"I could have done it better, it's not a big deal, oh, they had women and non white people on board, what even is the shareholder value of this mission, oh it was almost done 50 years ago..."
These people went literally to the moon and back. Furthest anyone has ever been. That's an achievement.
I know things suck right now. Even more reasons to appreciate what is possible with technology.
I agree with the premise of this article. This achievement is inspiring and re-assuring that competency brings results. The alternative is way too depressing AND it mostly is our reality right know.
Throughout the years we've heard concerns that we could no longer go back to the moon because of skill atrophy. This is, at a minimum, a great step towards recovering some lost skills while developing new ones.
People are too lost in their political hysteria to appreciate what a amazing achievement that was.
We're in this mix of living in a time of mass hysteria and so many bots on the internet that it's tough to tell if the comments are real. I want to hope most comments I see aren't real people. It's sad if they are.
TBF there’s very little change on what we can do more than what was achieved in the 60s. The current space boom is a re-do with better tooling. We can put better computers in space and that’s what gives us anything more than what we had before. The moon and Mars are PR stuff and would be cool and maybe inspire engineers or scientists but its still slight incremental upgrade to what we had so far since 60s.
Even the photos are not that much better so far, people compare the OG and many like the old stuff better. Obviously its impressive engineering but we have seen it before.
I will be impressed when we have a large city sized space station with a large transparent dome.
We have an incredible eclipse photos with multiple planets in the background. If you don't find photos like that incredible to see I'd guess you need to do some soul searching.
They are impressive photos, the earthrise is my background on my phone and the eclipse is my background on my laptop but they are derivatives of what we had before.
> TBF there’s very little change on what we can do more than what was achieved in the 60s.
People could do backflips and write moving poetry and memorize thousands of digits of pi in the 60s too. Such things were impressive then and they're impressive now.
I could understand someone thinking that the Apollo program was more impressive than the Artemis program, but to think that the Artemis missions are not impressive is completely foreign to me.
Doing it the second time is so less impressive that soviets cancelled their whole human moon landing and Americans stopped paying attention on Apollo 13 and cancelled the program after 17.
Obviously it is huge engineering achievement each time, just not as impressive as it was done before.
ofc very much the american way, outside of the region maybe its more read like propaganda... not in all regions people are like this, but its not a bad thing i suppose. Good things can also be leveraged for bad things etc. (not by the ppl involved ofc, but by others and their framing of the facts)
it'd be nice if people gave eachother a little space to be :) and look past the politics of things.
maybe then we would not feel the need to go the furthest out into space ever done and we can remain sometime in each other's proximity without feeling the need to develop nuclear weapons.
While it is obvious that the fact that except for the commander, the crew was composed of a woman, a Canadian and an African-Caribbean-American, cannot have happened by chance, I think that for this kind of mission also achieving a diversity target is perfectly fine.
There is no doubt that the members of the crew were at least equally qualified with the possible members of a less diverse crew, even if their provenance must have influenced the final selection.
Perhaps instead of doubting that it was right to choose crew members belonging to historically disadvantaged minorities, like Canadians :-), one should wonder why only the crew members are diverse, but not their chief, which is a more stereotypical American, as chiefs are expected to be in USA.
A conspiracy theorist can argue both ways, either that choosing a diverse crew was done as a favor to those kinds of people, or on the contrary, that choosing a diverse crew was done as a disfavor to them, to show them who is really their boss.
So no matter what choice is done, people can criticize it for more or less imaginary reasons.
you should not ask why they went to the moon again, but ask about why they went to the moon again NOW.
you will see why the whole ordeal was super polished etc.
not to the detriment of nasa nor astronauts or anyone involved. they are doing science and pretty epic things.
so then maybe you can allow to detach your sentiment from the science and acheivement and place it on the appropriate point. (us leadership and their wars needing to give ppl a bit of dopamine because the populus is getting saturated with bad news).
