Discussion
Artemis II Is Competency Porn and We Are Starving For It
quater321: Giving people jobs because of their gender and ethnicity is the beginning of the end. Why it is advertised and hyped so much is because it is propaganda for their agenda. Main topics are that the majority in the pictures are women or that there are none whites involved. Nasa did not advance a bit in the last 50 years, they rather went backwards.
newsclues: They didn’t even land the rockets for recovery. Regressing :(
daymanstep: I can't stop thinking about this article while reading this: https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....
moffkalast: Clearly in retrospect they made the right call to go ahead though. The heat shield held up fine.Arguably NASA played it extremely safe this time round, high first orbit, no direct TLI, no lunar orbit that you can't come back from if the engines don't fire back up. I think they're very aware of the poor quality of modern manufacturing they're working with, which is why it's all the more impressive that everything went as planned, Outlook aside.It's still extremely dumb they're throwing away RS-25 engines for this, but no competence survives contact with political management.
rbanffy: That NASA’s budget is so influenced by politics is why they can’t take the rapid iteration process of SpaceX - NASA can never fail in public. Any failure (even launch delays, as happened with Challenger) gets blown out of proportion and fuels the risk of further budget cuts, which push them to a “safer”, incremental, but very costly process of refining what is already proven rather than researching the less proven technology.
mPogrzeb: Exactly this
HPsquared: Are there any big technological advances from this program?
irdc: Right now all I can think of is the toilet. Which is not a small thing by the way.
rbanffy: They might have found a way of having two versions of Outlook and at least one of them working.A lot of it is relearning what was forgotten after the Apollo and shuttle programs. The technologies changed so much it’s a whole new spacecraft that looks like what existed only because that’s the best possible shape.
SirFatty: You're boring :(
newsclues: Why should I be excited about 50 year old milestones when we have more advanced rockets that can land and be reused? Don’t we care about sustainability, or do we forget because of unpleasant billionaires?
sweetheart: I didn’t follow the mission much as it occurred, but it’s striking to me how much I understand what the author means. Feels like the first event in many, many years that doesn’t amplify the feeling of being in the absurdist nightmare timeline. Artemis II felt like a 2013 event, not a 2026 event!
rbanffy: I will still wait for the heat shield analysis. Doing a crewed flight was not what I would have done - I’d use a Falcon Heavy to put one or more dummies through different trajectories to make sure we have enough experimental data to extensively model the shield behaviour, especially in non-nominal entries.
nlitened: If you honestly care about these things so much, surely you’re a big Elon Musk and SpaceX fan
ArtRichards: This article was a really uplifing take... Happy to see more about how awesome we can be, when we care.
ArcHound: I can't believe the comments here."I could have done it better, it's not a big deal, oh, they had women and non white people on board, what even is the shareholder value of this mission, oh it was almost done 50 years ago..."These people went literally to the moon and back. Furthest anyone has ever been. That's an achievement.I know things suck right now. Even more reasons to appreciate what is possible with technology.I agree with the premise of this article. This achievement is inspiring and re-assuring that competency brings results. The alternative is way too depressing AND it mostly is our reality right know.
saidnooneever: ofc very much the american way, outside of the region maybe its more read like propaganda... not in all regions people are like this, but its not a bad thing i suppose. Good things can also be leveraged for bad things etc. (not by the ppl involved ofc, but by others and their framing of the facts)it'd be nice if people gave eachother a little space to be :) and look past the politics of things.maybe then we would not feel the need to go the furthest out into space ever done and we can remain sometime in each other's proximity without feeling the need to develop nuclear weapons.
kylecazar: Because they had different goals. Reusable rockets are neat for launching satellites, where we need to do it frequently and manage cost efficiency. This was a completely different mission with a different objective?They were validating the capsule and it's operation in deep space and ability to withstand reentry. You're focused on the rocket. This was more important as a step towards going further with people on-board.
newsclues: It’s a 50 year old achievement.I couldn’t do it personally but as a nation or humanity, we can do better, even if it was hard.What year did nasa land on the moon again?
ArcHound: Thanks, edited my comment to reflect this reply.
shash: Of course they didn’t. The delta-v needed to land the rockets is better expended in pushing the craft further. Reusable rockets isn’t always the best choice.
PaulHoule: If I am not careful I wind up with two Outlooks running in my computer. ‘Classic’ is fine, but God forbid I start the other one because when I try to send an email with it is spinner… spinner… spinner… spinner… spinner…
splitbrainhack: women had to make it about themselves lol.
