This seems like a pretty big deal, why am I only now finding out about this
Probably because all the horrible shit trump does takes up all the space.
I don’t know, we need to do a better job of advertising this stuff if a lot of people don’t know about it. This is one of the few decent things the U.S. is doing.
I caught it through NPR maybe a couple weeks before it happened, and some science YouTubers were hype about it, but other than that I caught very little coverage. Not a lot mentioned on here that I saw til the day of or the day before. Not that it wasn’t talked about here before that, but just what I noticed.
Long as we have to depend on chemical propellants, the moon is as far as we’ll ever get
Well the solar panels all deployed and are charging, but yeah using chemical burns isn’t good for much beyond orbital movement
Still need a reliable method to convert the power gained from solar into propulsion with enough force so that it won’t take a decade to get anywhere
The nuclear reflection engine is still our best bet, I feel like it may take actual zero G experiments to solve but I think we can achieve fusion
SLS has gotten a lot of well-deserved hate for being an expendable money pit. All that aside, damn, it lifted off with humans in it and off to the moon! There’s no other currently available rocket that can do that, including Starship.
I wonder how Flatearthers are going to explain this one.
I’ve already seen “it’s AI generated”.
Same way moon landing deniers do.
“The whole thing is staged! Nobody actually flew anywhere! They just put some guys in costumes and filmed them on a sound stage in Hollywood!”
Yet another legacy sequel.
Frog lenses
I had a guy come into my shop yesterday and we started talking about the launch, and he said the exact same thing to me. We ended up having a good laugh about flat earthers and having a good ol fashioned space chat. Good bloke!
America, fast going backwards, has today reached
19691968, assuming that this mission succeeds.(Edit: this is not even a moon landing so more Apolo 8 than Apolo 11).
A truly pointless waste of money. This is what we did with all the cancer research money cut from NIH.
While Whitey’s on the moon.
Terrible take. A lot of what we know in science is due to NASA research. NASA is <0.5% of the federal budget. There are plenty of egregious things we are wasting money on to be upset about - this is not one of them.
And a lot of the NASA science budget was cut because it was too boring for the toddler administration who want to play with their flashy toys.
the budget was moved over to SpaceX on the lie of private sector efficiency. But to the credit of SpaceX, they did blow up more rockets than the inefficient NASA ever did.
It was largely restored under the 2026 congressional budget at levels similar to 2025. The trump administration tried to punish centers in blue states by taking away their funding, the worst of which was Goddard with a 50% budget cut. Basically they tried to cancel nearly every earth observing science mission, which is Goddards bread and butter.
Not to mention the R&D that Nasa does provides a massive return on investment
40 years ago.
NASA is <0.5% of the federal budget
that’s <0.5% more than cancer research.
A lot of what we know in science is due to NASA research
Someone not in STEM would say this. NASA has some important projects, this is not one of them.
Sending up this rocket accomplishes NOTHING. This is an idiot project based on moon colony fantasy and a way to shovel more tax $ to Elon Musk and SpaceX while people clap and holler like idiots.
This poem from 1970 illustrates exactly how far the US has progressed in 55 years:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the Moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey’s on the Moon)
I can’t pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey’s on the Moon)
Ten years from now I’ll be paying still.
(while Whitey’s on the Moon)
Except we can update 10 years to 20 years.
Someone not in STEM would say this
So you then? Because anyone who has to work with grants to fund their research knows this isn’t how this works at all. Lmao go back to Reddit.
While Whitey’s on the moon
At least the crew for this mission includes a black guy and a woman, unlike the 24 white dudes who crewed the Apollo missions.
Right, it’s definitely this and not the 200 billion dollar budget of ICE, or all the resources going towards the war in Iran right now.
Please don’t let it be cancelled and returned early because of a toilet That would just be too much. This is the first thing that has made me legitimately excited since having to unexpectedly say goodbye to my soul-dog last month. I need this, dammit.
