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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4567 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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I want to talk about space travel, once again. NASA's mission back to the moon, Artemis, is slated to launch in less than a week!

Luckily from my perspective, it seems that space travel hasn't been THAT politicized by the culture war, yet. Yes the left and environmentalists hate it, but it hasn't become a hot button, tribal trigger in the way gun control, or abortion, or other major culture war issues are.

Ideally I think space travel will continue to fly under the radar, and slowly get better and better. I know there are some fascinating scientific projects unfolding around space like algae to produce plastic in space, plans for asteroid mining, various organic compounds that can only be created in zero gee, etc. Also of course we now have Space Force, and a renewed space race with China seems to be heating up, potentially.

I'm curious what folks here think about space - are we optimistic that space travel and research will become a genuine market in the next few decades? What are the political fault lines people seeing potentially being an issue here?

And it is off until March.

https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2026/02/03/nasa-conducts-artemis-ii-fuel-test-eyes-march-for-launch-opportunity/

NASA now will target March as the earliest possible launch opportunity for the flight test.

Teams successfully filled all tanks in both the core stage and interim cryogenic propulsion stage before a team of five was sent to the launch pad to finish Orion closeout operations. Engineers conducted a first run at terminal countdown operations during the test, counting down to approximately 5 minutes left in the countdown, before the ground launch sequencer automatically stopped the countdown due to a spike in the liquid hydrogen leak rate.

In addition to the liquid hydrogen leak, a valve associated with Orion crew module hatch pressurization, which recently was replaced, required retorquing, and closeout operations took longer than planned. Cold weather that affected several cameras and other equipment didn’t impede wet dress rehearsal activities, but would have required additional attention on launch day. Finally, engineers have been troubleshooting dropouts of audio communication channels across ground teams in the past few weeks leading up to the test. Several dropouts reoccurred during the wet dress rehearsal.

Anyway ... if those kind of problems crop up so late in development - the question what exactly is lurking under the surface ready to bite the crew in the ass is relevant.

I like Eric Berger's thoughts: "its extremely low flight rate ... makes every fueling and launch an experimental rather than operational procedure."

But I have to wonder how much of the liquid hydrogen leak is just attributable to, well, liquid hydrogen. Less than a quarter the temperature of LOX (a bigger difference geometrically than LOX temperature vs air temperature!), for a fluid which engineers usually first learn about in the context of embrittlement. They had some LH2 leaks to sort out back during Artemis I preparation too.

the question what exactly is lurking under the surface ready to bite the crew in the ass is relevant.

Historically, new rockets tended to have something like a 50/50 chance of failure on their first launch, and that Artemis 1 went as well as it did is a good sign for the future. I would be even less worried for the future if we could afford to launch these things regularly, though, so we could wait to put humans on the fourth launch or the fortieth rather than the second.

Ideally I think space travel will continue to fly under the radar, and slowly get better and better.

I'm far from an expert but some of the brutally worthless projects undertaken by NASA (see Casey Handmer) seem to indicate this is the opposite of what's happening. Publicly funded projects are a complete win for the libertarian crowd with SpaceX (derided by everybody) the only player interested in making space work at all.

Oh boy. I'm glad this is in Culture War and not in Friday Fun, because Artemis isn't very fun at all. I'm sure there's a culture war angle here somewhere, though.

NASA's mission back to the moon, Artemis, is slated to launch in less than a week!

No, it's not. Because Artemis can't fucking reach the moon. NASA made Orion to heavy and/or SLS not powerful enough to get there. It simply doesn't have the delta v for a moon mission. And they did that knowingly, from the beginning. And they paid more than a $100B for the privilege. Let me say that again: NASA spent 20 years and significantly more than $100B of American tax payer money to use 2010 technology to build a rocket and a capsule a whole lot less capable than Apollo 8 was 50 years ago.

Really, it is hard to understate how bad the Artemis program was (and is) managed. At this point, it's not a program to return to the moon, it's a program to ram tens/hundreds of billions of dollars down the throat of Lockheed, Boenig, et al. in exchange for a welfare jobs program in strategically chosen congressional districts. It's much more pork barrel than rocket.

The best summary of the entire sad situation is The Lunacy of Artemis, and Casey Handmer has several nicely detailed rants on why the Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage, why cancellation is too good for SLSand why SLS is still a national disgrace.

