("Hey, kids! We're going to Disneyland! We're going to drive all the way around it before we head home!")
Hell, nobody knows the name of the third guy who did not get to set foot on the Moon with Apollo 11.
They know it happened but they have zero interest in it or the history.
That’s why the average person doesn’t cares now. They never actually did.
I think Artemis will be cancelled by the end of the year, unfortunately. If the heat shield doesn't hold up as some observers fear/have warned, perhaps by the end of April.
I hope I'm wrong.
The other is "knowledge and skills" that seem remote and detached from people's lives.
As someone whose life isn't affected much by either of these, I would choose the stimulus every time.
So, around 7 billion a year?
We are at around half of the total Artemis cost just one month after the Iran invasion. One week of this war finances one year of the Artemis program. Do you think that's a better deal?
Compared to the military spending, that doesn't even register. Maybe you should be mad about that.
This whole thing is nerd fantasy come to life but its not particularly useful and right now the world for most people is about trying to figure out how to deal with the cost of everything thanks to a poorly planned war against Iran.
The war in Iran doesn't help at all. But it's a much broader problem.
We’re all a bunch of idiots man let some of us go to the moon for gods sake.
Nowadays, I recognise that it is heavy engineering, but I am not so impressed by the fact that we are throwing so much resources at something that we already know we can do. In fact, we have had humans surviving in space for decades now. It's costing a lot, it's not bringing much.
But more than that: we have much more important problems to solve, starting with our survival. Sure, sending robots to Mars is interesting, for science. Sending people to Mars is useless. Hoping to become an "interplanetary species" is preposterous. Thinking that Mars is "just a next step, but we'll go further" is absolutely insane.
Life is literally, measurably dying on Earth (the current mass extinction we are living in is happening orders of magnitude faster than the one that killed the dinosaurs). We have a huge energy problem, and more and more global instability.
Sure, watching four humans happily travelling to the Moon in a spaceship that literally does not need them is fun, like watching the Superbowl. And like for the Superbowl, there are big fans for whom it is the most important event of the year. However, most people don't care. We're not in 1969 anymore, now it's just a matter of wasting enough money for some people to have the time of their life.
That's such a cynical viewpoint. We are not doing this so that astronauts can have fun.
Yes, we have been screwing up our planet. On that note alone, we should develop capabilities to access resources beyond our planet. We could have made that same argument before we had the capability of launching satellites ("why are we wasting resources sending something to space that can only beep while people are dying of hunger?"). Nowadays, they are crucial if we want to have a chance at saving what remains of our planet.
Moon missions may not give an immediate benefit, but we have always benefitted from scientific and technological advancements from space missions. I doubt it's going to be different this time.
I'd certainly prefer countless more moon missions than a new aircraft carrier.
Don't get me wrong: I would totally love to be in their shoes, I completely understand why they want to do it.
> Nowadays, they are crucial
This is the typical "we need to do it because it's hard, and we don't know what we will learn from it, and BTW there are things we developed for the space program that got into civilian use" argument.
But it is flawed. For one, we know a lot more today than we did in the 50s. It would be like saying "in the past, they thought that the Earth was flat, so who knows, maybe tomorrow we will realise that humans are capable of telekinesis". The truth is... "most likely not".
> we have always benefitted from scientific and technological advancements from space missions. I doubt it's going to be different this time.
Let's play a game: you're not allowed to read about it. Off the top of your head, what technological advancements did the different space programs bring? Gemini? Apollo? Soyuz? The space shuttle? Mir? The ISS? And if you manage to give more than one correct answer to that, do you genuinely believe that it wouldn't have been possible to develop that technology without the corresponding space program? I doubt it.
It's like saying that we needed to spend billions developing a race car in order to improve the stability of a skateboard. Technically, that is wrong, so the only argument I heard to defend the idea was something like "because brilliant people would be interested in developing a race car, but if it wasn't possible, instead of improving skateboards, they would be bureaucrats or financiers". Not very convincing.
> I'd certainly prefer countless more moon missions than a new aircraft carrier.
Agreed. But that's not a justification for spending billions sending humans in space for their own pleasure (and not without risk) and for the pleasure of all the nerds who enjoy working on that (and I count myself as part of those nerds).
