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
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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
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"
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”.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, RS25/SSME still have a higher specific impulse than any boost stage engine in operation, past or present.
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.
<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."
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).
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.
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.
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.
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Another recent commentator wrote here that he's responsible for "millions" of dead via the curtailing of USAID.
I'm a bit skeptical of estimates that vary by 3 orders of magnitude.
For the sake of argument let’s say that number was accurate.
How would you feel about that?
I'm not engaging in convicting people without concrete evidence.
I think that the reason you reject the claims and won’t even entertain the notion as a hypothetical is because you know deep down that you’ve been duped by Musk and can’t admit that fact publicly.
Should incontrovertible proof of the magnitude of the atrocities that he has committed come to light you’ll pivot and say that it was worth it because he’s taking us to Mars.
That’s how conmen work and Musk is a damn good one. The sooner you can admit that you’re duped is the sooner you’ll stop letting yourself be duped by him.
I’ll admit that I was duped by him too. I used to believe his stuff and this dream of mars.
When you find proof of atrocities, feel free to post it.
> dream of mars
He's doing something about it, while nobody else does nuttin.
Meanwhile, https://medium.com/swlh/here-s-to-the-crazy-ones-941190f58c5...
And it's his money being spent on it, not yours. You're not out anything. And if he succeeds, we all win.
The starship is a reality. Not a con.
Why don’t you just admit that you don’t really give a shit how many people he kills or laws he breaks as long as he does cool space stuff?
Like why beat around the bush? Just be honest man. The honesty would be refreshing.
It’s not like this attitude is unprecedented in aeronautics.
He hasn't killed anybody. Nor has he been charged with any crimes.
google sez: "One estimate suggests Tesla’s impact, through emission reductions, has saved over 20,000 lives globally."
google sez: "A 2022 report suggested that Tesla and other electric vehicle technologies (which often include enhanced safety features) have contributed to saving thousands of lives."
Empathy is judged by what one is willing to freely give. Not by making someone else give, and not by spending someone else's money.
> It’s not like this attitude is unprecedented in aeronautics.
You'd be quite wrong. I've worked with many aeronautical engineers, and their primary concern is safety. I'm personally very proud that the system I worked on has never been at fault in an accident. When the MD-83 went down because of jackscrew failure, I was sweating bullets worrying that it was a 757. Whenever I board an aircraft that is a 757, I feel a lot of pride and I always ask to speak to the captain and ask him how he likes it. They always say they love the 757. Makes me happy!
Here's the deal. I feel the same way about it as you do Walter.
I don't really care about all those people who will die because of Musk's actions at Doge with USAID. Poor Americans, poor Africans, In the context of getting humanity to space are all just fuel for the fire -- just like the slaves in mittelwerk and Von Braun. You don't need to convince me that you care about human life and that Elon Musk does too with some nebulous numbers that indicate that Tesla cars save a smattering of lives through reduced collisions and emissions.
My criticism of Musk isn't that he's hurting people -- that's just what shitty people do and I can't stop him -- my criticism is that he's not actually going to do the cool shit that he said he was going to do. It's all a con.
I think they'll get Starship mostly figured out but it'll end up underdelivering on payload. I don't just mean like the way it already has but they claim to be fixing it in v2 and v3, I mean the final version that does launch and comes back to Earth will have a relatively underspecced payload compared to what he sold us as a bill of goods all those years ago. It won't facilitate going to Mars as he sells it but it will enable amazing orbital stuff that can maybe one day serve as a springboard to further space exploration.
But Mars, it just ain't happening.
If you listen to his recent interview with Dwarkesh[0] you'll see that Mars is off the table now. The moon is actually where the cool kids have always wanted to go to and not Mars. And we're building data centres in space now -- terawatts worth -- and robot taxis with robot chauffers or something?
Do you actually think that space will be the cheapest place to locate data centres by 2029? If not then, will it ever be? It seems pretty bogus to me. Why would he make such an outrageous claim? The physics seem to work out, but I'm not certain about the radiation issue in LEO. I don't know enough about it, but it seems to me that it will ultimately require redesigned hardware architectures that can handle this kind of stuff, the workload certainly seems amenable to it, so it should be doable. But designing new chip architectures, and producing and testing all this in three years, on top of everything else that will go into one of these satellites, on top of everything else that his companies are doing sounds too good to be true. This ain't happening in three years.