PaulHoule: Yeah, but they still don’t have a realistic plan to land astronauts there.Like the space shuttle before it, Artemis proves that nobody can beat the US at spending money on boondoggles.Lunar missions are inconsequential to problems here on Earth like we can’t afford to build high-speed rail and transit, that we can’t build housing affordable or otherwise, that we already lost the next war to Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, won’t build affordable electric cars, etc.What we need is affordability porn!
eigenspace: Just because the heat shield held up fine does not mean it was the right call.Nobody who knew anything was saying there was a 100% chance of catastrophic heat-shield failure, they weren't even saying there was a 50% chance. They were saying that there was a small chance of failure which was nonetheless unacceptably large.Quote from the blogpost about it being unsafe: "It’s likely—hopefully very likely—that Artemis II will land safely. But do we really have to wait for astronauts to die to re-learn the same lessons a third time?"NASA themselves set a safety target of a 1 in 30 chance of crew mortality for the mission. That's an insanely high risk tolerance for something that'd be so public, and would have been so incredibly demoralizing and tragic if the world had to watch this crew die on re-entry.With everything dark going on in the world right now, a lot of people saw this whole thing as a small glimmer of light and something to just be happy and excited about. Having them burn up and die after inspiring that hope would have been crushing.
Simulacra: I'm just glad they made it back alive.. Now let's build a moon base!
guilhas: "...oh, they had women and non white people on board..."That is from the article not the comments
adrian_b: While it is obvious that the fact that except for the commander, the crew was composed of a woman, a Canadian and an African-Caribbean-American, cannot have happened by chance, I think that for this kind of mission also achieving a diversity target is perfectly fine.There is no doubt that the members of the crew were at least equally qualified with the possible members of a less diverse crew, even if their provenance must have influenced the final selection.Perhaps instead of doubting that it was right to choose crew members belonging to historically disadvantaged minorities, like Canadians :-), one should wonder why only the crew members are diverse, but not their chief, which is a more stereotypical American, as chiefs are expected to be in USA.
mrtksn: TBF there’s very little change on what we can do more than what was achieved in the 60s. The current space boom is a re-do with better tooling. We can put better computers in space and that’s what gives us anything more than what we had before. The moon and Mars are PR stuff and would be cool ans maybe inspire engineers ans scientists but its still slight incremental upgrade to what we had so far since 60s.Even the photos are not that much better so far, people compare the OG and many like the old stuff better. Obviously its impressive engineering but we have seen it before.I will be impressed when we have a large city sized space station with a large transparent dome.
matt_kantor: [delayed]
newsclues: No, I care about the only planet I have to live on continuing to exist until I die.
glimshe: Throughout the years we've heard concerns that we could no longer go back to the moon because of skill atrophy. This is, at a minimum, a great step towards recovering some lost skills while developing new ones.People are too lost in their political hysteria to appreciate what a amazing achievement that was.
tomjen3: We validated that Outlook is no good :)Seriously though, this is mostly a PR and validation win. I enjoyed watching the new Earthrise (Earthset) image - https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/art002e00928... - camera technology has come a long way since the 70s and seeing the moon this close is Weird to me.
throw0101a: > We validated that Outlook is no good :)"Help Keep Thunderbird Alive": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700388
mrtksn: Doing it the second time is so less impressive that soviets cancelled their whole human moon landing and Americans stopped paying attention on Apollo 13 and cancelled the program after 17.Obviously it is huge engineering achievement each time, just not as impressive as it was done before.
wookmaster: We're in this mix of living in a time of mass hysteria and so many bots on the internet that it's tough to tell if the comments are real. I want to hope most comments I see aren't real people. It's sad if they are.
wookmaster: "Even the photos are not that much better so far"We have an incredible eclipse photos with multiple planets in the background. If you don't find photos like that incredible to see I'd guess you need to do some soul searching.
moffkalast: Space travel is not safe and never will be, you can always get randomly sideswiped by a piece of debris in LEO and that's that, even if everything goes perfectly. If the astronauts understand the risks involved then I would say it's their call. Living on Earth isn't safe for that matter, driving has a 1 in 100 chance of death throughout your lifetime, so that margin isn't significantly more given that you get to go to the frickin Moon.I don't really buy the "if they die, it strands human spaceflight for years out of PR reasons" argument since what that argues for and against has the same result: nobody goes space for a while. In the end there will always be someone willing to roll the dice. ESA is already playing it 100% safe, that niche is covered.
dingaling: There's a difference between quantifiable but unmanageable situational risk and predictable, manageable technical risk.The heatshield issue is the latter.$100 billion has been spent on this project. Ablative heatshield coatings have been used since the Atlas ICBM in 1957. Yet they still flew Artemis with significant technical risk on a political grandstanding mission that delivered no significant science.
SirFatty: Read what you typed and think about how absurd it sounds.
