Do you think we will learn more from Artemis or the Asteroid Redirect Mission? Because that's a concrete example of how funding this mission caused other experiments to be cancelled.
Fair point, but that’s an argument about prioritization within NASA’s budget (and its size relative to other spending), not the scientific value of the mission.
There's never non-zero value to any challenging engineering problem. The question is whether the finite resources spent to solve it are best spent on it versus other projects.
And in this mission in particular, you can't divorce science from politics. NASA's budget was reined in by Trump 45 and his admin picked Artemis because a manned mission to the moon invokes a particular feeling and memory, not because it benefits science. The moon is a known quantity, and going there is not more valuable than the other projects the government could have spent $100 billion on.
Keep in mind, this is one of the most expensive single launches in history while there is a partial government shutdown and the rest of the federal government that does real research has been gutted by this same administration. So it's tough to talk about "scientific value" when it's obvious that this mission is doing little science at the same time the government has decreed it won't be in the business of paying for science.
The moon isn’t a known quantity, we sent a handful of people there for a combined few days half a century ago. There’s immense scientific and engineering value in keeping a generation of engineers fluent in deep space operations.
If you’re angry about this dumpster fire of an administration wasting money and gutting research (I am too), the answer is to fight for better funding across the board, not to tear down one of the few ambitious programs left that’s actually pushing the boundaries on what we can do. NASA’s budget amounts to a rounding error and isn’t zero sum with the rest of federal science funding, these are separate appropriations.
I'm going to tear down spending $2.5 billion to test the toilets on a space ship every chance I get. It is a massive waste of resources and depletion of human capital that would be better spent on other projects that could advance science and human understanding.
This opinion may be unpopular here but it's hard to get excited about a colossal waste of taxpayer money after all the damage DOGE did. I don't understand how these NASA missions with questionable scientific value and obscene budgets get off the ground.
I mean I do understand, NASA funding is important to oligarchs. But still.
I personally find the grind easier when there also big things happening. You can't just cook the same, most basic, cheapest meal every day for your family and expect them to be happy. Who wants to join a club that doesn't do anything interesting? Same with society. It sometimes needs to dream, to aspire and inspire. To lift peoples head from the toil and look up.
Artemis was already set in stone well before DOGE came about and IMO if the federal government is going to set mountains of cash on fire I'd rather it be to NASA than half the crap the government wastes every year.
My point is that DOGE killed a bunch of government programs that help people while saving no money, yet this giant waste of money survived. Cancelling Artemis II alone in favor of III would save a billion dollars by itself.
Multiply by 1000. Then multiply by 10. And that is expenditure on another country but instead of for promoting equity (how can anyone be against DEI as it is properly defined???) it is spent on slaughter.
It was never intended to save money. It was about a crusade against remote work, eliminating civil servants who might be loyal to the Constitution rather than the president, and planting a seed of government dysfunction for later years.
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