speaking of space, we just had a launch
Apr 01 · 5 weeks ago · 👍 Homer, bluesman, bsj38381
30 Comments ↓
I thought it was an April fool's prank. but I guess it's real
👻 darkghost · Apr 01 at 23:02:
Enjoyed watching it with my little kids
They must've found the old set and props in LA from the last time.
Was pretty cool watching the launch live on youtube
Capricorn one.
@stack Capricorn One was a great movie. If you enjoy it, you might also like the Russian mockumentary "First on the Moon" (Первые на Луне) about a Soviet moon mission in 1938.
I heard about it on the news. (I usually never watch the news on Tv, or at least not too much)
I just watched Capricorn One a few months back. Small planet, as they say.
🚀 lars_the_bear · Apr 02 at 06:56:
Nobody seemed to notice. FWIW I've written about this here:
— Did somebody just launch a Moon rocket?
I knew vaguely this was going on since Artemis I launched. Didn't realize it was *happening* until I saw this about twenty minutes before launch
— drmollytov.smol.pub/2026-04-01
I'm really glad I caught it. I think this is the first NASA launch I've ever watched live. I've watched a couple SpaceX launches, but this is a lot more exciting.
👻 darkghost · Apr 02 at 13:57:
My kids were pretty excited. They're looking forward to their own Apollo moment. Frankly, so am I. I'm too young to have witnessed it the first time around. The low hanging fruit has been harvested scientifically. But you could still discover new species by laying in the jungle covered in honey. You just won't get any media coverage for doing so. Made up species like big foot, the Jersey devil, or the honest car salesman are what get media attention.
🚀 lars_the_bear · Apr 02 at 15:08:
@darkghost : "But you could still discover new species by laying in the jungle covered in honey. You just won't get any media coverage for doing so."
Oh, I don't know. There are whole TV shows dedicated to people doing self-destructive things in the wilderness.
🌲 Half_Elf_Monk · Apr 03 at 05:00:
A comment from one of the novices in the half_elf_monastery: "Hey {half_elf_monk}, this rocket launch is AWESOME. But I bet the people who say the moon landing was faked are gonna say this was faked too. So even if they were right about the first one, and this is the first time we've been that far, it won't matter. Nothing will convince them."
👻 darkghost · Apr 03 at 09:39:
Nothing short of a stroll in space without a suit would be convincing to the most determined denier. That all said, I've definitely come around to the position that we had no business going to the moon when we did and it's sheer luck it didn't all fall apart. The knowledge gap was incredible and it took throwing a ton of money at the problem to make it happen. All good reasons why it wasn't sustainable and nobody's been back for half a century. The goal this time is to go back and be sustainable at least from a cost perspective. (I'm not convinced this is true this time either, at least not with SLS and the originally envisioned Gateway.)
🚀 lars_the_bear · Apr 03 at 09:46:
@darkghost : "...we had no business going to the moon when we did and it's sheer luck it didn't all fall apart."
Amazing luck, backed up by mind-boggling courage.
Oddly, I suspect it's going to be easier for people to claim this new Moon launch was faked than it is for the originals. We have better faking technology, and Artemis isn't the same world-wide public spectacle that Apollo was.
— https://bsky.app/profile/nikigrayson.com/post/3miik2wzosk25
The astronauts trying to get outlook working
I watched the crew's live interviews with the media last night. It brought a big smile to my face. Something positive for a change.
There are two ways to burn money by the trainload.
War and space "exploration".
If we must, I will take the second one.
If it cheers you up, good on you.
I would prefer not destroying money, and maybe feeding the hungry instead.
Okay.
🚀 lars_the_bear · Apr 04 at 12:26:
@stack : "...and maybe feeding the hungry instead."
I'd agree with you, if I thought there was the slightest chance that's where the money would go.
Yeah, hopeless. It would be better if the money was not taxes/inflated out of our pockets in the first place.
It has been now conclusively demonstrated that private enterprise can build and launch spacecraft, when profitable or at least appealing to shareholders.
There is absolutely no reason for governments to force unwilling citizens to fund this wasteful garbage.
If you like it so much, spend your own money and leave me out of it.
👻 darkghost · Apr 04 at 18:07:
Of course, private enterprise building and launching space craft got a huge leg up from.... government experience doing so. And who's the number one customer of this service? Government. There's only so many rich tourists who can afford to light half a million dollars on fire for a sick selfie. Elon charges $55 million per seat to go to the ISS. Frankly, the average citizen has no business being in space flight.
