is no gain in knowledge from this mission

This is wrong. We’re learning a lot about the new life-support systems. (Courtesy of the ESA.) We’re also going to learn more about the heat shield on 10 April.

Yes true, but these are all technologies required for humans in space. Toilets in space, as intriguing the topic and discussion are, are only needed because we decided to go there. I think the tech is interesting but the human unification vibe is tainted at the least.

Its not Pork and its not science. Its a strategically costly land grab rather than a political vain-glorious stunt.

Same as Mercury/Gemini/Apollo except this time China instead of Russia.

> its not science. Its a strategically costly land grab

Step away from your screens. Framing everything exclusively in these hard terms isn’t healthy (or true).

Jumping in late here. I think both can be true, that it's an inspirational moment and the idea of humans exploring and visiting other worlds is amazing. That a society's ability to do so implies its scientific prowess. And that we are in competition with other top nations to "have a seat at the table" if/when those nations start trying to put controls on the use of those celestial bodies.

> the immense amount of pork involved (SLS is called "Senate Launch System" for good reason

Most of science has always had this dual use purpose.

No senator ever would have voted for any kind of space program just to send a few tourists to the moon. It's a way to have a substantial workforce, spread across a wide area (so they can't all be hit by the same bomb), that knows how to make and launch rockets and to do weird stuff in space and to work with very energetic materials.

But I agree that it feels hollow right now because of the war abroad and also the needless disrespect we've shown to our Canadian friends at home.

It reminds me a little bit of The Man in the High Castle, it's like these videos are sent from some happier timeline that we don't live in. Hopefully they inspire some people to bring the spirit of curiosity and friendship they present back to our earth.

You know the whole point of the space race was to prove that we could send ICBMs to the USSR right?

> the whole point of the space race was to prove that we could send ICBMs to the USSR right?

No, it wasn’t. The real world seldom has single causation. Some people supported Apollo as a messaging exercise. Most had other reasons.

And in any case, there are easy ways to demonstrate ICBM competence. Pyongyang isn’t going to the Moon to prove it can bomb Alaska.

People complaining about "pork" - reminds me of the 90's.

In general, pork is an overstated problem. We've had far less so-called pork in legislation the past 20 years or so, but that reality has actually contributed to grid-lock and dis-empowerment of the legislature. Pork often functioned as a kind of grease on the wheels and, while gross, gave legislators incentives to bargain and levers with which to do it. The war on pork is one part of the story of how the US congress has calcified.

Dude, we went to the moon again. Who the fuck cares how. If we waited for the no-pork solution, we'd still be planning the first test. I'm over the moon right now!

I'm not being a hater, but we landed on the moon 55+ years ago and now we're doing a flyby with 35+ year-old engine tech. It's good that we're doing something but we should be doing better.

In 2-3 years we should expect a Starship mission to Moon, at a much more sensible scale, as in the amount of scientific gear and actual researchers delivered to the surface (and then back).

There is literally not many things in life I hope so much for than starship success. Sounds strange perhaps but I just love space and I hope it succeeds.

Funnily I absolutely despise Musk at the same time for being absolute buffoon

We're days away from the SpaceX IPO that will make Musk even richer than he is now. I don't trust him with that money.

I trust his gargantuan insecurity

Sometimes the flaws of someone make him completely predictable. Very trustworthy to repeatedly pour billions in an attempt to become someone he fantasizes to be.

There are innumerable amount of assholes in history that sold things we use daily, sometimes at the expense of original inventors. It is hard to cope with the idea that greed, ambition and ruthlessness are the building blocks of everything that stands around us.

Sometimes it makes me want to reject everything I know of good and human and feed these traits until they fill the hollow parts of mind with wealth, empty fame and too many lonely sunsets on a private island.

His stated and oft-repeated goal is to save mankind by making it interplanetary.

It doesn't seem to be about personal aggrandizement. He has built no monuments to himself, has not named his company "Musk Inc", he doesn't run for office, etc.

Musk does not own a yacht or even a house.

> lonely

If he feels lonely, he can message me and I'd treat him to dinner.

Well he is a piece of shit no matter what theoretical ideals he holds. I am sure many evil people in history wanted to “save mankind”

I don’t think I need to remind you how he treated his transgender daughter and that’s just single example

Steve Jobs rejected his daughter.

George Washington declined being crowned king and set the tone for a modest and limited Executive branch. Yet he also owned slaves.

Saint Thomas More burned people at the stake.

