Whitey on the moon

Turns out that an assload of private contractors (because natch...) put a lander on the Moon.

Apparently NASA was involved, but the primary was something called "Intuitive Machines" that designed and built the actual lander. The Reuters story says that "The NASA payload focuses on space weather interactions with the moon's surface, radio astronomy and other aspects of the lunar environment for future landing missions."

Which just reminds me of 1) how excited 12-year-old me was at the Apollo lunar landings, and 2) how silly that excitement looks with fifty years of perspective.

As adventure? Sure. It was pretty adventurous. The science (at least to my eyes, anyway) cooks down to some helpful planetary geology. Some useful tech emerged from the space program. The unmanned probes like Galileo have produced some immensely valuable knowledge of our solar system, and the various iterations of orbital telescopes some fascinating cosmology.

But Einstein's Wall still stands.

Human extra-atmospheric travel is still hugely impractical, and the notion of space-faring is and will be the realm of fiction.

All this farkling about on the Moon is a simple reminder that the thing is a cold dead rock.

The article goes on to say that this: 

"...marked the first "soft landing" on the moon ever by a commercially manufactured and operated vehicle and the first under NASA's Artemis lunar program, as the U.S. races to return astronauts to Earth's natural satellite before China lands its own crewed spacecraft there. NASA aims to land its first crewed Artemis in late 2026 as part of long-term, sustained lunar exploration and a stepping stone toward eventual human flights to Mars."

Which is just nuts.

There's no value in sending people back to the Moon, and even less to Mars. Like keeping a mistress, the pleasure is transient, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable. There's nothing on either celestial body that a drone or robotic probe can't examine.

FFS let the PRC waste time and money sending people to the Moon.

Right here we can't figure out how to get hoboes out of the fucking public streets. I don't see we're going to learn anything more to spend a ton of money to send someone back to the Sea of Tranquility to kick rocks.

Now if there was some Wensleydale, mind...

Music of the spheres

I don't have anything to say; in fact, I don't want to talk anymore. Much of the "talk" I've had here lately just depresses and saddens me. The image - taken from NASA's Cassini probe - reminds me that our ridiculous little problems and fusses are just that; ridiculous and small.

I will be back in a bit.

Small Step to Nowhere..?

I'm not immune to popular enthusiasms, and with that I note the 40th anniversary for the "small step for a man" that capped NASA's manned space program in 1969.I was not a particularly bright kid at the age of 12, and I remember the summer of '69 more for my mother's frenzied ranting at the Chicago Cubs on their way to their traditional September swoon in the year of the Miracle Mets than for the lunar landing.

And, really, after forty years, you have to look back - at least, some of us look back - and wonder; what the fuck?

Riley over at Bats Left/Throws Right pretty much nails it. The space program was born, grew, and died like a mayfly, in 1969, It didn't die because somehow we jacked the money to bomb Vietnam or give food stamps to Negroes.

"It died because it's damned near at the edge of what we might accomplish provided we threw everything we've got into it (and if we haven't learned from doing that several times over that the main thing it accomplishes is bankruptcy, then we've been paying even less attention than we appear to be), and means fucking nothing whatsoever to anyone above the mental age of eleven..."

The reality is that Einstein's Wall makes interstellar travel impractical unless you're willing to construct monstrous argosies that will carry, in effect, little Earths, voyaging for countless generations through the empty voids between the stars. Even assuming the idea was practical - and the ill-fated "Biosphere" experiments suggest that we are, at best, generations away from a workable model, no nation could afford it. Mars and Venus, the closest planetary objects to us, cannot support life, and the remaining planets are even worse.

Nope. We're stuck on this planet save for in the imagination of sci-fi fans, books and movies. The "moon shots" were a one-off, a vastly expensive, mildly entertaining bit of government pork thrown at the military, useful for collecting some rather valuable geologic data but otherwise sterile. The fact that there are mental ten-year-olds presently in elective office that seem to think that sending a human being to Mars is a good idea says more about our electoral process than it does about the value of the idea.

So I guess I understand why the "celebration" of the anniversary of Apollo 11's landing was so muted.

Who celebrates the puberty of a eunuch?

Update 7/21 pm: I want to hammer this home - I'm not saying this stuff just to be curmudgeonly. The IDEAL of space exploration, of humanity finding a way to the stars, is a terrific one. Not only for the pure knowledge and adventure of it - being confined to a single planet is begging for extinction. But here's my deal; why are we celebrating our piddly little "dream" of flag-waving Yankee Doodle moon shots? Why not dream REALLY big? An "Ark in Space", the real chance to give the human race a shot at a future beyond the lifetime of our star?

National space progams like the Apollo missions, IMO, are the problem, not the solution. They divide the human race, forcing nation to compete against nation, militarizing the space programs and condemning us to farting around near the Earth's orbit for the next ten generations.

The real dream is up there. But the groundwork for the dream is here, on Earth, and it involves moving beyond the Apollo-type missions to real, global cooperation and exploration and, yes, commercialization, of space.The day we see the launch of the "Nostromo" from Kaiser's orbiting shipyard near Ceres, with a commercial crew and funding from Reynolds Metals, will be the true culmination of the dream of space exploration. At that point we will truly be reaching out into space, rather than simply using it as a void through which to swing a fist.