How exactly do you think they’d return prematurely? Hit the reverse button?
Its the entire reason they did a full orbit before firing the lunar injection burn, so that if something was wrong they could jettison the service module and perform a deorbit burn for an early splashdown in the pacific.
Yeah, they should piss out a window like the rest of us.
Can’t we get a single article without mentioning how shitty the U.S is right now? Half of the comments here aren’t even ontopic.
Going back to the moon is still an engineering feat, even if we’ve done it before. That was a generation ago, and all of those engineers are retired or about to.
AFAIK, the service module is European, built by the ESA, so this is not 100% an American accomplishment.
This gives mission me hope. A diamond in the rough.
I mean I kinda see manned missions as pointless. I would like us to remotely create destinations before going through the added expense of people and I think the technology gains would be bigger.
Lucky for you, we have sent probes to the moon.
Unluckily, the next probe is set for Uranus…
I’m going to ignore the obvious Kindergarten joke (which I’ve made myself).
I would be happy to send a probe to Uranus. We know a lot less about the outer planets bcz we’ve really only done a few flybys of them.
It’s funny, because things I’ve watched recently have been pronouncing it YOUR-uh-nus, versus your-A-nus. Dunno when we made the change, but 25-30 years ago, it was butthole.
But jokes aside, I want to see something like the Parker Solar Probe, but out. Fastest thing ever created, by a large margin, and second place is the goddamn manhole cover. I’m assuming the science can’t exactly slingshot something straight out like that, wave to Voyager Uno and Voyager Dos, and see what’s happening.
I’m no scientist though, but let’s go.
now we just need the construction of destinations. we are well on our way tom completing the initial preliminary work before we start what should be the main effort.
Can’t we get a single article without mentioning how shitty the U.S is right now? Half of the comments here aren’t even on topic.
My friend, the toilet was clogged on the rocket.
Toilet= shitty
Seems on topic to me
I’m surprised that Trump didn’t sign an EO declaring that it was now the Trump space mission rather than Artemis II.
I don’t care what we call it, as long as we keep funding the science and engineering. The amount of people who don’t understand why we should do this stuff is astounding. And I’m honestly not the best at articulating why we should do it.
I don’t see the point of sending people to the moon or Mars. It will always be insanely expensive to do anything there, always. What is there to discover that can’t be done with robots? Doing it for the poetic sake of doing it--“going where no man has gone before”-- seems impractical and wasteful.
Yes, we’ve done it in the past, exploring, that doesn’t mean we must keep doing it as it becomes more impractical, and with what benefits, exactly? Exploiting whatever resources are there? Is that really what we should be doing?
Yeah, why do things! Let’s just sit on our ass and stagnate!
Stop trying, idiots, things are hard!
Yeah, why do things! Let’s just sit on our ass and stagnate!
Let’s do the same thing over and over again and call it progress! Next time you are in a hospital watching a loved one dying of cancer, you can tell them how many times we flew around the moon!
We can’t breathe, the earth is on fire…let’s do another moon victory lap!
The world doesn’t have enough supply of organs for transplant
We cannot grow synthetic organs on earth because complex tissue collapses under its own weight during the growing process on earth
Space has much lower gravity. We might be able to grow synthetic organs there.
When I’m old and my Grandkids can get full organ transplants with kidneys grown on the moon, I just might thank the Artemis missions.
Those things are not mutually exclusive. Why are you so angry about this when the military budget request this year was over 892 billion dollars?
NASA’s budget is less than 0.35% of the what was spent the previous year, which was over 7 trillion dollars.
If you want to be angry at something, you should direct it toward the asshats in charge who refuse to fund our Healthcare, infrastructure, and yes, cancer research.
You’re right to be upset, but you are directing it a the wrong stuff.
The moon is a good stopping off point for the rest of the solar system. Launching interplanetary missions from the moon is much easier assuming a moon base exists
Why waste billions when we can waste trillions!
you guys realize NASA probes have already gone beyond the solar system?