You'll have a hard time finding any faultless people.

It's pretty annoying to be a fan of space in 2026. On the one hand you have NASA, a shadow of its former self. Clearly there is something deeply dysfunctional with it.

On the other you have an old drug addict, still functional, thankfully, dead set on antagonizing every possible person alive. (I guess dems will probably shut his space program down after they win? Can he even get on good standing with them at all after everything that has transpired?)

Shit CEO vs Money pit

Good luck finding a saint. You won't find any.

I would settle for just a decent human being

What do you think of Musk's Neuralink company that has enabled quadriplegics to control things with their mind? What do you think of Musk's Tesla that has apparently saved 20,000 lives?

Who meets your criteria?

I don’t care about some imaginary balance of souls. Leave that to god if he exists.

The ability to save someone doesn’t enable you to senselessly hurt many others.

You should read Ursula K. Le Guin's: "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

A healthy person or society does not find enjoyment or entertainment in the torture of another. The act of senseless infliction of harm betrays a lack of empathy and moral spine, which is fundamentally incompatible with the role of a "savior" or truly moral agent.

The good he does doesn't require the harm he causes, so the good cannot justify it.

Last time he got a bunch of money he used it to fund SpaceX and Tesla.

Now also Neuralink.

It’s hard to imagine anyone else who’s done more for the planet with his money than Musk.

He's directly responsible for the deaths of several hundred thousand people via DOGE and their abrupt withdrawal and support of food aid.

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...

Directly? I do not think it means what you think it means.

Hate the guy all you want, even for this, but don't try and juice it another 20% with emotional words that are ultimately incorrect.

Okay let me juice you with some "emotional words".

There is a direct line from his decisions to more than ten times the number of Americans KIA in the entirety of the Vietnam war.

Argue about how it happened all you want, the bodies are at his fucking feet. CEOs and leadership of organizations are accountable for their decisions.

"Emotional"

How about get a fucking working conscience.

Hundreds of thousands are dead, two thirds of which were kids. Children.

Those estimates are highly disputed because they all come from modeled projections, not anything attributed on the ground.

If a death toll like that was real and attributable it would be the only thing in the news, 24/7, until the next election.

The fact is, it’s not. Aid was relocated to other departments and continued. Significant insider pork was cut leading to a lot of very loud people complaining with hyperbole in their outrage.

Elon remains the most effective person in history at wielding wealth for the benefit of mankind. It is not particularly close and he has banked more credibility for moon-shot efforts (pun intended) than anyone on the planet.

> The fact is, it’s not. Aid was relocated to other departments and continued.

Source?

All the recent data I can find shows a more than 80% decline in global food aid, education, and vaccinations, as of February 2026.

Education aid for 23 million children, 95 million lost access to basic healthcare, and from March 2025 to Feb 2026, an estimated ~3 million preventable deaths caused by this.

Sources: https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/issues/making-foreign-a...

https://firstfocus.org/resource/fact-sheet-usaid-cuts-total-...

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/chikungunya/quick-takes-death-tol...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/02/04/africa-trump...

https://www.rescue.org/article/innovation-vs-cuts-humanitari...

How do we take it away from him?

> I absolutely despise Musk at the same time for being absolute buffoon

Buffoonery is harmless, why despise him for that?

Tell that to the 100k+ people he killed by abruptly and illegally halting usaid

What I've heard is it's "thousands", "100k+", and "millions", which doesn't sound like anything trustworthy.

Besides, that's not what "buffoonery" means.

Here you go - hundreds of thousands as of Nov 2025 - https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...

The link blames the Trump administration, not Musk.

google sez: "The World Health Organization (WHO) is the UN's specialized agency for health, aiming to ensure the highest possible level of health for all people. It acts as a global leader, directing health emergencies, promoting healthier lives, expanding universal health coverage, and setting international health standards based on science."

Why isn't the WHO stepping up?

2 to 3 years is wildly optimistic. Of the 5 launches last year 3 were failures and it's not even close to be ready for humans yet.

Some people don’t understand the difference between testing and use. You can afford to test when your launches cost 1/100 of SLS launches instead of risking human lives. Artemis II was human rated with zero launches of its life support equipment, modeling failures of its heat shield, multiple power issues in its only predecessor flight in space. Starship will carry humans after hundreds of launches and landings.

I don't believe that to be true. Starship may host humans next year if it can get to a stable orbit and manage to demonstrate sufficient control for docking. It is extremely unlikely to demonstrate any environmental control before that.

