The borderless, unifying sense of our world as a single global community that entranced us after Apollo, and might have marshalled us all to act together for a greater environmental good, could have been amplified by social media. Instead, these platforms’ profit-driven, algorithmically tuned echo chambers have driven many of us in the opposite direction. Instead of fighting for the habitability of our home, we are fighting each other; our minds occupied by divisive, polarising politics and broken international relations.
Peky little bastards, aren’t we?
Now four of us have ventured far away from our divided planet again. This international crew of calm, curious, kind, thoughtful people represents the best of us. They symbolise something important. They will ride a spaceship built by communities from 11 nations who have harnessed their inherent diversity of thought and their broader problem-solving abilities to accomplish a new moonshot. Instead of individual nations racing there, the Artemis missions represent a group of united nations going to the moon together, first to fly around the moon this week with Artemis II, then to land there in 2028. Sixty-one countries have signed the Artemis accords, a set of global agreements committing to working peacefully together in space and on the moon.
Like fuck. The Kumbayah this will last 90 seconds then it’s back to normality again. Fractious little beasts that we are.
This international crew of calm, curious, kind, thoughtful people represents the best of us.
They are still getting paid, though, aren’t they ?
I’m trying to work out how The Potatonator deduced that they were all those things. It’s not like the Apollo landings where the crew had to be pretty shit-hot at the spaceflight business.
They even threatened to go on strike if they weren’t allowed to steer the capsules !
The Right Stuff is a fabulous film. The thumbs-up moment in the B-29 cockpit is magnificent. It ought to be on at Christmas, to show our little pink/blue darlings what proper men are. And women, come to that.
Wrong rag(ging).
International. The world did this. Not America. Not capitalism.
They will ride a spaceship built by communities from 11 nations who have harnessed their inherent diversity of thought and their broader problem-solving abilities to accomplish a new moonshot.
Where are those 11 ‘diverse’ nations: Africa, South America or maybe on the Sub-Continent?
It was also a case-study in international collaboration, given that ESA, NASA, and industry partners Airbus and Lockheed Martin for the first time had to design, build, test, and fly a fully integrated human-rated spacecraft, with most critical functions dependent and interconnected across U.S. and European systems.
No, it’s just white people…
Oho. So every time they want to change the design of a wingnut, they have to get consensus from 11 nations.
Meanwhile back at SpaceX:
Engineer: I want to change the design of this wingnut.
Elon: The best part is no part. Scrap it.
Embarrassing, isn’t it? Best not to mention it. Or try to fob off these counties as “diverse”, nowadays.
The engineers aren’t.
.
It was about 6 years between Cuban missile crisis and Apollo 8 flying around the moon. I don’t recall it unifying people that time. There was even heightened tension during Apollo 11 that the Soviet probe also on the way to the moon might interfere with the mission,
Spit!
“This international crew of calm, curious, kind, thoughtful people represents the best of us.”
Astronauts are about the most overrated people on the planet. One of them is a pilot, the rest are passengers.
And this project is a waste of money, like nearly all manned spaceflight. Once you’ve gone to space, landed on the moon, you’ve proven you can do it. What’s the point in going back? What actual value is generated for humanity from billions of dollars spent?
I couldn’t agree more. At Risk & Progress https://risknprogress.substack.com/p/how-china-will-get-to-the-moon I commented:
On its own a lunar base is a waste of time, prompting the saying “Never interrupt the enemy when they are making a mistake.” NASA has over nearly six decades proven beyond doubt that crewed spaceflight just isn’t worth it. Most of the cost and effort goes into keeping astronauts alive, and very little into scientific research.
However.
It’s the technology spinoffs that make space exploration pay, not only better rocket engines, but better materials that may one day end up in cars and kitchens; better systems that may cure cancer and feed the world. And there’s the economic multiplier effect. High-tech manufacture has a very high multiplier. It doesn’t even matter if the damn rocket never gets off the ground. The economy still gets a massive boost, and a huge cohort of expert STEM people.
