- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
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This seems like a pretty big deal, why am I only now finding out about this
I don’t know, we need to do a better job of advertising this stuff if a lot of people don’t know about it. This is one of the few decent things the U.S. is doing.
I caught it through NPR maybe a couple weeks before it happened, and some science YouTubers were hype about it, but other than that I caught very little coverage. Not a lot mentioned on here that I saw til the day of or the day before. Not that it wasn’t talked about here before that, but just what I noticed.
Hell yeah! Let’s go!
You’re too late, they already left.
Not again!
KEVIN!
Ooh I know this reference. It’s Wall-E, right?
Yeah, when the two immortal robbers try to steal Wall-E’s treasures and he deals gross bodily slapstick horrors to them for the sake of a gag.
most elaborate April fools prank this year
If they can fake the moon landing they can fake a launch.
If they can fake launch, can they fake dienner, too?
I don’t know what that is but I believe in them.
Bearing in mind that explaining jokes ruins them, “launch” can be pretend-read as a mispelling of “lunch”, so I mispelled “dinner” to make a stupid joke.
This is a terrible joke, and I love it.
You have terrible taste. :)
I don’t know you, but if you’re anything like my dog, you must think I’m awesome! Which I appreciate, but I question your judgement.
I was honestly considering that, even though it would have been strange for AP. I opened the article and the latest update was about some toilet issue
Yeah, a little over the top in my opinion. More money than I’m willing to spend on a prank.
I have now seen 2 moon launches live. Will I live to see them actually set foot back on the moon again. Who knows.
Only if you have a really good telescope
In 1969, the cold war filled the hearts of the world with dread. Today, we live in times that echo this sentiment.
The launch of 1969 was made with the hope of a better future, and though we cocked it up a drainpipe the first time, maybe we’ll take the right path and echo the sentiment “for all mankind”.
This launch included a bunch of “American superiority” drivel, and was done on a rocket that is unsustainable and uses leftover parts from the last millennium.
I wish they’d gone with “for all mankind” — instead they went with “America America” even though one of the mission specialists is Canadian and the module was made in cooperation with the ESA.
It could be worse. It could be Trump claiming all the glory for himself and jinxing it to miserably fail like everything else that orange pedophile clown touches.
Jesus, the shudder this comment just elicited gave me a crick in my neck… Someone distract the mango before he gets the astronauts killed…
I mean, how exactly do you create a “sustainable” rocket? Genuinely curious, as the sheer amount of energy it takes to escape the earth’s gravity well would render this an almost impossible feat.
Sustainable rocket program.
Like SpaceX does it.
The current launch used supplies and technology that can no longer be produced, is single use, and has enough potential points of failure that it’s taken them months beyond the original launch date to achieve conditions for a reliable launch.
At least Isaacman has them on a path to achieve something repeatable in the future.
SpaceX’s only current launch capability is to LEO and it took them 20 years to make it ‘sustainable’. This rocket is going to the moon today.
Falcon Heavy is quite a capable rocket, with about 60% of the SLS’s payload capacity to LEO when the side boosters are reused (although it’s almost never used for LEO, since no one actually needs that large of a payload there…).
New Glenn can reuse it’s whole first stage, but currently has only 47% of the SLS’s payload capacity to LEO. (with plans for a larger variant)
Starship… has been kind of a mess. At least with how their timeline has compared to their goals. They have demonstrated several successful launches, but with the reliability of their past few, I doubt anyone will trust them anytime soon.
China seems extremely close to having a partially reusable heavy lift rocket, they have said that they’ll test it in the first half of this year (LEO payload a little bit higher than Falcon Heavy, but they plan to go to the moon with something very similar). India has some looser long-term plans.
As a spaceflight nerd, I was thinking today about why I (and everyone else) don’t care that much about the Artemis launch. I think it’s largely because it’s not demonstrating anything new; they already did basically the same mission but without the people in it, and even more advanced missions with people in them were done in the 1960s. The rocket itself though isn’t helping, the only things it has going for it compared to other modern rockets are that it’s large and probably reliable. The technology is basically just re-used space shuttle parts, there’s nothing that seems particularly innovative, and reusing old technology hasn’t prevented it from being extremely expensive compared to basically everything else (~20x the cost of New Glenn, Falcon Heavy, or Starship per launch…). It’s also worse for the environment in basically every way (expendable, and has solid fuel boosters).