Also, i kinda doubt as a nation or humanity you would do better. i dont know who you are , but this is saying you will be better than some of the brightest minds working at esa, spacex, nasa and chinese, indian, russian equavalents etc
as humanity ... yeah. good luck getting people to work together more than they already do... do you think no one is trying it??? what is your grand plan? how would you do it better?
you cant just make such claims willynilly..show credentials and proof you can do it.
I thought this was a straw man, because surely wtf is even the point of this comment, but nope, sure enough, ctrl+f and there are comments like that here. Wow.
I haven’t paid any attention to the mission, and there’s something about the framing of this article that I don’t like, as if it’s talking about a soap opera or reality TV or something. It just rubs me up the wrong way.
Clearly in retrospect they made the right call to go ahead though. The heat shield held up fine.
Arguably NASA played it extremely safe this time round, high first orbit, no direct TLI, no lunar orbit that you can't come back from if the engines don't fire back up. I think they're very aware of the poor quality of modern manufacturing they're working with, which is why it's all the more impressive that everything went as planned, Outlook aside.
It's still extremely dumb they're throwing away RS-25 engines for this, but no competence survives contact with political management.
Just because the heat shield held up fine does not mean it was the right call. Nobody who knew anything was saying there was a 100% chance of catastrophic heat-shield failure, they weren't even saying there was a 50% chance. They were saying that there was a small chance of failure which was nonetheless unacceptably large.
Quote from the blogpost about it being unsafe: "It’s likely—hopefully very likely—that Artemis II will land safely. But do we really have to wait for astronauts to die to re-learn the same lessons a third time?"
NASA themselves set a safety target of a 1 in 30 chance of crew mortality for the mission. That's an insanely high risk tolerance for something that'd be so public, and would have been so incredibly demoralizing and tragic if the world had to watch this crew die on re-entry.
With everything dark going on in the world right now, a lot of people saw this whole thing as a small glimmer of light and something to just be happy and excited about. Having them burn up and die after inspiring that hope would have been crushing.
Space travel is not safe and never will be, you can always get randomly sideswiped by a piece of debris in LEO and that's that, even if everything goes perfectly. If the astronauts understand the risks involved then I would say it's their call. Living on Earth isn't safe for that matter, driving has a 1 in 100 chance of death throughout your lifetime, so that margin isn't significantly more given that you get to go to the frickin Moon.
I don't really buy the "if they die, it strands human spaceflight for years out of PR reasons" argument since what that argues for and against has the same result: nobody goes space for a while. In the end there will always be someone willing to roll the dice. ESA is already playing it 100% safe, that niche is covered.
There's a difference between quantifiable but unmanageable situational risk and predictable, manageable technical risk.
The heatshield issue is the latter.
$100 billion has been spent on this project. Ablative heatshield coatings have been used since the Atlas ICBM in 1957. Yet they still flew Artemis with significant technical risk on a political grandstanding mission that delivered no significant science.
That NASA’s budget is so influenced by politics is why they can’t take the rapid iteration process of SpaceX - NASA can never fail in public. Any failure (even launch delays, as happened with Challenger) gets blown out of proportion and fuels the risk of further budget cuts, which push them to a “safer”, incremental, but very costly process of refining what is already proven rather than researching the less proven technology.
As a german, seeing you go to the moon under trump feels like celebrating the olympics in the dawn of the german reich, it cannot be taken for what it is. It does not matter what we feel, what we want to feel, we can enjoy it for a second and then swallow it down and not write an article like that.
I will still wait for the heat shield analysis. Doing a crewed flight was not what I would have done - I’d use a Falcon Heavy to put one or more dummies through different trajectories to make sure we have enough experimental data to extensively model the shield behaviour, especially in non-nominal entries.
It can carry an Orion capsule to a suborbital trajectory and achieve the same reentry speeds the capsule experiences returning from the Moon. The trick is doing a second burn pointing down. If you don't use an actual Orion but just a mass simulator, you can even do some very off-nominal reentries to test limits.
