It was a “go” at Trump and other world “leaders” for the glorification of their ideology , conquest and aims of killing people , using vast amounts of money and scientific advancements in order to do so.
Our ability as a species can take life forms beyond our only known habitable planet , send it to a body moving at 3000 km/hr through an unsurvivable near vacuum, return it safely and land it within a 1 minute window of the projected eta having journeyed nearly 700,000 miles.
Or we can still communicate with a probe 1 Light day away that was launched 50 years ago.
Or we can find new treatments and cures for ailments that have decimated humanity for millennia.
It’s extraordinary what we CAN do , collectively.
But most of the time, we’re more interested in destroying each other, consolidating the wealth and power of the already wealthy, outright deriding and denying aspects of science that interfere with that goal, condemning the have nots to servitude and in general behaving like ■■■■■■■ exterminators on entirely ideological grounds.
That was the point. It was the contrast between what Artemis and other scientific endevours show we can do versus the idiocy of humanities often default actions and what is currently happening around the world.
It was also a go at his unasked for, self-serving, public property-defacing of the White House East wing demolition and rebuild/gaudy extension (in his faux grandeur, gilded regression style, Corinthian columns and all)
I mean land like they did on the Moon in 1969, 57 years ago. I understand about atmosphere and gravity but you would think in 57 years they can work out a soft landing on Earth.
To have a vehicle landing on earth with propulsion, as we did on the moon, you need engines and fuel and landing legs and all the associated systems which are extra mass that needs to be carried the whole journey.
Without all of that, the alternative is parachutes and landing on water or land. This works well, is cheaper and technically much easier to implement reliably.
The current SLS/Orion and even Apollo architectures are not designed for and do not support for the extra mass to be carried to/around the moon and back to earth.
Carrying that extra mass is required for propulsive landing.
At the end of the day if you are not going to reuse, you don’t need it to land in a way to reuse it.
Reuse is the difference of what NASA has dreamed, considered to be technically viable and achieved and what commercial space has.
SpaceX has spent around 7 years and around $20B so far to achieve a resusable first stage.
Hopefully later this year they will also do it with the second lander stage. To achieve this they will need to refuel the second lander stage in orbit to allow its propulsion systems to be able to carry the extra mass required for landing. No one previously considered refueling in space as feasible. It needed someone as crazy as Elon to really attempt it.
Blue Origin hasn’t even proposed a reusable second lander stage as yet. So it remains to be seen how they will land the second stage back on earth. Consensus is landing legs, but reuse hasn’t been mentioned to my knowledge and nothing has been seen as yet.
NASA has thought about landing second stages and reusing them but the path to design and implement a fully reusable system is not easy.
Shuttle is a special case and never had the capability to go to the moon so many different factors involved in its reuse.
Despite the future I’d like to be living in, the Enterprise was a test shuttle vehicle that verified subsonic flight and landing characteristics. Never went to space.
What I love about Fraser is that he ties to explain complex topics in simple terms as possible.
He also does in-depth deep dive interviews with scientists that do research and release papers all the way through to people that built and operate LSST, Hubble and JWST.
Oort cloud comet C 2025 R3 (Panstarrs) is now potentially visible. Look low and east 15 minutes or so before sunrise, just north of where the sun will come up.