I kind of agree with what some other people have been saying about NASA for a while now. They should probably just stick to the satellites, rovers, and technology tests, making their own launch vehicle is not really helping anyone. The usefulness of being a government funded thing is that they can do the type of science to help humanity that doesn’t turn a profit. They don’t really need their own launch vehicle to do their science, and the vehicle itself is so conservative that I’m sure they aren’t really learning anything from it. If they were actually capable of producing something economical and better than the corporations then it wouldn’t be a problem, but that will never happen with Congress pushing rocket designs that “seem like they would be cheaper” and forcing NASA to route all work through insanely inefficient military contractors.
Starship has been a mess because they’re constantly changing things and experimenting. They got v1 working then moved to v2 which had some issues, they get v2 working and they immediately move to v3. There are so many changes in v3 I imagine its going to have its own teething problems as well.
Until they decide they are happy with something and commit to that as a launch vehicle and test other variations separately from their launch version, its probably going to keep happening and keep people wary of wanting to use it.
Edit: they’re already talking about making changes so it can do 200t to orbit. But if they just get v3 working then switch to that, it’ll be the same problem all over again.
Edit: working excluding rentry heat shield anyway, they haven’t proven they can make starship reusable yet.
Yeah, just the 2 identical failures on Starship V2 I think destroyed a lot of trust
and afaik they still haven’t had a reentry that hasn’t seemed at least somewhat like a miraculous survival… I know they were testing out different types of heatshield tiles on the last launch though which was where a lot of the weirdness was from
What I was referring to though was the very… optimistic timelines they’ve had in the past. HLS was supposed to be ready last year.
Everything you say is correct, and it’s great that the mission is actually in progress.
But that is neither here nor there with the point I was making.
I’m just glad that things have the potential to turn around at NASA now. I’d love to see them back at the forefront of space exploration and technology.
If SpaceX realllllllly wanted to, Falcon Heavy could likely pull off a lunar return trip like this (edit: with modifications), but ya, SpaceX designed their existing rockets around reusability in LEO.
When you don’t have to think about reusability, it’s a lot easier to do things, as so many problems become a lot simpler and weight savings are substantial.
Having re-usable parts is the obvious bit. But actually the worst part for the environment from a lot of rockets is the solid fuel boosters, those leave a ton of weird stuff in the atmosphere that a liquid fueled thing wouldn’t (like the Falcon Heavy, Starship, Delta 4 Heavy, New Glenn, Long March 9 and 10…)
Even Starship is going to leave a lot of CO2 behind, but they could technically make their own methane and be carbon neutral, but they aren’t as they can’t make enough of it fast enough for their plans, even if they do make some.
Interestingly apparently water vapor from rocket launches can be similarly harmful to CO2. Water vapor doesn’t usually get into the upper atmosphere, and has a hard time exiting, but still acts as a greenhouse gas.
Wow, we really cant catch a break on getting off this rock without consequences.
“Canadian” is actually an American DEI category.
Sadly, NASA has to appeal to the Trump admin for funding.
Unfortunately NASA is always tied up with politics. I would not be surprised if the whole ego stroking speech was a mandate by the current American administration.
Or, if not a mandate, pandering. Because if the politicians in charge of giving NASA its funding don’t like what’s being said, they will likely cut their funding, even in the middle of a long-term successful project.
You: complains rocket isn’t reusing enough stuff
Also you: complains rocket is reusing stuff.
You’re not wrong… that’s what happens when you reduce a situation past meaningful statements.
Long as we have to depend on chemical propellants, the moon is as far as we’ll ever get
Well the solar panels all deployed and are charging, but yeah using chemical burns isn’t good for much beyond orbital movement
Still need a reliable method to convert the power gained from solar into propulsion with enough force so that it won’t take a decade to get anywhere
The nuclear reflection engine is still our best bet, I feel like it may take actual zero G experiments to solve but I think we can achieve fusion
They go in search of human rights
God speed!
