Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Artemis II. Its 10 day mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before! I don't know about anybody else, but I think this entire mission is just the coolest.
When my Mom was growing up, they were told that the moon was made out of cheese as a joke. However, some people actually really believed that, as well as it being populated by little green men. I'm not kidding.
They didn't land on the moon. My question is: Why send people to ride in a ship around the moon when they can easily send a probe. What was the purpose of this aside from brownie points?
Same reason why they sent a monkey into space to see if it lived thru the trip. Those Astronauts (do they still call them that??) proved that human spaceflight is still possible even on short trips beyond earth. A lot of new technology was tested and all of this is building towards another manned moon landing in a few years. Now we know we can get there. All we need to find out is if we can get back after landing. We are in a new space race with China so there's that incentive to consider.
No one has ever seen - much less been on - the far side of the moon. There's no substitute for meeting someone in person as opposed to seeing them in a photograph or a painting, much like there's no substitute for being there and visibly seeing the moon with your own eyes or being on the surface of it. As people will be people in all of their shitty, unwavering predictability, there's a bunch of trash and garbage on the moon. So space exploration, in a more telling way, doesn't mean we're actually going to learn any real basics about respecting anything, lol.
They saw the dark side of the moon during the original apollo missions. They had to orbit the moon before landing. To me, 5 people looking at something doesn't make it any different. I love nerdy stuff and love NASA, but this seemed more like it was about appearance. We should be going for Mars.
Why wouldn't they live through the trip, though? That has already been tested. If it was possible in the 60s of course it's still possible today. We've already known we can get there.
Perhaps they're measuring the amount of radiation the astronauts will absorb along the round trip. That's the one thing that stumps any planning for a Manned Mars mission. All of this tech needed to be tested by humans before any landing could be attempted. Not to mention the prestige of the US beating China back to the moon. Its like the old days when the Soviets had the edge.
I should have been more clear. The astonauts on Apollo 8 saw it 1968, but not with these optics or nearly to this extent. The astronauts on the Artemis II have indeed seen parts of the far side of the moon never before seen by human eyes. To me, it sounds like you're being contrarian just to be contrarian, as if it's just as pedestrian as you yourself driving around the block in a car. Anyway, every time someone goes into space is a measure of where else we can go. The human race is so revolting as a species that if or when we were to colonize elsewhere we're only going to fck that up for the same reasons we fck everything else up. Greed, jealousy, self-centredness, selfishness, conceit, arrogance, etc. We'll never evolve out of that, even if we evolve out of the physical need for a body.