Fascinating. My naive perception of the extinction event was that it was relatively sudden, on a personal rather than geological timescale - decades or maybe generations. But it looks like it might be "_rapid extinction, perhaps over a period of less than 10,000 years_" [0]. Goes to show how unintuitive geological and evolutionary timelines are!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e...
No, "we" knew how to do it with 10x more money and people on the board, in a very unsafely manner. It was a few times muscle flex.
Making entire thing routine, cheap and safe is something else, and "we" don't know yet how to do that, or we would have at least few scientists constantly on the Moon.
It's a difference between running a marathon and dropping dead, and doing it all the time.
I am not _too excited_ about the SLS itself as it looks like a political compromise, just as the shuttle was.
But better late than never.
We could have sent the ship without astronauts to test all the systems and learn the only real valuable question: does this thing work? Instead we get drama & politics, and a much more expensive mission.
The further we go as humans is Mars, and it's useless. The next star is so, so, so far away that even considering reaching it with "something" requires a revolution in fundamental physics. No need to build rockets for that, just a whiteboard and physicists, I guess.
And saying that we go to Mars is extremely generous. The engineering of the rocket going there is fun, but if you want to send humans there, they have to survive the trip. Including, for instance, eating and drinking and breathing air for the duration of the trip. Those are not solved problems. Chances are that we as a society collapse long before we get to send humans to Mars.
The average person thinks NASA’s only mission of note was Apollo 11, they don’t even realize there were 5 other landings.
Sure, they tested it on the ground. But that's what they did for Artemis I, and we know how successful that was.
There was a comedian that had the observation a few years back that we've lost our saw of awe and wonder: he was on a plane when Internet was just being introduced, and it was announced on the flight, but after a little bit it stopped working and they announced 'technical difficulties' and it wouldn't be available.
The guy next to him was like "this is bullshit": how quickly the world owed this guy something that he knew existed only a few minutes before.
As he goes on: often whenever people complain about their flights, it was like a 1940s German cattle car: X happened, then Y happened. And his response is: And then what happened? Did you fly in the air? Did you sit on a chair in the sky? Like a bird, like humans have been imaging since the tail of Icarus (and before)?
Hedonic adaptation is real (which is "fine" as far as it goes, as striving for better isn't a bad thing):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
But given you're invoking history, it's easy how it is to forget the woe that humans lived in just a few decades before Apollo 8, and the incredible strides that happened (and that many people on the planet, even now, have yet to fully experience):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...
Artemis program and hardware is a huge government money appropriation program, and even if the program makes it to the landing phase, it would still be an unsustainable one-off with probably even less landings than the Apollo program.
Establishing of Moon bases, commercial travel and development there - it is all Starship (naturally predicated on SpaceX success at getting it to $5-10M/launch - if not SpaceX, somebody else would anyway do it)
As i wrote couple days ago the Artemis/SLS will never be able to get to that commercial level https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47583438
Release the Epstein files, hang every pedophile in them starting with their king, Donald Trump, then move on to anyone of any party who aided and abetted Israels' genocide of Palestinians. Then put the billionaires to the guillotine. Everyone south of the Mason-Dixon line gets to fuck off and have their own country and leave the rest of us alone.
There's a long, long list of things we need to take care of, then maybe we can care about rocketships.
And look at America now. Erratic, belligerent, applying tariffs on a whim, threatening to annex Canada and Greenland, threatening to leave NATO, alienating itself from allies.
Don't underestimate the reputational damage America has done and is still doing to itself.
Young men were being drafted, taken from home, and forced to kill people across the world.
African Americans were fighting for basic rights and equality.
A President, a major Presidential candidate, and the most prominent civil rights leader were all assassinated.
It’s not like Apollo was happening during the golden age of America or something…
If you actually do appreciate Apollo, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to appreciate Artemis.
It’s just too abstract, too complicated, and too far away for them to feel connected to it. It’s not attached to national pride (anymore), it’s not connected to tragedy (typically), it’s not connected to celebrities they feel like they know (Katy Perry isn’t involved with this launch)… there’s just nothing for the average person to connect with.
Every other explanation is just an excuse from people who feel like they should care, but never have.
Or are you maybe just generally uninterested in space exploration?
abdelhousni•1h ago
metalman•1h ago
TimorousBestie•51m ago
Today’s article by Peter Baker ( https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/us/politics/artemis-ii-la... ) was yet more political drivel and very light on scientific goals, just a token mention of follow-on missions.