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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.
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.
"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.
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