Discussion

Why Doesn’t Anybody Realize We’re Going Back to the Moon?

abdelhousni: Some people may think it's "Fake news"... Seriously, I guess people are more concerned of the damages and crimes done by the US Trump government and its effects on earth.

metalman: it is at a minimum, semantic missalignment, as they are most defintly not going " to the moon", but are going to take a huge swing by at a huge speed, because they dont have the fuel to do a burn into a circular LLO (low lunar orbit),and then get home, and are realy just slingshoting back to earth. wish them luck in that though.

Avicebron: We do. But the relative purchasing power and command over purchasing essentials for a middle class life from 1969 to now has shifted so dramatically people are not comfortable enough to care.

trhway: we're going back to Moon and going to Mars too on Starship, and it is just a normal roadmap of the SpaceX. Existence or not of Artemis wouldn't change much.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 langings than the Apollo program.

whycome: The language is weird about it. Because it’s not a landing. Most people don’t think of Apollo 8 as “going to the moon” — for the public, that’s Apollo 11.

palata: That, and most people don't care about the Apollo missions that happened after Apollo 11.Hell, nobody knows the name of the third guy who did not get to set foot on the Moon with Apollo 11.

voidfunc: Been there; done 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.

Avicebron: > 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.

eigenrick: So we're re-creating the Apollo 8 Mission 60 years later. 60 years after swinging around the moon, we are going to attempt the feat again. I'm having a hard time getting excited... Especially when some say it may not survive reentry because of politics (https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....)

palata: I grew up admiring the Apollo mission and the likes.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.

PaulRobinson: $93 billion over 13 years doesn't feel like a great deal for a program that has started to align around a single person's ego, when most of the US is struggling to make ends meet.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.

happytoexplain: Everything that has made my country great has been or is being destroyed. The life I have tirelessly worked for is a shadow of the life my parents and grandparents had. I realize we're going to (orbit) the moon, and I think it's great, but I'm tired. Why would I even talk about this thing?

0xf00ff00f: This is the first time humans go beyond LEO in my lifetime, so personally I'm pretty excited.

lisper: Because we are not going back to the moon. A flyby is going to the moon in the same way that driving by the Anaheim exit on I-5 is going to Disneyland.

gedy: We handed out 300 billion in cash payments alone for COVID stimulus, this is not that crazy especially if you factor in the knowledge and skills put to work and retained.

TimorousBestie: Even “real news” these days is insipid and poorly written. For instance, the NYT coverage pre-launch barely communicated the mission parameters.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.

whackernews: Yeh how are we all going to keep the air con on full blast and get our food delivered to our doorstep through summer!We’re all a bunch of idiots man let some of us go to the moon for gods sake.

outworlder: Sure, you may look at it from that perspective. Or, you could look into it as restoring a capability that we used to have, and potentially enable further, more interesting missions.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.

stickfigure: I'd rather spend it on high speed rail projects.

whackernews: God, negative Nancy over here. Keep it to yourself mate.

krapp: We know what bread and circuses are. We know what distraction is.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.

sys_64738: Pink Floyd did it in the 1970s.

throw0101c: > 60 years after swinging around the moon, we are going to attempt the feat again. I'm having a hard time getting excited...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)?

scubbo: > the current mass extinction we are living in is happening orders of magnitude faster than the one that killed the dinosaursFascinating. 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...

autoexec: I thought I'd heard they'd already made changes to the heat shield after the last failure. Hopefully whatever they learn from this trip will be useful for their next one.

g947o: One is real cash going into the hands of ordinary people for everyday purchases, which has proven (in various studies) to have helped parents/families and the financially struggled.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.

Gagarin1917: That’s not it. Most people don’t even know what Apollo 8 was.The average person thinks NASA’s only mission of note was Apollo 11, they don’t even realize there were 5 other landings.

outworlder: > 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.

bwoah: https://archive.is/mwlfi

TrackerFF: I think there's a war in the middle east. And a circus back home. Think those are hogging the spotlight right now.

tayo42: There's alot off reasons to not be interested other people are listing them. Space exploration in general has been taken over by billionaires as their hobby becasue they have to much money. I find it hard to care about someone else's expensive toys.

palata: > That's such a cynical viewpoint. We are not doing this so that astronauts can have fun.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 crucialThis 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 is 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. From the top off 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).

majkinetor: Louis C.K.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me4BZBsHwZs

skeeter2020: I'm just not that jazzed on what we could possibly learn. I can go on a big road trip and eat, sleep (but probably not poop) in my minivan; what does that teach me about moving to a new city or country? I can drive across the country and do a loop around Houston's ring road; that tells me nothing about what it's like to live there.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.

tayo42: The comedian is Louis C.K.