You’re not seeing better engines because there aren’t any. We are reaching the limits of physics.

That’s why we are working on alternatives like refueling in space or reusable ships.

The Artemis missions are testing things that we still have a lot of area to improve upon — materials (a huge one), international standards for things like docking ports, computing, radiation safety, and a lot more.

Artemis II doesn’t have any docking hardware since it won’t have anything to dock with. And Artemis in general is just using the IDSS used on the ISS and by Dragon and Starliner, nothing new being discovered or tested there.

Yeah, RS25/SSME still have a higher specific impulse than any boost stage engine in operation, past or present.

<snark>Did we really need to spend $90 billion and send people past the Moon to troubleshoot Bluetooth?</snark>[1]

Sharing because this seems to capture the je ne sais quoi that seems off about Artemis for me.

1. https://github.com/RICLAMER/Artemis_II_2026

NASA's Artemis II Live Views from Orion, 04 - Day 1-2 - 03-04-2026 - 1645-Transcript-EN.txt: "03/04/2026 - 18:57:27 (-3 TMZ) | 01:23:22:27 (Artemis Clock) "No joy seeing the device in the list of available devices when I attempt to re-pair it after doing the Bluetooth forget."

Also the heatshield is designed in a way that is cheaper to manufacture but less safe.

> but less safe

Depending on the outcome, that’s also a way to say less overengineered.

Actually, at this moment, the top 3 parent posts are all about how people aren't responding positively enough to this event. I think it's really cool, and more people would be more exited, if there wasn't so much else going on. To be fair, I already had the conversation this weekend that the late 60s-70s were also quite fraught.

Maybe we really have just been jaded by hours of youtube and tiktok shorts? I watched it on a 9" B/W crt and I was amazed! Of course I hadn't seen 2001, StarWars, Contact, or The Expanse.

It's great for them, but I'm not really into reaction videos. Pictures taken by space probes are just as good as far as I'm concerned.

It's not for the reason that the parent commenter said, and it's not the moon (yet), but you can't take photos like this with probes alone: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2026/apr/05...

I see what you mean, but I kind of understand the reaction: what does this change in 99.99% of people lives? Nothing at all. It's not necessarily ignorance.

I think in this case more than 0.1% feel a bit of inspiration in a time of darkness.

To me, the importance of crewed spaceflight like this cannot be overstated. I think my way of thinking was best phrased by Eddie Izzard: "When we landed on the moon, that was the point where god should have come up and said hello. Because if you invent some creatures, put them on the blue one and they make it to the grey one, you fucking turn up and say 'well done'".

Now, it's not the reason I'm an atheist, but "getting from the blue one to the grey one" (and hearing nothing) is so big that to me it disproves at the very least the existence of a personal god.

You may think it ridiculous, but I'm trying to convey why some people would think that it does change their life.

Most world events don't change 99.99% of people's lives, and yet they matter too. The only big world event, maybe in my entire life, that affected my life was covid. Because I lived in a lockdown country.

It's also not the first time humans are seeing the far side of the moon, Ronald Evans orbitted the Moon 75 times in the orbital module during Apollo 17 (and other ppl did before him), so he also saw it right? The only unique thing is that its the first mission where they dont really do anything more interesting than looking at the far side

Apollo 8 did pretty much the same thing so not a first there either, but a first for today’s Orion architecture.

I'm very excited about the later steps of the Artemis project!

Landing on the Moon South Pole and start setting up the lunar station there will be a huge step, especially after 50 years of nothing!!

But this flight has already been done without a crew. Doing it with a human crew is important, but it achieves nothing new and exciting.

> it achieves nothing new and exciting

I thought this but have since changed my mind. On board, real humans tax life-support systems in a way that’s difficult to simulate. And real human astronauts garble processes and communications with ground control in ways that a nation that hasn’t done deep spaceflight in a generation could probably do with practice on.

I half agree. It is new and important.

But it's hard, at least for me personally, to get really excited about it...

I thought the various space stations were there to develop & test life-support systems long term?

> thought the various space stations were there to develop & test life-support systems long term?

I thought ducks were a preparation of chicken until my early teens. I was wrong.

We have never flown this deep-space life-support system on the ISS together. In parts, yes. But that doesn’t substitute for a real mission. As for simulations, how would you rate your experience from a role play versus the real deal?

