By all rights, this should be something I am deeply passionate about. I’ve been in tech/engineering my entire adult life and was obsessed with NASA as a kid. I even live on the east coast of Florida and can sometimes see the launches/landings over the ocean. But I just… don’t care at all. I’m not suffering from depression or any other malaise, and generally things are fine. But I haven’t clicked on a single link or looked at a single image. I know this has not been the case for many, many people, so I’m wondering what might be different about this launch (or really the whole program in general), and curious if anyone else has found themselves feeling the same.
I love space and discovery. I also dont super care about this because what is even the point of it? We did a fly around of a rock in our backyard we know super well already. Give me more JWST, not this
Yeah, but the point is to test the technology which will eventually get people back onto the moon, set up permanent off-Earth habitation, etc. Which in turn will/could be part of future steps for further-reaching exploration. I still think it has value as a building block.
But we already had the technology to get to the moon, take pictures, and get off it. Nothing against the crew, im glad they got this once in a life experience, but theres nothing new to this.
We had it, yes, but we lost it - I believe that many of the technical plans from Apollo have been lost over the years, so some of this is pretty much reinventing the wheel to get us back to where we were before.
Not so much lost but, its an entirely new tech stack. So any solutions we might have had in the past are no longer appropriate solutions.
What part of reinventing the wheel is slashing NASA’s budget to shreds? This is just the last public test flight before space is walled off as a playground for the rich. They’ll get their tourist flights and luxury colonies and nice vacations from the boiling toxic hell they turned earth into.
If you think any resources are going to trickle down to us earth peasants, I’ve got a moon base to sell you.
Thats a weird take.
Literally everything that just went to the moon and back is “new”.
Yes, we have been to the moon before but that doesn’t mean that all the cool stuff we just did is not an amazing achievement.
If they landed and did stuff that was more complex than we can send robots to do it would have been pretty awesome!
This flyby is a necessary precursor to landing and doing those cool things.
They need to take tiny incremental steps because the cost of a fuckup is so great.
If the public has to watch someone expire in space due to a malfunction the existing candle flame of support for these endeavours would be snuffed out.
With only two seconds of ping they can work from Earth with robots. Sending people is just a dick contest.
Yeah I’ve been thinking maybe this is it – it’s still technically impressive and I have nothing but admiration for the teams who have pored their sweat and tears into making sure it’s safe and reliable, but it’s kind of a ‘so what?’ moment.
Telescopes and geology have always been the cool part of space, not that humans are in it.
No one’s been on this spacecraft design while it’s in space before, and it’s got some kinks that need to be worked out (like the issues with the toilet); it’s a shakedown flight to figure out what goes wrong when people are actually on board. That’s not really all that sexy compared to a moon landing, but testing your support systems in practice really needs to happen before you do more ambitious things with the craft.
Yep, I am definitely more excited by space science news. I’d say I’m just more mature now and interested in more grounded “pure” science, but it wasn’t too long ago that I was giggling like an idiot as we watched the 2 falcon heavy boosters landing back on their dual pads at KSC, so I don’t think it’s entirely just a loss of child-like wonder (though it’s wearing thin these days, gotta admit).
It’s impressive in the sense that it’s the second time they launched a mostly clean sheet heavy-lift rocket. It took spaceX dozens of exploding rockets before they could even think about putting humans on one. Just getting something that insanely complex working the first time is kind of incredible, and I say this as an engineer who works on much simpler things that almost never work perfectly the first time.