(As an atheist, and just thankful despite Elon and Trump’s best efforts)
I’m glad there is diversity and Canadian representation, btw!
Oh what’s next, will Spain send three wooden boats to the New World, take a few pictures, and come back?
“If I told you once, Chris, I told you a thousand times: slaves go in the other direction.”
They went to hide the Epstein files on the far side of the Moon.
Trump said they’re going further than we’ve ever gone before! Checkmate Apollo moon landing believers!
Technically he is right about this.
are they doing a further away turn around the moon than before?
The moon is slowly moving further away from Earth
So I didn’t know that, but I looked it up and its 3.8cm a year.
The moon isn’t always the exact same distance from earth either, so that extra distance is pretty negligible compared to where it was on any given previous mission, that his statement isn’t necessarily true.
Artemis II will loop around the moon on a trajectory that will take it about 4500 miles farther away from Earth than any of the Apollo manned missions.
Ah okay that makes more sense than it slowly drifting away.
Yeah but you can see the obvious absurdity in stating it. Hope they don’t get fried by the intense solar weather or smashed by one of these fireballs from the apparent debris field we’re traveling through.
Space is big, they’ll probably be fine
I wonder how all that space debris compares to the probability of all the commercial airliners ascending and descending through birds and what not. Comparative damage aside.
It doesn’t.
ok
Soon we will be able to sing again “Whitey’s on the moon”
Can’t we get a single article without mentioning how shitty the U.S is right now? Half of the comments here aren’t even ontopic.
Going back to the moon is still an engineering feat, even if we’ve done it before. That was a generation ago, and all of those engineers are retired or about to.
This gives mission me hope. A diamond in the rough.
I’m surprised that Trump didn’t sign an EO declaring that it was now the Trump space mission rather than Artemis II.
I don’t care what we call it, as long as we keep funding the science and engineering. The amount of people who don’t understand why we should do this stuff is astounding. And I’m honestly not the best at articulating why we should do it.
I don’t see the point of sending people to the moon or Mars. It will always be insanely expensive to do anything there, always. What is there to discover that can’t be done with robots? Doing it for the poetic sake of doing it--“going where no man has gone before”-- seems impractical and wasteful.
Yes, we’ve done it in the past, exploring, that doesn’t mean we must keep doing it as it becomes more impractical, and with what benefits, exactly? Exploiting whatever resources are there? Is that really what we should be doing?
I hope it goes smoothly. I read some troubling things about it, but time will tell.
Can’t we get a single article without mentioning how shitty the U.S is right now? Half of the comments here aren’t even on topic.
My friend, the toilet was clogged on the rocket.
Toilet= shitty
Seems on topic to me
Can’t we get a single article without mentioning how shitty the U.S is right now?
So you concede this is all about distraction.
Let’s discover antibiotics again!
I’m talking about the comments section here, not the content of the article.
I wonder how Flatearthers are going to explain this one.
I’ve already seen “it’s AI generated”.
Same way moon landing deniers do.
“The whole thing is staged! Nobody actually flew anywhere! They just put some guys in costumes and filmed them on a sound stage in Hollywood!”
Yet another legacy sequel.
Frog lenses
I had a guy come into my shop yesterday and we started talking about the launch, and he said the exact same thing to me. We ended up having a good laugh about flat earthers and having a good ol fashioned space chat. Good bloke!
Please don’t let it be cancelled and returned early because of a toilet That would just be too much. This is the first thing that has made me legitimately excited since having to unexpectedly say goodbye to my soul-dog last month. I need this, dammit.
Yeah, they should piss out a window like the rest of us.
How exactly do you think they’d return prematurely? Hit the reverse button?
Its the entire reason they did a full orbit before firing the lunar injection burn, so that if something was wrong they could jettison the service module and perform a deorbit burn for an early splashdown in the pacific.