But we, as humans, were literally "been there, done that". Nothing new is happening. We are just picking up the ball where we dropped it 50 years ago. The ship is somehow newer and even has a toilet. The said toilet receives most news coverage.

Agreed, every astronaut says no photo prepares you for actually being there.

Knowing what the far side looks like and floating there looking at it are completely different things

People are struggling to afford every day life and we are surrounding by crazy things every day like cellphones talking to satellites in space. On any objective measure it is definitely amazing to send humans to the moon, but there are more pressing issues for most people right now.

If we as a species had more of our ducks in a row we may be able to better celebrate this as the achievement for humankind that it is.

1969 wasn’t exactly all flowers and sunshine either.

Yeah your life must really suck if you only care about immediate hurdles and pains without making room for hope or creativity

you’re making their point, you just don’t know it yet

And your life might be very privileged to so flippantly disregard anyone’s reality that is just that difficult.

It's that difficult but they're also commenting on hn.

And? Is that a hurdle or something? You know homeless people are allowed to go on the internet? Smartphones? You'll find other homeless or desolate people here on HN - I won't name anyone out of respect but if you read enough comments here over time you would recognize them.

Well yes. For too many people, life does suck for that very reason.

That's not something to mock people for; it's a problem to apply your mind to and fix.

> it's a problem to apply your mind to and fix

In kids, sure. In adults, not sure it’s worth the effort on a society wide basis.

nah, it just seems like that on Twitter. We have more prosperity by far than we've ever had in history, this is a time to celebrate.

We have our 'ducks in a row' more now than in the 1960's when we went to the moon because of a cold war and nuclear annihilation / escalation.

My grandparents were born on farms with no electricity, plumbing, there was no real 'police' no social services, no healthcare, no antibiotics, 10% of children did not make it past age 1. That's in living memory.

Despite the insanity on the news, it's mostly drama, and we still have more people coming out of abject poverty than ever.

We have 'modern world problems', they are real problems for sure, but they are of a different scale entirely.

Frankly, it may never even get that much better as we may be hitting diminishing marginal returns on 'progress' - we now have to figure out how to live 'long lives and stay healthy'.

It's a fine time to go to the moon.

It is a fine time to be going to the moon, but we could be doing multiple productive things at the same time. It just doesn't surprise me that there are so many people that are not caring so much about this.

We are doing multiple productive things. Zillions of them.

They are like 50 companies making robots right now that will soon do a lot of work.

There are advances in many fields.

Headlines are dominated by something else, the 'news' is not a good reflection of reality.

What about the workers that will be eventually replaced by said robots? You think they're just going to get free money to exist? Most likely they'll end up in the private prison system or in institutions while the corporations pocket all of the savings. Things are a lot more complicated than they seem I think...

95% of us used to labour as serfs on farms. 4.5% were technical trades. 0.5% noble class, 0.01% high elite.

The industrial revolution moved almost 95% of people away from direct agrarian labour.

We'll find ways.

It won't be pretty in some cases, but we'll figure it out.

I hope you're right but I think it won't be pretty in all cases. It's easy to forget the industrial revolution wasn't entirely positive for common people or for that matter the environment.

That's upside down. The industrial revolution was more beneficial for 'common people' than it was for anyone else.

The 'industrial revolution' upended the ancien regime of basically feudal order.

For the fist time, it created actual 'surplus' in the economy, and that surplus went into all sorts of things: education, leisure, the arts, medicine, travel.

The very concept of 'working people' taking a vacation - very modern idea.

Then that broke through into basic real emancipation, universal suffrage.

Then medicine, healthcare, social services etc.

All of that only happens because of elevated productivity that's not captured by a passive elite.

The game is different now for sure, but there's almost no argument that can be made for 'less surplus'.

It's almost like saying 'what if energy were free, that would be bad'. No - it would mostly be good.

Well figure it out

I don’t think people are spending their time on more pressing issues. I think they are just are hooked on an endless stream of content that is built for addiction and is always within arms reach.

people have been struggling to afford every day life for decades. So that’s nothing new. Unless only people in the 1st world count as people lol.

You’re either emotionally consumed by the human struggle or not, it’s a personality thing - in my opinion. You’re allowed to be poor and a nerd, unless I missed the memo. I’ve met poor and wealthy people that are excited by space.

Struggling to meet our basic needs is not a recent phenomenon. It has been a part of the human condition for millenia, not just decades.