I don't understand how the coupling between Orion and Falcon Heavy would be done (can't just put it inside the fairing).
I also don't understand how you plan to re-light the engines for a second burn.
I also don't understand the trajectory you envision. Even if you could re-light the FH engines and couple Orion to it, I don't understand how you would get the re-entry angle correct.
Regarding the mass simulator, it's not clear by your description how the shields would be tested in that scenario.
Let's not leave it to the reader's imagination. If you're seeing something that I'm not, please, lay out the plan in more detail.
I didn’t follow the mission much as it occurred, but it’s striking to me how much I understand what the author means. Feels like the first event in many, many years that doesn’t amplify the feeling of being in the absurdist nightmare timeline. Artemis II felt like a 2013 event, not a 2026 event!
They might have found a way of having two versions of Outlook and at least one of them working.
A lot of it is relearning what was forgotten after the Apollo and shuttle programs. The technologies changed so much it’s a whole new spacecraft that looks like what existed only because that’s the best possible shape.
If I am not careful I wind up with two Outlooks running in my computer. ‘Classic’ is fine, but God forbid I start the other one because when I try to send an email with it is spinner… spinner… spinner… spinner… spinner…
Artemis II is basically a test mission for Orion. And while flippantly Orion isn't doing anything that Apollo didn't do first, it definitely does it with a lot more margin, more living space, more safety and redundancy, and an actual toilet instead of gross poop bags you had to manipulate your waste into.
Seriously though, this is mostly a PR and validation win. I enjoyed watching the new Earthrise (Earthset) image - https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/art002e00928... - camera technology has come a long way since the 70s and seeing the moon this close is Weird to me.
This is a good point - in the space shuttle era, the SRBs were recovered, refurbished and re-flown. The boosters flown on Artemis 1 and 2 are now lost. There are only enough space shuttle era parts to fly another seven SLS rockets and the current plan to replace them with new hardware is still on-going.
I could not find out exactly why the SRBs of SLS are not worth recovering. If anyone knows why, that would be interesting to find out.
Of course they didn’t. The delta-v needed to land the rockets is better expended in pushing the craft further. Reusable rockets isn’t always the best choice.
Why should I be excited about 50 year old milestones when we have more advanced rockets that can land and be reused? Don’t we care about sustainability, or do we forget because of unpleasant billionaires?
Then you're probably concerned about the Falcon creating easy launches for mass numbers of satellites and the extra carbon footprint that new industry has. NASA here barely compares to the output of that of falcon.
Sorry, but it's clear the author is trying to make a socio-political statement about DEI more so than celebrating the actual technical competencies involved in the mission.
The very next article suggested by this same author is "the patriarchy is living through it's last tantrum". Enough said...
Yeah, but they still don’t have a realistic plan to land astronauts there.
Like the space shuttle before it, Artemis proves that nobody can beat the US at spending money on boondoggles.
Lunar missions are inconsequential to problems here on Earth like we can’t afford to build high-speed rail and transit, that we can’t build housing affordable or otherwise, that we already lost the next war to Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, won’t build affordable electric cars, etc.
I can't believe the comments here.
"I could have done it better, it's not a big deal, oh, they had women and non white people on board, what even is the shareholder value of this mission, oh it was almost done 50 years ago..."
These people went literally to the moon and back. Furthest anyone has ever been. That's an achievement.
I know things suck right now. Even more reasons to appreciate what is possible with technology.
I agree with the premise of this article. This achievement is inspiring and re-assuring that competency brings results. The alternative is way too depressing AND it mostly is our reality right know.
Throughout the years we've heard concerns that we could no longer go back to the moon because of skill atrophy. This is, at a minimum, a great step towards recovering some lost skills while developing new ones.
People are too lost in their political hysteria to appreciate what a amazing achievement that was.