The TL;DR (but really, you should read at least the first one if you care about the Moon mission) is: the rocket can only lift 27 tons to the moon (compared to Apollo's 49 tons). That's not enough for a moon mission, especially not if you make the new capsule so heavy. This is mostly because NASA has to reuse old Space Shuttle parts, e.g. the engines on the rocket. They pay $420M to take a single old existing engine out of storage and refurbish it, and then dump it into the ocean during the first flight evn though those are reusable engines. $420M is both more than an entire SpaceX booster (with 33 engines) and also more than those old engines cost to make in the first place ($40M). The capsule is a six seater designed for Mars. It now goes towards the moon with four astronauts instead. They didn't change the design much, so it is extremely heavy - a bad combination if you have to work with an underpowered rocket. This means NASA's plan had to change quite a bit. They can't make it to the moon, they can't even make it to a useful orbit around the moon (like Apollo 8), no, they have to make due with a more... 'lunar-adjacent' destination. It's called a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit, is really slow (and thus dangerous for manned missions since you can't really abort it if something goes wrong, you have to ride it out - for up to 11 days) and really not all that interesting since it's rather far away from the moon most of the time. NASA says they will fix all those problems before Artemis III by refueling the rocket at a new space station, something that will indubitably cost another $100B. Oh, and although they always wanted to do that, they forgot that the capsule doesn't have a docking hatch to dock at a space station in the specs. Changing the design to include that hatch has cost billions and billions of dollars, again. Also, the last time they tried to fly the capsule, they had catastrophic trouble with both the heat shield (of Columbia fame) and the batteries. They haven't flight tested both of those since, but are going to fly it with human guinea pigs on board next.

In the end, I'm mostly sad and angry because this clusterfuck has cost us the Mars sample return mission, and it might cost us manned space flight for the next several decades.

Now, for the culture war angle. I'm relatively far left-leaning. Universal healthcare appeals to me. But this entire story black-pilled me on universal healthcare in the US. There's just no way that a system that allows this much mismanagement in favor of Lockheed and Boenig would manage to drop healthcare costs when facing the healthcare lobby. Also, this seems entirely unfixable. This is a cancer that has long spread across the aisle, and it shows itself every single time the military industrial complex smells money. Feels like another real loss of state capacity.

If we go full Challenger Appendix F - what are the real odds of something going sideways during the mission? Polymarket prices that at 12% at the moment, but that is absurdly high.

Polymarket prices that at 12% at the moment, but that is absurdly high.

Interesting, I was wondering the same thing while writing the comment and my gut reaction was "10%". And yes, that is absurdly high. But there's no margin for error with the heat shield, and as far as I understood the reporting at the time the battery failure would also not have been survivable. Years ago, I'd have said NASA knows the risk models, and they wouldn't send astronauts on a P(death)=0.1 mission. But man, have they squandered their technical integrity and credibility on this project.

And don't get me wrong, the mission with those constraints coming from congress was difficult. It might have been impossible. But I would have expected to see high level resignations at NASA left and right until they got something that could make the trip to the surface and back without failing during tests.

Bear in mind that Polymarket is pricing Loss-of-Vehicle for the SLS rocket, and hopefully the Orion's Launch Abort System means that the odds for Loss-of-Crew during launch are significantly lower.

On the other hand, it looks like 12% is just for the question "Artemis II explodes?", specifically referring to "the booster", and if the crew dies due to just the capsule failing reentry then that would count as a "no" on the Polymarket bet despite it counting as a "hell no" for the future of Orion and SLS.

Years ago, I'd have said NASA knows the risk models, and they wouldn't send astronauts on a P(death)=0.1 mission.

Interesting tidbit - an independent consultant estimated the chances of the shuttle blowing up to 1-2/100 . They lost 2 vehicles in 135 flights. He was quite right on the money.

Feynmann's report on Challenger said that the NASA engineers estimated the chance of a catastrophic failure at around 1/200 (contrasting it to middle management who thought the figure was 1/1000 or better and senior management who insisted it was 1/100,000). So even the engineers were optimistic.

With so little data it's hard to be sure.

If the odds of failure had actually been 1/200 per flight, then you'd expect to see a ~50% chance of no failures, 34% of 1, 11.6% of 2, 2.5% of 3, etc. Seeing 2/135 failures is good evidence that 1/200 was overly optimistic, but not proof.

That said, Feynman found engineers willing to give risk estimates as high as 1/100, which was still probably too optimistic (the last post-Columbia post-mortem analysis apparently said 1/90?) but not by much.

Luckily from my perspective, it seems that space travel hasn't been THAT politicized by the culture war, yet.

You're talking about a mission specifically designed to put a woman on the moon. Although it seems they only have one woman on the 4-person crew, as well as a black man.

No worries, the two white dudes are practically Buzz Lightyear from central casting! And they only have to get the woman in proximity of the moon AIUI; piece of cake.

I've never heard a leftist snarl about space IRL, and trust me, it a leftist snarls about something, I hear it.

You may be too young. Around the time after the moon landings, there were protests of the kind "could not this ointment be sold and the money given to the poor?" about it. Space exploration was not seen to be doing anything, sure we'd been to the moon but so what? just sending up more landings was doing nothing, meanwhile we have all these problems on earth of poverty etc. and isn't it better if the budget devoted to useless rocket launches, coming out of taxpayer money, is instead spent on the sick, poor and homeless here in our own countries?

I'd be more optimistic about the New Space Age were it not for having lived through the Old Space Age. We do not have the moon bases and so forth that were the golden dreams post-moon landing. I don't see any reason for it to be different this time round, except that private commercial operators are now up and running. Asteroid belt mining will remain the province of SF.

EDIT: I am extremely bummed out about the space shuttle, for instance. This was meant to be the future, yet it seems to have fizzled out in "too expensive, not really doing what it was supposed to do, back to old fashioned heavy rocket lifts".

I can count one of my ratchet clicks away from leftism when I first heard the performance of the poem "Whitey on the Moon."

From 1970, complaining about the moon landing whilst poverty exists.

Just an insane level of scope blindness. "How dare you move the course of human history and the frontiers of exploration forward while I have to pay more for food.

Which ignores that we can walk and chew gum at the same time, but also represents the kind of envious Luddism that threatens to keep us confined to this rock forever.

(And no, this isn't a feature that is limited to the left).

I can count one of my ratchet clicks away from leftism when I first heard the performance of the poem "Whitey on the Moon."

I had my own ratchet click away in the opposite direction when I read Greg Egan's Oracle. In it, an AI from the future is talking to Alan Turing from a different parallel universe:

Robert was silent for a while, contemplating the magnitude of what she was proposing. Then he said, “It’s a pity you didn’t come sooner. In this branch, about twenty years ago —”

Helen cut him off. “I know. We had the same war. The same Holocaust, the same Soviet death toll. But we’ve yet to be able to avert that, anywhere. You can never do anything in just one history – even the most focused intervention happens across a broad ‘ribbon’ of strands. When we try to reach back to the ’30s and ’40s, the ribbon overlaps with its own past to such a degree that all the worst horrors are faits accomplis. We can’t shoot any version of Adolf Hitler, because we can’t shrink the ribbon to the point where none of us would be shooting ourselves in the back. All we’ve ever managed are minor interventions, like sending projectiles back to the Blitz, saving a few lives by deflecting bombs.”

“What, knocking them into the Thames?”

“No, that would have been too risky. We did some modelling, and the safest thing turned out to be diverting them onto big, empty buildings: Westminster Abbey, Saint Paul’s Cathedral.”

At that moment I did the "raise finger, lower finger" meme IRL. In a good way.

This reminds me of one of my favorite personal anecdotes ever.

In 2022, I was, for about six months, living in a big city on the east coast. I had previously worked in this city, hated it, and moved away. When I came back, I contact some friends and colleagues with the standard, "TollBooth is back in town, who want's to party."

One guy invites me to meet him, his girlfriend, and one of her friend's at a bar. I text him asking if he's trying to slyly set me up on a blind date. He responds cheekily, but the intent is clear (yes). L-to-the-O-L. I get ready and meet them.

Old buddy is outgoing and affable. Somewhat like a human golden retriever. Girlfriend is a great complement. A little more dryly humorous. The straight man to his goofball. Blind date girl is ..... swing and a miss. Although quite pretty, the personality type was immediately offputting - liberal but brittle. Not a loud and proud wearer of pussy hats, but an anxious NPR type who sometimes has a meltdown loading and running the dishwasher. If You've seen School of Rock, think of the female principal (before she turns cool. Whatever. I'm not going to ruin the vibe.

Conversation is happening. Lots of references to memes and The Office. It's not like mentally jerking off discussing topics of high importance on The Motte, but it's not a bad way to spend a Friday evening. I've also been drinking, which helps.

Old Buddy brings up space. I think he'd been watching a document. Starts to really geek out over all the cool stuff SpaceX may be able to do. Nods from TollBooth, girlfriend seems pleased her man has a non videogame passion.

Blind date hits the table with your "Whitey on The Moon" vibe; _"I just think it's kind of insane, actually, that we're spending, what, tens of billions of dollars on these hobby projects while people are LitErallY StARVing out there."

I'm no veteran, but I know a landmine when I see one. Not stepping into this one. Just give a sincere seeming nod...and maybe flag down the waitress for another drink or four.

Old Buddy can't help himself. In the most gentle way, he asks Blind Date if, perhaps, maybe, just maybe, poverty and space exploration aren't zero sum tradeoffs? And that, perhaps, advancing the species' exploration of the cosmos may deliver some auxiliary benefits to the economy as a whole?

Nope. She holds the line. Moderate escalation. Girlfriend finds a way to change the subject. Rest of the evening is pretty much fine. I got pretty nicely drunk without getting sloppy. Old Buddy and girlfriend get their uber quickly after we all pile out of the restaurant. I'm ready to give an awkaward ass-out hug to Blind Date and then stumble to an Irish Bar to finish off the night solo.

"Want to come over to my place?" She asks. I'm stunned, and not only because I'm drunk. I haven't ... talked to her for the past 2 hours. But, years, later, I learn tall, plain guy is a fantastic pickup routine. All of that non-committal non-communication, paired with disinterested heavy drinking was irresistible!

Or not, who knows. I declined the offer, honestly informing her I was pretty wasted. I think I registered a mix of confusion and revulsion on her face.

The kicker to the story is that Old Buddy texts me the next day; "Great seeing you! Sorry Blind Date was such a weirdo"

I declined the offer, honestly informing her I was pretty wasted.

Given her prettiness I would have still went for the smash and dash.

I haven't ... talked to her for the past 2 hours. But, years, later, I learn tall, plain guy is a fantastic pickup routine.

The heightpilled already had a phrase for this since at least the late 201Xs: Just be Tall (JBT).

There's a limit somewhere, though. Do Moon landings benefit humans? Obviously, as a step toward extraction and colonization. Do Saturn probes benefit humans? Maybe, if I squint. Do deep-space telescopes benefit humans? I personally don't see how.

My general response to that is "the market would sort it out" under normal conditions.

We just can't let the existence of human suffering, somewhere, be an excuse to shut down human advancement everywhere.

If we are productive enough to have excess resources lying around after we feed, house, clothe, and entertain ourselves, some of it can probably get thrown at speculative science projects or pure pursuit of knowledge sans profit motive.

Is there demand for it? Probably not that much... but the people that would demand it also happen to be pretty rich.

Some of that also comes down to how you answer the Fermi paradox. If there's a small but nonzero chance of happening across other intelligent life (or the remnants of same) that's a potentially massive payoff, so buying a few lotto tickets 'makes sense' if survival isn't compromised (lol Dark Forest Theory).

Deep Space Telescopes in particular seem to be relatively cheap to deploy and have a small but real chance of discovering something really, really cool... even if not immediately valuable.

If we were moving rapidly towards space industrialization, they'd also be useful for finding ripe targets for Von Neumann Probes.

We just can't let the existence of human suffering, somewhere, be an excuse to shut down human advancement everywhere.

If we allowed the human advancement for advancement's sake, then our enemies would gain political power.

In an environment where the socioeconomic power for the average member outside the current dominant bloc has done nothing but shrink, a society governed by that bloc is going to be fiercely resistant to change.

This is the root cause of why China (and a few other countries that have high human capital potential) can build and advance; while everywhere else [allows itself to be] buried under heckler's veto without end.

If we allowed the human advancement for advancement's sake, then our enemies would gain political power.

Ironically, one of the better reasons to get space-based industry going is to try and outrun these Molochian incentives for a while.

My dream is to have a nice little O'Neill Cylinder of my own, tucked inside a nondescript asteroid, powered by fusion, so that I can genuinely just live life in peace, such that there's no major incentive to try and exercise political authority over me and mine.

Unless we think that the drive of the collectivists will not permit them to leave someone alone who could be forced to come into the fold. At which point I'd rather fight them to the death before we get off-planet.

The crew is diverse. The backup crew is equally diverse. That increases the chances of NASA pulling off a Challenger substantially in my book. The organizations that care about diversity seems to underperform in execution of their core mission.

Yes the left and environmentalists hate it

Why? For me peaceful space exploration is the least controversial thing - the resources it consumes are negligible, no pollution, huge moral lifter.

We need to explore space. We need to do more stuff in space. And the scientific bang for buck is extraordinary.

There are enough women, Canadians, and blacks that they can find someone competent, and all of them want to be astronauts. Diversity in itself doesn’t mean much.

There are enough women, Canadians, and blacks that they can find someone competent

You would think so, but my experience going to an elite university says otherwise, at least as to blacks.

As far as women go, the issue I see is that the pool of women who are seriously interested in becoming astronauts is surely far far smaller than the pool of men. So while the (non-minority) female professors I had in college were basically competent, I'm not sure that it would be the same way with astronauts.