Some people think that if we can just eliminate our 'struggles' by building AI tools to do the hard thinking or robots to perform all our labor; that civilization would become some kind of utopia. I don't believe that. Progress happens when we do hard things.

> for millenia

Since the first life appeared.

I see that "whitey on the moon" is back.

If it makes you feel better, the amount of money the United States spends on space is a very small percentage compared overall entitlement spending. There is always going to be some level of inequality, so your maxim that we should only spend money on space exploration when those problems are solved just isn't workable. The enormous amount of money the United States spends on "solving" inequality and poverty begs the question of if that's even an effective or efficient allocation of resources in the first place.

1. Do you think that it is the mission that is misguided, or the methods, in "solving" inequality and poverty?

2. What would you rather the money be spent on?

1. Both.

2. I don't understand the question. What money?

1. Why would eradicating poverty not be something to strive for?

2. The money you mentioned as basis of the comment I replied to. But if you have a cognitive disability which precludes the ability to follow a conversation's thread, I can summarize the previous state at the start of each response.

For some numbers:

The Artemis program has an estimated cost of 93B since 2012 [0].

As a comparison:

"Between 2020 and 2024, $771 billion in Pentagon contracts went to just five firms: Lockheed Martin ($313 billion), RTX (formerly Raytheon, $145 billion), Boeing ($115 billion), General Dynamics ($116 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($81 billion). In comparison, the total diplomacy, development, and humanitarian aid budget, excluding military aid, was $356 billion."[1]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#cite_note-NASA...

1. https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/economic/us-federa...

America has spent more than the equivalent of Artemis blowing up yet another middle eastern country for no good reason. I know which I'd rather get the money.

it's amazing, but I'll refer you to Gil Scott-Heron for my feelings on the matter

  A rat done bit my sister Nell
  With whitey on the moon
  Her face and arms began to swell
  And whitey's on the moon
  I can't pay no doctor bills
  But whitey's on the moon
  Ten years from now I'll be payin' still
  While whitey's on the moon
  The man just upped my rent last night
  Cause whitey's on the moon
  No hot water, no toilets, no lights
  But whitey's on the moon
  I wonder why he's upping me?
  Cause whitey's on the moon?
  Well I was already giving him fifty a week
  With whitey on the moon
  Taxes taking my whole damn check
  Junkies making me a nervous wreck
  The price of food is going up
  And as if all that shit wasn't enough:
  A rat done bit my sister Nell
  With whitey on the moon
  Her face and arm began to swell
  And whitey's on the moon
  Was all that money I made last year
  For whitey on the moon?
  How come I ain't got no money here?
  Hmm! Whitey's on the moon
  Y'know I just 'bout had my fill
  Of whitey on the moon
  I think I'll send these doctor bills
  Airmail special
  To whitey on the moon

Great share, thank you!

Interesting. For all of Gil Scott-Heron's brilliance, this is by far my least favorite work of his.

It's fine to not be interested, but this time one of the astronauts is black

I just came across this poem a few days ago and had the opportunity to think about it.

It’s a valuable perspective to hear. As someone prone to getting caught up in the breathless excitement about science, progress, human achievement, etc., it is a hard truth that these things are abstract and not relevant for people who are struggling with day-to-day life, particularly when those struggles are a result of the same government that is executing this mission.

However, the older I get, the less I bind to the idea of a single, correct truth. This perspective doesn’t invalidate the perspective that the mission is valuable. The complexity of the system in which this is taking place means that these things (moon missions and affordable healthcare) aren’t fungible for one another; his poverty wasn’t the result of the moon mission, it was the result of EVERYTHING that had happened over the 100 years prior.

So it’s useful to hear. It’s a sharp, valid reality check for those of us who like to think in big, abstract concepts. And, it’s one perspective among myriad valid perspectives.

Kind of a false dichotomy. How about medical care as a right for a big abstract concept? He's not anti-science here, he's against the inequality of its distribution.

> Kind of a false dichotomy.

That’s precisely my point. Some stanzas in the poem suggest that there’s a direct connection between the moon mission and his poverty.

> The man just upped my rent last night > cause Whitey’s on the moon

> Was all that money I made last year > For Whitey on the moon?

And my point then was that I can see and empathize with his frustration, but I don’t feel it’s a singularly correct perspective to the exclusion of the perspective that the missions were of great value.

But he's not blaming his poverty on "whitey on the moon" but the lack of healthcare. There is an opportunity cost to war, Moon/Mars missions etc.