We're in this mix of living in a time of mass hysteria and so many bots on the internet that it's tough to tell if the comments are real. I want to hope most comments I see aren't real people. It's sad if they are.
TBF there’s very little change on what we can do more than what was achieved in the 60s. The current space boom is a re-do with better tooling. We can put better computers in space and that’s what gives us anything more than what we had before. The moon and Mars are PR stuff and would be cool and maybe inspire engineers or scientists but its still slight incremental upgrade to what we had so far since 60s.
Even the photos are not that much better so far, people compare the OG and many like the old stuff better. Obviously its impressive engineering but we have seen it before.
I will be impressed when we have a large city sized space station with a large transparent dome.
"Even the photos are not that much better so far"
We have an incredible eclipse photos with multiple planets in the background. If you don't find photos like that incredible to see I'd guess you need to do some soul searching.
They are impressive photos, the earthrise is my background on my phone and the eclipse is my background on my laptop but they are derivatives of what we had before.
> TBF there’s very little change on what we can do more than what was achieved in the 60s.
People could do backflips and write moving poetry and memorize thousands of digits of pi in the 60s too. Such things were impressive then and they're impressive now.
I could understand someone thinking that the Apollo program was more impressive than the Artemis program, but to think that the Artemis missions are not impressive is completely foreign to me.
Doing it the second time is so less impressive that soviets cancelled their whole human moon landing and Americans stopped paying attention on Apollo 13 and cancelled the program after 17.
Obviously it is huge engineering achievement each time, just not as impressive as it was done before.
Why not up the ante a bit; I'll be impressed when they bio-engineer special humans who don't need a dome to live there. Come on, it's been 60 years!!
ofc very much the american way, outside of the region maybe its more read like propaganda... not in all regions people are like this, but its not a bad thing i suppose. Good things can also be leveraged for bad things etc. (not by the ppl involved ofc, but by others and their framing of the facts)
it'd be nice if people gave eachother a little space to be :) and look past the politics of things.
maybe then we would not feel the need to go the furthest out into space ever done and we can remain sometime in each other's proximity without feeling the need to develop nuclear weapons.
While it is obvious that the fact that except for the commander, the crew was composed of a woman, a Canadian and an African-Caribbean-American, cannot have happened by chance, I think that for this kind of mission also achieving a diversity target is perfectly fine.
There is no doubt that the members of the crew were at least equally qualified with the possible members of a less diverse crew, even if their provenance must have influenced the final selection.
Perhaps instead of doubting that it was right to choose crew members belonging to historically disadvantaged minorities, like Canadians :-), one should wonder why only the crew members are diverse, but not their chief, which is a more stereotypical American, as chiefs are expected to be in USA.
A conspiracy theorist can argue both ways, either that choosing a diverse crew was done as a favor to those kinds of people, or on the contrary, that choosing a diverse crew was done as a disfavor to them, to show them who is really their boss.
So no matter what choice is done, people can criticize it for more or less imaginary reasons.
> "...oh, they had women and non white people on board..."
That is from the article
It’s a 50 year old achievement.
I couldn’t do it personally but as a nation or humanity, we can do better, even if it was hard.
What year did nasa land on the moon again?
you should not ask why they went to the moon again, but ask about why they went to the moon again NOW.
you will see why the whole ordeal was super polished etc.
not to the detriment of nasa nor astronauts or anyone involved. they are doing science and pretty epic things.
so then maybe you can allow to detach your sentiment from the science and acheivement and place it on the appropriate point. (us leadership and their wars needing to give ppl a bit of dopamine because the populus is getting saturated with bad news).
Also, i kinda doubt as a nation or humanity you would do better. i dont know who you are , but this is saying you will be better than some of the brightest minds working at esa, spacex, nasa and chinese, indian, russian equavalents etc
as humanity ... yeah. good luck getting people to work together more than they already do... do you think no one is trying it??? what is your grand plan? how would you do it better?
you cant just make such claims willynilly..show credentials and proof you can do it.