Gagarin1917: Would you have been uninterested in Apollo at the time because of the Vietnam war?Or are you maybe just generally uninterested in space exploration?

eeixlk: Trump attempted to significantly decrease NASAs budgets and cancel missions so this is happening despite him, and I cant feel joy for this when we are putting people in cages, manipulating stock markets, entering pointless wars, and raising prices of everything while Billionares massively increase their wealth through technically-legal manipulations of the system. This feels like a sad memory of what used to be more than anything else.

palata: Yep. We all know that "the dinosaurs disappeared", but very few know how long it took. The dinosaurs were not witnessing the climate warming year after year, by a long shot... What we are witnessing right now is happening exceedingly fast.

majkinetor: > we are throwing so much resources at something that we already know we can do.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.

palata: So they made a first real test with Artemis I, and it was deemed unsafe because of the heat shield. So they modified the heat shield and didn't bother making a real test with it. "Move fast and break things", I guess?Sure, they tested it on the ground. But that's what they did for Artemis I, and we know how successful that was.

palata: > and potentially enable further, more interesting missions.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.

skeeter2020: I read something along these lines yesterday, to paraphrase: "Saying we're going back to the moon is like driving across the country, circling Hoboken and telling your friends about your trip to NY City".

Gagarin1917: Most people don’t care about Apollo 11 period.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.

palata: Well the comparison is not what people think about Apollo 11 right now, but what they thought back then.Back then, it was a big event that made the news worldwide.Artemis II launched yesterday, and my non-engineer relatives and friends don't even know it happened (they don't even know it was planned).

Gagarin1917: It WAS global news, I assure you. Every major news agency and local news channels talked about it.People don’t get their “news” from news agencies anymore, though. They get it from their social media algorithms, and if they have no prior interest in anything space or tangential to space, they won’t get news about it.And if they did hear about it, it probably didn’t connect whatsoever, and their brain filled it away in the same place as “city bus makes successful stop at bus stop.” Because they couldn’t care less.Culture is far less centralized, for better or worse.

gedy: The money was not vaporized by aerospace companies, it's largely spent in US on salaries, subcontractors, etc. Not against stimulus but to call out the amount in comparison is reasonable.

palata: I am not sure what you are trying to say. So people should be ecstatic about it because "it's almost the same thing, but this time the people having fun onboard are not taking remotely as much risk (other than NASA sending them knowing that the heat shield is unsafe), and the whole thing is a lot cheaper"? And then should we invest billions do go there in 3 days instead of 6, and expect that people will be impressed?> With so many people around, there can be arbitrary group of people working on any kind of problemSure. It's just that this particular group of people does it with taxpayer money, and it's measurably not very useful. That money could go to... I don't know... feed people? Just one example.> You talk like unless everybody works on solving specific problem, its not going to get solved.Actually, if you read a bit about the problem that I am mentioning (i.e. our survival), I think it's relatively clear that "solving it properly" is impossible (that ship has sailed), and "solving it badly" will require sacrifices from pretty much everybody alive. We literally need everybody to change their lifestyle in order to have more chances of survival. And even that will not prevent very bad things from happening to most people.And I am saying that being pretty optimistic about it. A shortcut is simply "we're pretty much screwed". And if you don't realise it, it's probably because you don't really understand the problem.

rtcode_io: People think it's a fake show for distraction.

Gagarin1917: Do you honestly only ever talk about how your country has been destroyed and how shitty your life is compared to your parents?If so, I’m genuinely sorry for you. I hope you can find joy somewhere everyday. If you do already do that, then why not Artemis as well?

Gagarin1917: This just isn’t true, people have tons of interests beyond “things that are useful” and “trying to figure out how to deal with the cost of everything.”I’m almost certain you have genuine interests beyond your financials, and enjoy entertainment in general.The fact is, the vast majority of people (and perhaps yourself) never actually cared about space or space exploration. I think most of this dismissiveness comes from people thinking they SHOULD care, and need to rationalize why they don’t.

Gagarin1917: I’m not sure I’m following. Do most people not care because of the environment? Because that’s certainly not the case. Most people don’t care about the environment either.Plus, do you not have any other interests besides the state of the world? No interest in entertainment or sports or tech news at all? I doubt that if you’re on HN.My bet is that you wouldn’t care even if the world was objectively better than ever. You’re just coming up with excuses for why you don’t care. It’s fine if you don’t care, but it’s certainly not because of the state of the world. Otherwise you wouldn’t have any interests at all, including HackerNews.

The Apollo program was the triple-back-handspring exclamation mark on a century of American technological transformations, during which Americans had electrified their cities, filled their streets with cars and their skies with airplanes, split atoms, and invented digital computers.

breve: > The Apollo program was the triple-back-handspring exclamation mark on a century of American technological transformations, during which Americans had electrified their cities, filled their streets with cars and their skies with airplanes, split atoms, and invented digital computers.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.

Gagarin1917: During the Apollo missions, the US was melting babies in Vietnam, amongst other war crimes.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.

throw0101c: Commentary at the time:* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon