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PaperclipPerfector  14hr ago (text post)   1491 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?

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.

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.

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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