Do you actually think that Musk's companies will actually be fabbing terawatts of photovoltaics? He says they plan to do it all in house, so what does that mean? Are they going to make their own wafers? Their own ingots? Source their own sand? How long will take to scale up? I don't see hown they can ever compete with China and I'm sure China will knee-cap them at every turn to prevent a competitor in the solar market. I just don't see an American company ever producing a significant quality of solar panels ever again. Just like America is the pornography producing capital of the world and always will be I think it's going to be the same with solar for China. People specialize in what they're good at. That's just comparative advantage.
As for the Optimus Robot -- do you actually think humanoid robots are going to be a household item in the next five years? Worth shutting down to automobile assembly lines to convert into robot production lines? Seems a bit foolish to me when you could be selling cars, a proven product with a known market. I don't think I need to say too much about the robotaxi stuff -- this list of claims about self driving speaks for itself.[0]
When you listen to Elon Musk talk about these things in the interview and you look at his facial expressions and mannerisms, do you actually get the impression that he knows what he's talking about and not just blowing smoke up the host's ass? Because when I look at this stuff, I see a con-man. I see a flim-flam man doing the interview circuit to drum up some press for his impending IPO.
The way I see it Walter, you and others are still in denial about getting duped by Musk. I think on some level you're aware but pride prevents you from expressing doubts and you're still a ways off from admitting the possiblity that you could have been duped. I was duped too. It's okay to admit it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
Did you know that von Braun was jailed by the SS because he was spending too much time dreaming about planets and not enough about weapons? Von Braun was a dead man if he didn't do what they said. What would you do in his shoes?
As for Mars, I've advocated in this forum numerous times that a more practical goal was a Moon base. I doubt I'll live to see a man on Mars.
If Musk has 10 amazing goals, and delivers on 3 of them, is he a success or a con man? I say success. So what has he delivered on? Tesla, X, Grok, AI, Neuralink, The Boring Company (yes it is profitable!), reusable cheap rockets, and Starlink. Any one of those would be a storied lifetime achievement for anyone else.
Platitude alert: If you're not failing, you're not trying.
Who would you say is a more successful entrepreneur than Musk?
Musk can be both an successful entrepreneur and a conman. Just like how Musk can be a successful entrepreneur and an absolutely terrible father.
These things often go together like peanut butter and jam.
Ten amazing goals, and delivers on three is exactly how a con works -- The con-man over promises massively, delivers on the easier or more profitable stuff and then glosses over the stuff that they didn't deliver on.
The key difference between an overly ambitious but honest person and a conman is that a conman has absolutely no intention of folowing through on any of the things promise if they don't have to. They only deliver on what they have to to keep the con going and that's what Musk has been doing for well over a decade. I'm sure at some point he genuinely believed that self driving cars are right around the corner but he's come to realize that htey aren't and it doesn't matter because he can just make that same promise ove rand over and rubes fall for it time and time again.
As for your point regarding Von Braun, I highly recommend this biography[0] of him if you haven't read it. It contains details about that episode of his life and many more fascinating ones. I'm glad that you chose to defend Von Braun in your reply because it is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. People in the space community have been reflexively minimizing the hrm done by 'great men' for decades simply because they think space stuff is cool.
Just be honest with yourself about why you like Von Braun. You don't need to paint him in a sympathetic light becauase his persuit of something cool resulted in him making a pact with the devil that almost resulted in his death.
The question isn't whether or not a person like Musk is a successful entrepreneur or whether or not someone like Von Braun was a spectacular project manager. The question is whether not his current slate of promises -- space data centres, domestic robots, robotaxis etc... are credible.
I think that your choice to omit commenting on them is illuminating -- you know they're not credible. You know they exist to serve his financial interests and bolster his upcoming IPO with little regard for veracity or legality.
