To think millions of litres of fuel shouldn't be wasted on sending a rocket to the moon

[Viviennemary]

With this current fuel crisis it's total madness sending a rocket to the moon. What is the point. Nobody is even going to land on the moon. Doubt therei s any oil on the moon.

Starlink os what happened. Well over half of the satellites currently in orbit belong to one company - Elon Musk's Starlink. Over 10,000 launched so far, with an expected 20,000 more.

Its basically making earth-based astronomy impossible.

Not biodegradable.

Fucking up our oceans as I write.

But it’s the big boys with their space toys, their war games and the Earth in flames.
They won’t be told to stop.

🤣

Selfish NASA panic buying.

Plenty of things are a waste or brain power and money. What use is paying actors heaps of money to make movies and TV shows. How is spending time on sociak media anything but a waste of time. Etc, etc. At least space exploration has advanced human technology.

There's something deeply united inthe fellowship between the people in many environments (RNLI boats, Fire Brigade, Litter picking groups etc).

You don't have to leave earth to see this stuff.

I wish they'd leave the moon alone - the whole of space for that matter. Everything humans touch turns to shit. We've fucked up our own planet, why do we think we have the right to go checking out prospects on the moon, mars and beyond? The arrogance of the human race is never fails to astound me.

Well just imagine if humans had thought “what right do we have to go looking for the northwest passage or the South Pole? How far do you think human knowledge would have advanced?

"Packham has argued that because of their specialized diet, low reproductive rates, and reduced habitat, pandas are an "evolutionary cul-de-sac" and not worth the immense cost of captive breeding and habitat preservation."

His point is that they're a bit buggered anyway and the money could be better spend benefiting the wider natural world.

How long before restrictions are applied to human breeding. I'd say over population is far more serious tha climate change and probably fuels climate change. Yet it's the elephant in the room never to be mentioned.

Or perhaps just a different view of the world.

Some people would like to live to see people walking on Mars.
Some would forgo that to live to see things improving in the natural world and an end to world hunger. That would require some intellectual curiosity and inspire a sense of wonder.

Neither of those makes you dead inside. One of those is closer to home and requires more empathy.

Not the same thing at all, that's on our planet.

It is actually a female British engineer who runs the team which builds the Artemis service modules. Not a “boy”.

There’s absolutely no reason we have to choose between those things. Not to mention that you would see things on Earth improve substantially if world leaders emulated the international cooperation between scientists and engineers.

Fun fact - a number of rockets, including the first stage of the Apollo rockets, burn kerosene which is more or less a lighter version of diesel.

Well I for one am extremely thankful for boys and their toys or we would still be living in the dark ages.

Kerosene is just what the Americans call paraffin. It's the same as jet fuel. It comes between petrol and diesel when distilling crude.

Alpha Centuri (the nearest star system to the Sun) is 4.37 light years away. Using our current technology (travelling at 25,000km per hour like Artemis) it would take at least 189,000 years for us to travel there.

That’s the nearest star. There are hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way. It is over 100,000 light years from one side of the Milky Way to the other. Travelling that distance would take the Artemis spacecraft 4.3 billion years.

Andromeda, the nearest galaxy to the Milky Way, is 2.5 million light years away. It would take the Artemis spacecraft at least 108 trillion years to travel that far.

There are billions, if not trillions of galaxies each containing billions of stars.

I don’t think space is in any imminent danger from human beings.

(Edited to make all times comparable using the speed of Artemis. A probe can travel much faster but not our current manned (or “womaned”!) spacecraft.)

I despise the dismissal of space exploration as "boys and their toys" - it completely negating the huge contributions made by women to the discipline. Puts whoever says it in the same basket as those manosphere creeps who always say "what did a woman ever invent" in my mind.

It takes the same kind of spirit of adventure and determination though

At the time it was absolutely the equivalent of going into space. The New World is so-called for a reason - it was literally a completely new world, impossible to comprehend and inconceivably distant.

I was dismissing someone else's flippant remark regarding 'boys toys'

Still hugely energy-intensive tho

YABU for not having a clue what you are moaning about.