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...