Thanks, edited my comment to reflect this reply.
> they had women and non white people on board
I thought this was a straw man, because surely wtf is even the point of this comment, but nope, sure enough, ctrl+f and there are comments like that here. Wow.
[dead]
I haven’t paid any attention to the mission, and there’s something about the framing of this article that I don’t like, as if it’s talking about a soap opera or reality TV or something. It just rubs me up the wrong way.
I can't stop thinking about this article while reading this: https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....
Clearly in retrospect they made the right call to go ahead though. The heat shield held up fine.
Arguably NASA played it extremely safe this time round, high first orbit, no direct TLI, no lunar orbit that you can't come back from if the engines don't fire back up. I think they're very aware of the poor quality of modern manufacturing they're working with, which is why it's all the more impressive that everything went as planned, Outlook aside.
It's still extremely dumb they're throwing away RS-25 engines for this, but no competence survives contact with political management.
Just because the heat shield held up fine does not mean it was the right call. Nobody who knew anything was saying there was a 100% chance of catastrophic heat-shield failure, they weren't even saying there was a 50% chance. They were saying that there was a small chance of failure which was nonetheless unacceptably large.
Quote from the blogpost about it being unsafe: "It’s likely—hopefully very likely—that Artemis II will land safely. But do we really have to wait for astronauts to die to re-learn the same lessons a third time?"
NASA themselves set a safety target of a 1 in 30 chance of crew mortality for the mission. That's an insanely high risk tolerance for something that'd be so public, and would have been so incredibly demoralizing and tragic if the world had to watch this crew die on re-entry.
With everything dark going on in the world right now, a lot of people saw this whole thing as a small glimmer of light and something to just be happy and excited about. Having them burn up and die after inspiring that hope would have been crushing.
Space travel is not safe and never will be, you can always get randomly sideswiped by a piece of debris in LEO and that's that, even if everything goes perfectly. If the astronauts understand the risks involved then I would say it's their call. Living on Earth isn't safe for that matter, driving has a 1 in 100 chance of death throughout your lifetime, so that margin isn't significantly more given that you get to go to the frickin Moon.
I don't really buy the "if they die, it strands human spaceflight for years out of PR reasons" argument since what that argues for and against has the same result: nobody goes space for a while. In the end there will always be someone willing to roll the dice. ESA is already playing it 100% safe, that niche is covered.
There's a difference between quantifiable but unmanageable situational risk and predictable, manageable technical risk.
The heatshield issue is the latter.
$100 billion has been spent on this project. Ablative heatshield coatings have been used since the Atlas ICBM in 1957. Yet they still flew Artemis with significant technical risk on a political grandstanding mission that delivered no significant science.
That NASA’s budget is so influenced by politics is why they can’t take the rapid iteration process of SpaceX - NASA can never fail in public. Any failure (even launch delays, as happened with Challenger) gets blown out of proportion and fuels the risk of further budget cuts, which push them to a “safer”, incremental, but very costly process of refining what is already proven rather than researching the less proven technology.
Exactly this
As a german, seeing you go to the moon under trump feels like celebrating the olympics in the dawn of the german reich, it cannot be taken for what it is. It does not matter what we feel, what we want to feel, we can enjoy it for a second and then swallow it down and not write an article like that.
This article was a really uplifing take... Happy to see more about how awesome we can be, when we care.
I will still wait for the heat shield analysis. Doing a crewed flight was not what I would have done - I’d use a Falcon Heavy to put one or more dummies through different trajectories to make sure we have enough experimental data to extensively model the shield behaviour, especially in non-nominal entries.
Falcon Heavy cannot carry Orion.
It can carry an Orion capsule to a suborbital trajectory and achieve the same reentry speeds the capsule experiences returning from the Moon. The trick is doing a second burn pointing down. If you don't use an actual Orion but just a mass simulator, you can even do some very off-nominal reentries to test limits.