So yeah the question in my mind isn't "Does he do cool stuff?" but "is the cool stuff he does worth the negative externalities that he dumps on society?" and I think the answer to that is likely to be no.
Musk like all the other current crop of American oligarchs are weakening America's grip on the world and it will have calamitous effects on the American people.
[0] https://www.amazon.ca/Von-Braun-Dreamer-Space-Engineer/dp/03...
> Ten amazing goals, and delivers on three is exactly how a con works
A very cynical take. I've tried and failed at many things, and succeeded here and there. Does that make me a con man? If you're not failing, then you aren't trying.
> is the cool stuff he does worth the negative externalities that he dumps on society?
Musk's Tesla is estimated to have saved 20,000 lives. And then there's Neuralink. And Starlink, which stepped in to help the hurricane Helene victims when FEMA fell flat.
> Musk like all the other current crop of American oligarchs are weakening America's grip on the world
That's quite a claim. I don't see any evidence of that.
> you know they're not credible. You know they exist to serve his financial interests and bolster his upcoming IPO with little regard for veracity or legality.
Assuming your arguments are so compelling that I must be secretly agreeing with you is the "false consensus fallacy".
My knowledge of von Braun comes from the book "V2" by Dornberger. As for the practical effect of the V2 program, see "Impact" by King. (Spoiler: the V2 program was enormously expensive yet ineffective, and shortened the war. It was ineffective because its guidance system was not accurate enough.)
Von Braun at one point was imprisoned by the SS and threatened with execution if he didn't stop dreaming about interplanetary flight and get busy with the military use of the V2.
Wikipedia's take on this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
Pretty much all the liquid fueled rockets of today can trace their lineage back to the V2. The Saturn V was a scaled up V2. Von Braun's team figured out all the crucial details of how to make a liquid rocket engine work:
1. boundary layer cooling
2. nozzle cooled by liquid oxygen, which also preheated the oxygen
3. baffles to prevent pogo-ing
4. turbo-pumps
5. first supersonic airframe
6. first guidance mechanism
[dead]
Presumably he doesn't "admit" it because it isn't true. You aren't going to get anywhere convincing people if you make attacks on your interlocutor like this.
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...
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...
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.
How do we take it away from him?
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 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?
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.
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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.
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.
I think in this case more than 0.1% feel a bit of inspiration in a time of darkness.
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.
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.
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...
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 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.
1969 wasn’t exactly all flowers and sunshine either.
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.
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.
Yeah your life must really suck if you only care about immediate hurdles and pains without making room for hope or creativity
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.
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.
you’re making their point, you just don’t know it yet
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
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the hell does that have to do with anything
the comment i'm replying to is saying that the moon mission is morally dubious because we haven't solved domestic poverty
He didn't imply it's morally dubious, I just read it as "people have more pressing matters to direct their attention to than this".
that's absolutely not what he said lmao. he said it's far down on our list of priorities, which is true.
They could've employed the astronauts to be waiters in Africa.
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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.
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 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?
I half agree. It is new and important.
But it's hard, at least for me personally, to get really excited about it...
it's amazing, but I'll refer you to Gil Scott-Heron for my feelings on the matter
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> they'll come back and need solving again
So like "whitey going to the moon" again on Artemis II?
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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.
> 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.
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.
You gotta be completely out of touch with reality to compare a black man who grew up in the Jim Crow era and was living through the civil rights era to thin-skinned white kids who grew up in the suburbs. What a speed-limit IQ take.
> to compare a black man who grew up in the Jim Crow era and was living through the civil rights era to thin-skinned white kids who grew up in the suburbs
I’ll stand by it. Frustration is genuine. Using it as an excuse for racism doesn’t have an obvious reason to scale with distress.
If you think I’m saying the input horror is similar, I’m not. But there isn’t a law of proportionality for racism. If you think being racist is okay because something in your past excuses bad behavior, I disagree with qualification.
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.
Interesting. For all of Gil Scott-Heron's brilliance, this is by far my least favorite work of his.
Great share, thank you!
Apparently Artemis 2 Victor Glover listened to this weekly on his commute to NASA.
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.
It's fine to not be interested, but this time one of the astronauts is black
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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