“On its own a lunar base is a waste of time, ”
You may say that, but it is a huge boost to the purple wig-making industry !
and string vests
That was the submarine corps.
Heresy. Burn him.
When the future was fab.
“It’s the technology spin offs”….. Having believed that Velcro, Teflon and Memory Foam were spin offs from the space race, I now discover that they weren’t.
The Fisher Space pen was developed for use in space in the 1960’s but not by NASA.
They are still used today…..
Don’t know if this is true.
NASA spent a lot of money developing a pen that would write in zero gravity for their astronauts. (Star sailors.)
The USSR gave their Cosmonauts (Space sailors) pencils. Pencils are still available today.
And how many countries were in USSR?
Yes, about that…
Turns out pencils are crap in space.
The shavings get everywhere. And if you break off the lead you now have a small piece of conductor floating around that will get into a circuit at just the wrong time.
Cleaning in microgravity is a real problem. You are conditioned to look “down” when trying to find stuff. And there’s no down, or it changes.
Yes, and it’s not just the risk of debris getting into the machinery. An astronaut could inhale those floating bits, or have them drift into his or her eyes. The Soviets used pencils because they were cheap, while NASA could afford the right tool for the job.
“Don’t know if this is true”. Sorry, it is and NASA didn’t:
“No, NASA did not develop a pen that would work in space. That’s a popular urban legend (sometimes exaggerated to claim NASA spent millions or even billions of taxpayer dollars), but it’s not true” From Grok.
If you spend money anywhere you will get some spinoffs. CERN led to the WWW. Radar was massively improved by WW2. But WW2 also meant William Shockley worked on submarine detection instead of transistors, delaying the development of them by 3 years.
Spending money on space travel means taking money from somewhere else. You tax people to do it and they don’t get some medical treatment, or buy a better car. That hampers the development of new medicines, or some new car feature. Spinoffs from those won’t appear, either (like certain blue pills).
War also cost us Alan Blumlein.
You likely have a radar spinoff in your kitchen. The microwave oven is a direct descendant, they were initially called radar ranges.
Sure. And we had to fight WW2, got a few perks out of it, but what was the cost to get the perks. What if you had that money in your pocket instead, what would you have spent it on instead? Maybe we wouldn’t have had microwaves so early but other things would have been invented instead.
“What if…” is the core of speculative fiction.
This *should* be a Bloody Big Hint for the advisability of its use in adult conversation about actual reality.
Well we could have had computers a bit quicker, if the British Government weren’t a bunch of short sighted f*ckwits, and decided that having invented them to help win the war, they better destroy most of them immediately the war ended, and tell everyone who worked on them never to mention them again. Oh, and while we’re at it, lets sell Uncle Joe some of our top secret jet engines too.
Lets make that short sighted traitorous f*ckwits.
The Colossi weren’t really programmable computers, though they did share much of the early technology. And some of the senior guys from Bletchley went on to help develop the first computers at Manchester and elsewhere. But in 1946 the UK was broke and the US was awash with dollars.
‘What’s this “we”, white man?’
-Tonto
Don’t they have a cliche alert bell in the editors office? How many times have we heard this over the years. Best I remember was the utter metldown after Diana died. People were wandering around in a miasma of “things will never be the same again”.wafted in their direction from every media outlet. But they were the same shortly after the rotting flowers were cleared away…
Don’t they have a cliche alert bell…?
Self-awareness is not the Guardian’s strong point…
Nope. There was an order of magnitude increase in general sentimentality and things have only become worse since then. “People’s Princess” indeed. Look where that’s got us.
Yarp, that stupid, narcissistic, doe-eyed but also cynically manipulative cow was to the great mass of people what Blair was to the Bolshevik progressives.
I do not know, perhaps history will record that he split her whiskers.