And then it's all fun until somebody dies. It's not a matter of if but when. Governments send people to die all the time. Criminals, soldiers, explorers, scientists managing emergencies. Quite different when private companies do though. Waivers, lawyers, insurance, it gets messy.
Yeah. The first time it meant something. Fifty years later -- there had better be a good reason to blow a trillion.
🌲 Half_Elf_Monk · Apr 09 at 15:10:
Y'all make some good points about the costs, which I hadn't thought of. This couldn't have been cheap. I too object to being taxed to support causes I find immoral or imprudent. That's something every side of the political spectrum in the US seems to agree on, just not the specifics.
That said, it occurs to me though that there are both national and human-scale interests involved in space exploration, which benefit everyone, and seem to make it worth it in the long run.
Nationally, space exploration could be a way to instigate interest in the sciences. Maybe the focus fosters a patriotism or esprit-de-corps as humanity. Maybe (maybe) elevate our attention beyond the banal, or the partisan and Cultural ForeverWar that lives rent-free in too many minds. Some generations had an Apollo 11 moment... others had a September 11 moment. Which do you think was better for the souls of the people watching?
Now, I don't think that a hope in technological progress is going to make wicked people into good ones (it hasn't ever historically), but that seems like a better place to turn your attention. It seems like... the extent to which a person interprets Artemis II as political ... is the extent to which they don't like it. Does that come from interest in the space-science axis, or one's relationship to political narratives?
Worldwide, I'd like us to be a more capable in our local space at least. Those capabilities might come in really useful someday. For example if there was a massive meteor that needed deflecting. You can't just scramble shuttle launches right now. We'd be better off having the equipment, sensors, thrusters, etc to detect/deflect extinction-level events. Heck, even the sentient AGI and lizard people running the goverments and people wearing tinfoil hats have a vested interest in planetary defense.
What did this mission actually teach us? Incremental bits of knowledge about the moon, testing equipment and flight paths. I hope they make the landing work. Whatever the casee, I doubt this thing will come back empty-handed, so to speak. I bet there are lots of places you could look that would present a case to justify this mission, scientifically speaking.
You know what I found really cool? The timing of it all. Two of those astronauts are Christian, and celebrated Easter... in space... pretty near L1 lagrange point. That's gotta be one of the more human things we've ever done.
Those are weak arguments for blowing trillions of dollars and bringing us closer to the end of the dollar and likely a new stone age.
Inspiring young people? That is just foolishness.
All this is about is putting military crap up there.
We are learning nothing usable.
Asteroid defense sounds reasonable, but the probability of an asteroid we can deflect in the next 50 years or so is negligible. 50 years is optimistic if we keep blowing money at this rate.
👻 darkghost · Apr 09 at 21:06:
I think the inspiration of young people is undervalued. I've had a scientific mind for as long as I can remember, but my intensity for it can be owed to Shuttle work and the intensity for which those folks work. It's hard to say how I might have personally turned out without that influence but I *think* I can credit it as an influence. But I'm a special case. I am one of those hideous mutants of a human being that actually READS the scientific papers that come out of work in space. My name might even be on a few proposals out there, though I never got anything off the ground.
I am being a bit harsh, but if you were to put a price tag on inspiration, for every scientist inspired by the space program, it's millions per head...
There must be a better way.
👻 darkghost · Apr 10 at 00:03:
Fair point. For all the documentaries with a French horn accompaniment I am not blind to the militaristic applications of the endeavor. Look how big my missiles are. I can put nukes on the moon and launch em anytime. Oh boy will you be in trouble 4 days from now when they finally arrive. Look at my space plane, I can pluck your satellites right out of orbit.
🚀 lars_the_bear · Apr 10 at 13:56:
@stack : doing good things for unworthy motives still amounts, in the end, to doing good things.
Sometimes, in their rush to do evil, our political leaders inadvertently do something noble.
@lars_the_bear: yes, sometimes it happens. Would probably be cheaper to decide policy with a coin toss. Come to think of it, current leadership seems very much a random walk.
I have a hard time coming up with anyithing actually useful that came out of the space program. Everything I can think of could have been reached with at least an order of magnitude less spending, often many orders of magnitude.
Again, I am a great fan of space science fiction, and I was definitely inspired by the Soyuz missions as a kid. But I was even more inspired by Stanislaw Lem and the Strugatsky brothers. And now I am a grown-up, and can see how wasteful and damaging the space program was.