Im on the same page. I feel we should concentrate on discovery with probes or rovers and such and automation. trying to mine something robotically on an asteroid. if we can do that then see if we can smelt it. See if we can create fuel in space and such. I don’t think we will progress at all till we can be sourcing and manufacturing in space.
Asteroid mining is ridiculous. Ignorance of both asteroids and mining.
if thats the case then going into space is rediculous because if we at some point can’t source and build our there then there is no future out there.
I hope it goes smoothly. I read some troubling things about it, but time will tell.
Can’t we get a single article without mentioning how shitty the U.S is right now?
So you concede this is all about distraction.
Let’s discover antibiotics again!
I’m talking about the comments section here, not the content of the article.
They went to hide the Epstein files on the far side of the Moon.
They go in search of human rights
If I’ve learned anything from realistic space fiction, it’s that they won’t find any up there.
we can also just look at who are currently the faces of the private space race, and their beliefs and how they run their companies
whew. i’ve rolled the dice on my life, but i’ve never gotten on a boeing spacecraft. and the shitter’s already clogged.
SLS is mostly designed by Lockeed-Martin and NASA SRC. Boeing was a private contractor too though. This is also the first space toilet we’ve put in a spacecraft and exactly why we’re doing this test flight.
You’re thinking of Starliner. This is SLS (Space Launch System).
Right, my mistake. Shitter is clogged tho. Seriously. I know how to design a clogproof shitter (you need a mashing stick) and look what they did.
Space toilets are complicated. They don’t have gravity assisting the flush. You’d be surprised how even simple stuff we take for granted on Earth is complex when you take away gravity.
yeah i am making a little fun because oh my gods why did they not consult the spends their entire life on the toilet community because we can solve any toilet clogging problem with a wire hangar.
They launched the integrity of the USA off the planet, so it won’t bother them anymore for a few days.
Very often, I was like “I don’t think I need to watch this shuttle launch, they might have to scrub it” and then they’d actually launch and I was was like “damn, I should have watched that shuttle launch”.
So I was like “naaah, I don’t think I need to watch this launch, they might scrub it” and now it looks like they’ve launched and I was like “shit, I fell for that again, I’m really stupid”
The shuttle is Lucy holding the football and you live in a Charlie Brown world. ✌
I watched the live stream of the launch. You never know what happens until the rocket has reached space. From significant past launches was the launch of JWST, that was truly nerve racking and exciting, although no people were on the board.
Hopefully nothing will break, and we perhaps get a moon base in this century. (we do have more urgent things to research, but space research tends to produce more eye-opening and unexpected results.)
Hell yeah! Let’s go!
You’re too late, they already left.
Not again!
KEVIN!
Ooh I know this reference. It’s Wall-E, right?
Yeah, when the two immortal robbers try to steal Wall-E’s treasures and he deals gross bodily slapstick horrors to them for the sake of a gag.
omfg can yous not enjoy a moon mission without falling into doomerism and talking about the epstein files
Some people seem to think about political issues every day. It seems unhealthy and unhappy.
But that’s the joke.
most elaborate April fools prank this year
If they can fake the moon landing they can fake a launch.
if you can fake a wrench, you can fake a ball!
If they can fake launch, can they fake dienner, too?
I don’t know what that is but I believe in them.
Bearing in mind that explaining jokes ruins them, “launch” can be pretend-read as a mispelling of “lunch”, so I mispelled “dinner” to make a stupid joke.
This is a terrible joke, and I love it.
You have terrible taste. :)
I don’t know you, but if you’re anything like my dog, you must think I’m awesome! Which I appreciate, but I question your judgement.
They tricked the Astronauts into thinking they are going to the moon, when in reality they are aiming for Jupiter. Good luck nerds!
Yeah, a little over the top in my opinion. More money than I’m willing to spend on a prank.
I was honestly considering that, even though it would have been strnge for AP. I opened the article and the latest update was about some toilet issue