I'm reminded of an incident a few years ago where a female astronaut was arrested over an apparent kidnapping plan she had hatched over a love triangle. Yes, this is an n=1 situation, but still. The pool of wannabe male astronauts is large enough that anyone with the slightest hint of this kind of psychological issue can be eliminated.

I don’t think there should be women astronauts. But I don’t think minorities, women, and Canadians on the ship will cause it to blow up mid flight, either.

But I don’t think minorities, women, and Canadians on the ship will cause it to blow up mid flight, either.

I would agree it's unlikely however it certainly raises the odds of a calamity. The other issue is that every DEI hire paves the way to more and more DEI hires, which can be expected to result in disasters which would not have otherwise happened. Separately, in order to meet DEI quotas, organizations tend to de-emphasize objective measures of competency. Which means that everyone is worse, on average, even white men.

I once encountered a grizzled mariner who assured me that women aboard a ship are still bad luck, even in current year.

I presume they're even more bad luck in current year than they've ever been.

Challenger astronauts were also competent.

Deliberate diversity is organizational rot. Can you think of examples of organizations that become better after dei push?

Ok, do you think the quality control inspectors on the Artemis program are DEI hires? I suspect not.

Even if they are not - organizational culture matters a great deal for outcomes. Does it matter if the pressure for you to greenlight something comes because your boss has overly optimistic schedule or because you are afraid she will call you anti black racist?

Nasa has a history of cultural drift leading to disasters. And the track record of embracing DEI is spotty at best.

Do you think that there is no way those two could interact in such a way that to lead to a failed mission?

I have no opinion on the quality control inspectors on the Artemis program in particular, but I would note that we have seen strong DEI pushes that trade off directly against high-stakes safety institutions like air traffic controllers and pilot training, along with pretty much every field in the whole country. This is not something I'd be super confident in asserting obviously wouldn't happen, especially given the degree to which space programs are very clearly run off politics rather than engineering.

I have no opinion on the quality control inspectors on the Artemis program in particular, but I would note that we have seen strong DEI pushes that trade off directly against high-stakes safety institutions like air traffic controllers and pilot training, along with pretty much every field in the whole country.

I agree. My general sense is that the pattern with DEI is that in the early stages, diversity-hires are put into non-critical jobs and given very little in the way of important work responsibilities. At my first corporate job, there was a senior administrative position held by a black woman, for the most part she just sat in her office playing games on her company PC.

But seeing the push for DEI physicians; DEI pilots; and DEI air-traffic controllers makes me think that the Left isn't content to stop with handing do-nothing window dressing jobs to diversity hires.

Challenger had nothing to do with DEI and everything to do with a demented and unholy mix of refusing to listen to Engineers, Victory Disease, and the Space Shuttle being an deformed Rube Goldberg machine to get into orbit.

Funny thing is, had they stripped the Orbiter out of the equation, you'd have a disposable heavy-lift vehicle capable of getting 90 tons into orbit.

Retrospective perspective is a bitch. We should have just continued making Saturn V rockets.

Challenger happened due to cultural rot. For me DEI has also a smell of cultural rot.

Yeah, but they rarely pick those people. The whole point of DEI is to destroy the concept of merit. You can't go picking meritorious minorities, you have to purposely pick the least qualified ones you can possibly get away with. Because the entire thing is a social experiment at scale to prove merit isn't real.

The crew is diverse.

"We're sending the first woman, first person of color, and, uh, first Canadian around the moon."

Although I think a decent chunk of the Artemis program success has been a lack of prominent news coverage. The last few decades of space exploration have largely been dictated by political decisions regularly yanking the chain of the current project in whatever shiny direction appeals to the elected officials "Moon! No, Mars! No, Moon! Shuttle-derived Constellation! No, SLS!". It seemed we'd change things up every time the party in office changed over. If anything. It seems we're here because Artemis might be the only Trump first-term agenda item that Biden didn't summarily cancel (uncertain if due to agreement on direction, or just lack of concern about NASA budget). They "let them cook", as the kids would say.

Which isn't to say that concerns about cost effectiveness are wrong, per se. SLS is hilariously expensive (and I'm sure Orion is too), but the SpaceX fanboys originally advertised Starship HLS on the Moon in 2024, and we haven't even seen the base variant make orbit yet, much less hit the advertised payload numbers (and there aren't public numbers on Starship dev costs). Dino space is at least mostly competent at building things that don't go boom unexpectedly too often: SLS worked on its first launch, as did Vulcan and even New Glenn.

Whitey on the Moon remains a banger even as somebody who thinks the concept is ludicrous. What more needs to be said?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4

Don't forget the spiritual successor.

Or the country version.

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