Either way, between them, they opened multiple floodgates to Dolby surround-sound cuntishness. And that is a box which needs its filling to be put back.
Footfall by 2028, eh? We’re talking NASA here… I’ll be surprised if it’ll be 2030…
God, I hate this kind of “serious” moralistic guff. Who and what the fuck does this writer think xe is?
Diversity of thought? That’s not how you get engineering done. These people are consistantly single-mindedly uniform of thought: get a rocket to the moon and back.
As as many SciFi films have shown us, the absolute last thing you want in a space crew is diversity of thought. Space crews in reality are carefully picked to work together and to eliminate as much diversity as possible.
But one wonder how much diversity there is there? They’re all going to be the same. second (or more) generation university grads from very similar (if not the same) universities. It’s today’s central problem. All the people running everything with similar thinking. They actively work to keep people not like them out of the decision loops So every situation has the same responses..
They talk about diversity of thought but it’s a fair bit that the number of Elon Musk types involved in this venture is as close to zero as fuck it is to swearing.
Nobody will challenge the orthodoxy so when something doesn’t seem right it won’t get picked up or corrected
https://youtu.be/8qAi_9quzUY?si=qoG8hIA9XlFEQOCv
And most anything in governance & commerce…
The Musk Types have the contract for the actual lander…. And the necessary in-space refuelling… and….
It’s funny how NASA is “considering” opening up that contract because of “delays in development” at SpaceX, even though they themselves are more than 5 years delayed in building a slightly altered Space Shuttle booster with a capsule on top.
With a service module that *doesn’t* even have the fuel capacity to get back from the moon , unless a *very* specific orbit is used.
All the guff aside, if you look at what the planned Moon landing is supposed to look like, it’s really NASA getting to launch a “modernised” Apollo capsule to the Moon, using Space Shuttle and old Nuclear Projection spare parts, to hitch a ride on transport and landing infrastructure SpaceX is supposed to have in place already.
If you replace the whole SLS with a modified Dragon support module SpaceX could have already done this 3 years ago….
It’s “just” flinging a crewed capsule around the Moon, after all…
Meanwhile SpaceX is putting Ship v3 through its earthside cryogenic refuelling test paces as we type..
Indicating that this particular set of iterations will have it actually land *and* be re-used..
By the time Artemis III goes up, Musk *should* be able to have a crew orbiting the Moon, match orbits with the capsule, do a neighbourly spacewalk, and offer to clean their viewports while topping up their tank….
One of the reasons that Elon gave for being successful at SpaceX and also Tesla was that he had no prior experience and came at things from a fresh perspective.
Let’s hope the images they send back of our fragile home bring acceptance of global communism.
FIFY.
And fragile? PUH-lease. No doubt, it needs global communism to protect it.
As a ‘Merican, I take full damn credit for Artemis. That we contracted out parts of it means FA.
Yes this is just like the sympathy many people expressed for the Americans after 9/11. Which lasted until they decided to do something about it instead of just wailing.
I remember when Septics expressed lots of concern about the Provos murdering civilians in Belfast. Wailing they were, the Septics, at the grannies and kiddies perforated with nails. They could not bear it. And they did not raise money for the Provos. That defo did not happen. And they also did not allow guns to be run to the Provos.
But, because we’re a bunch of cunts, the first ‘allied’ servicemen into the Afghan in about October 2001 were Royal Marines SF.
Yours ever
Lord Fucking Palmerson
Palmerston.
Ahem.
There is no RM SF. There is the SAS and the SBS (and the SRR) but there are RM in the SAS, and now and then an army bod decides to go SBS. That that latter is the rarer option – esp given the far bigger a number of parent units – says something.
Yes, I meant the SBS. Perhaps better described as RN SF.
But I think I am right in saying that it was the SBS who were the first ‘allied’ troops – or ‘swimmer canoeists’ if you prefer – into Afghanistan in October 2001.