I don’t mean to badger, but how can this stanza:

> The man just upped my rent last night > cause Whitey’s on the moon

Be interpreted as anything other than directly blaming his poverty on the moon mission?

There is an opportunity cost to everything. Moving money from energy research to food programs may mean not having an energy breakthrough that could potentially cut down food costs (and a lot of other things) dramatically in the long run.

The poem itself seems to mix several things (It is a poem, and can say whatever it wants of course). What parent said doesn't preclude medical care as a right for a concept, though.

Also, a cursory search says around 2 trillion are spent on healthcare (effectively or not is irrelevant in this context) and NASA moon exploration costs $90B. Doesn't feel like these are all mutually exclusive.

I don't think it's actually a useful perspective at all. The poem is racial resentment repackaged as a means to guilt trip people into feeling bad about adventure, science, and exploration. Unless they were pretty well read at a young age, most millennials probably first experienced this poem in the film First Man, where it is read as a backdrop to Apollo 11 traveling to the moon. It's a great scene because the juxtaposition is stark. We can either hold ourselves back an an endless and futile journey on solving the human condition of poverty and inequality, or we can explore the stars. It's an easy choice.

> We can either hold ourselves back an an endless and futile journey on solving the human condition of poverty and inequality, or we can explore the stars. It's an easy choice.

Wait... Are you suggesting that "exploring the stars" is less of an endless and futile journey than dealing with poverty and inequality?

Solving poverty and inequality is for the short term - they'll come back and need solving again no matter how many times you already solved them. But once the stars are explored, they stay explored forever. So yea, that's moving forwards and the other isn't.

The closest stars are way too far to reach on any reasonable timescale. That's not even mentioning the fact that moving forwards is a vague goal. Moving forwards towards what exactly? And if the US government got off of it's ass to... Oh I don't know, maybe fix the bullshit healthcare system we have and help people with tax money instead of bombing people for Israel things would improve quite a bit in a very short time. That's assuming we don't bomb each other over terroritorial squabbles first. In any case I don't really understand your defeatism when it comes to inequality but when it's something as difficult as interstellar space travel you seem to be optimistic.

It's not optimism and defeatism, it's recognizing that one of them lasts and the other doesn't. Political changes like you listed can easily be reversed in future, but if we discover something in space, we'll keep that discovery forever even if we stop exploring.

> they'll come back and need solving again

So like "whitey going to the moon" again on Artemis II?

Only 75%

No, not at all.

I am saying that there we never be a world in which poverty and inequality do not exist, unless we are all dead. Maybe it's because I'm an American, but this perspective that grand adventure and exploration is pointless or not worth it is totally foreign to me.

I'm an American, too, and justice-for-all is my watchword—not this "grand adventure" costume for self-aggrandizement.

Sorry, how is it a costume? It literally is a grand adventure.

It's a disguise for self-aggrandizement.

"Grand" and "adventure" are subjective terms.

> We can either hold ourselves back an an endless and futile journey on solving the human condition of poverty and inequality, or we can explore the stars. It's an easy choice.

"Sorry, poor people; but I want to live on Jupiter so you're just gonna have to starve to death".

What a loser

Yea what other technological progress was only wanted by losers? Most of it, by your standard. Yet it's also technological progress that has reduced poverty. You don't care about the people of the future and want to keep them in poverty for the sake of the people of today. I wouldn't call you a loser for that but you do have bad morals.

Technological progress had to invent poverty before it could reduce it.

Is it meant to guilt trip people? Or is it an honest expression of the frustration (and yes, racial resentment) that the author feels?

This is why I consider it a useful perspective to hear. I read this as a human being simply saying “this is how I feel in these circumstances”.

It’s uncomfortable, and I don’t believe that space exploration should be gated on solving poverty and inequality, but it is important to understand that an intelligent, thoughtful human being arrived at this place.

In a sense I feel that this is actually an appeal to the same sense of curiosity that drives space exploration. Why do we explore space? To learn and understand. Why should we consider human perspectives we don’t agree with? To learn and understand.

You could plausibly argue that the poem, when it was written, was meant as an honest expression of frustration, but the context in which it was deployed makes whatever original intent of the author irrelevant. The whole point of the poem's deployment once it was published was to say "white people are wasting money on a moon rocket, they should be spending money on inner city black poverty". Otherwise I think you're reading a bit too much into it. There's nothing more to learn or understand from this poem. "Don't spend money on rockets and going to space, spend it on entitlements and 'fighting' poverty". We get it.