There is ample delta-v for that.
Can you elaborate more on that?
I don't understand how the coupling between Orion and Falcon Heavy would be done (can't just put it inside the fairing).
I also don't understand how you plan to re-light the engines for a second burn.
I also don't understand the trajectory you envision. Even if you could re-light the FH engines and couple Orion to it, I don't understand how you would get the re-entry angle correct.
Regarding the mass simulator, it's not clear by your description how the shields would be tested in that scenario.
Let's not leave it to the reader's imagination. If you're seeing something that I'm not, please, lay out the plan in more detail.
I'm just glad they made it back alive.. Now let's build a moon base!
I didn’t follow the mission much as it occurred, but it’s striking to me how much I understand what the author means. Feels like the first event in many, many years that doesn’t amplify the feeling of being in the absurdist nightmare timeline. Artemis II felt like a 2013 event, not a 2026 event!
Are there any big technological advances from this program?
Right now all I can think of is the toilet. Which is not a small thing by the way.
They might have found a way of having two versions of Outlook and at least one of them working.
A lot of it is relearning what was forgotten after the Apollo and shuttle programs. The technologies changed so much it’s a whole new spacecraft that looks like what existed only because that’s the best possible shape.
If I am not careful I wind up with two Outlooks running in my computer. ‘Classic’ is fine, but God forbid I start the other one because when I try to send an email with it is spinner… spinner… spinner… spinner… spinner…
Artemis II is basically a test mission for Orion. And while flippantly Orion isn't doing anything that Apollo didn't do first, it definitely does it with a lot more margin, more living space, more safety and redundancy, and an actual toilet instead of gross poop bags you had to manipulate your waste into.
We validated that Outlook is no good :)
Seriously though, this is mostly a PR and validation win. I enjoyed watching the new Earthrise (Earthset) image - https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/art002e00928... - camera technology has come a long way since the 70s and seeing the moon this close is Weird to me.
> We validated that Outlook is no good :)
"Help Keep Thunderbird Alive": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700388
They didn’t even land the rockets for recovery. Regressing :(
This is a good point - in the space shuttle era, the SRBs were recovered, refurbished and re-flown. The boosters flown on Artemis 1 and 2 are now lost. There are only enough space shuttle era parts to fly another seven SLS rockets and the current plan to replace them with new hardware is still on-going.
I could not find out exactly why the SRBs of SLS are not worth recovering. If anyone knows why, that would be interesting to find out.
Of course they didn’t. The delta-v needed to land the rockets is better expended in pushing the craft further. Reusable rockets isn’t always the best choice.
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You're boring :(
Why should I be excited about 50 year old milestones when we have more advanced rockets that can land and be reused? Don’t we care about sustainability, or do we forget because of unpleasant billionaires?
Read what you typed and think about how absurd it sounds.
If you honestly care about these things so much, surely you’re a big Elon Musk and SpaceX fan
No, I care about the only planet I have to live on continuing to exist until I die.
Then you're probably concerned about the Falcon creating easy launches for mass numbers of satellites and the extra carbon footprint that new industry has. NASA here barely compares to the output of that of falcon.
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It sent humans around the moon and back though. Can't say that about those other "advancing" programs yet. Little humility here goes a long way.
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Sorry, but it's clear the author is trying to make a socio-political statement about DEI more so than celebrating the actual technical competencies involved in the mission.
The very next article suggested by this same author is "the patriarchy is living through it's last tantrum". Enough said...
Yeah, but they still don’t have a realistic plan to land astronauts there.
Like the space shuttle before it, Artemis proves that nobody can beat the US at spending money on boondoggles.
Lunar missions are inconsequential to problems here on Earth like we can’t afford to build high-speed rail and transit, that we can’t build housing affordable or otherwise, that we already lost the next war to Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, won’t build affordable electric cars, etc.
What we need is affordability porn!