> an endless and futile journey on solving the human condition of poverty and inequality

It’s very telling that you think poverty can’t be solved.

—

I can't pay no doctor bills

But whitey's on the moon

Ten years from now I'll be payin' still

While whitey's on the moon

The man just upped my rent last night

Cause whitey's on the moon

No hot water, no toilets, no lights

But whitey's on the moon

I wonder why he's upping me?

Cause whitey's on the moon?

Well I was already giving him fifty a week

With whitey on the moon.

Rest in peace Gil-Scott Heron.

Yes, I remember that nihilistic piece of race rage bait and I remember it well. Now that 'non-whitey' is gliding past the moon and has shown he is past all that race-rage baiting by stating that [1] this is just — this is human history ... It’s the story of humanity — not black history, not women’s history I hope that the like of Scott-Heron and those who like to push this type of narrative are willing to finally take that hammer to ram down that nail into the coffin of the 'systemic racism narrative'.

No, I'm not holding my breath, the narrative if far too profitable for far too many people [2] to be put to rest.

[1] https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-black-astronaut-on-arte...

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11151740-racism-is-not-dead...

Wanda Sykes is also famous for a pithier more recent take on it

Why are you so angry about a black person's perspective of what the moon landing meant to them? Rather than putting a nail in the coffin of the "systemic racism narrative", your post underlines how long we still have to go as a society to take black people's perspectives seriously, rather than simply denigrating them as "race bait."

Their HN profile is a bunch of complaints about being rate-limited for shitty takes. It's the norm.

I get the general frustration there, but it's weird to focus on NASA's budget when it's such a teeny tiny fraction of the total.

Yes, there's a lot of government waste, but NASA ain't it.

And I would suggest that the billionaire class and unfettered capitalism are far more responsible for the modern day version of Scott-Heron's woes than the good ol' government scapegoat.

If DOGE served for anything at all it was for showing that there isn’t even that much “waste” per se. If there’s any waste it’s in the Pentagon which can’t even audit itself, but of course DOGE didn’t even get close to that. It was all performative for them.

I think they proved that the waste is not easily defined. I would call fraud, waste, but a computer program isn't likely to discover it without boots on the ground looking to see if the money is actually going where the records indicate.

The richest person in the world, who has had billions from government handouts, decided they were going to audit government spending.

Fraud doesn't even begin to describe it.

SpaceX did not receive government subsidies. Government contracts, yes, but those are payments for services delivered, not subsidies or handouts.

Those contracts are direct subsidies. They would not exist in the private market. Government spending subsidizes whatever it spends on.

> Those contracts are direct subsidies.

They are not. You are imputing your own meanings into the word "subsidy". If you buy a Coke from a Coke machine, you are not "subsidizing" the machine's vendor.

The author of this poem went to great lengths to show his racism. It reminds me of a post, probably on Reddit, of a similar racist nature. Just when it's going in the other direction it's clearer.

The post was by a man, supposedly white, who had to pull his child or children from private school because he could not pay for it. His frustration was based on the fact that his taxes were higher than the school tuition, and that another student at the school, a black student, was having his tuition paid by the government. He implied that he was paying for another person's education, and could not afford his own child's education. He saw the same dichotomy as that expressed in the poem, in the other direction.

He could be expressing the generational frustration of being black in America. When things are so segregated you feel you are looking across at a different country landing on the moon, you might write such a poem.

> He could be expressing the generational frustration of being black in America

I’m sure that’s how the racist young Republicans would defend themselves too. It’s hard being a young man in America today.

It's safe to assume that racist young Republicans contribute more to the difficulty of being black in America than vice versa. What's your point?

> It's safe to assume that racist young Republicans contribute more to the difficulty of being black in America than vice versa

If racism follows “eye for an eye,” sure. I don’t think most people feel someone being discriminated at when young is excused from being racist when older. If that is the case, everyone who had any poverty in their childhood is off the hook for horrible behavior. That isn’t true, at least for most voters anywhere.

Apparently Artemis 2 Victor Glover listened to this weekly on his commute to NASA.

there's zero difference between a photo taken by them and one by cameras on ISS.

Stealing a link from a comment by ceejayoz, the difference is like a 5% or 10% [it got deleted now] https://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/comments/1sd797j/the_moon...

Too late to edit: perhaps a bit more than 10%. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47651659

Reply on news.ycombinator.com