NASA: "We're going back to the moon!"

NASA: "We're not going back to the moon!"

Here's where I rep for Kerbal Space Program, a neat little game/physics sandbox where you construct various rocketry and spaceplanes in an attempt to make orbit, translunar, or intrasolar travel, before failing spectacularly and having your little green astronaut dudes bail out right before everything blows up.

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/

"NASA human spaceflight is the Terry Schiavo of the US government, its been dead a long time, they just need to pull the plug..."

i didn't know about this! http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/FEATURE-FirstPhoto.html

https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2912016/Kepler-186f_20x30.0.jpg

https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2912018/HD_40307g_20x30.0.jpg

https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2912020/Kepler_16b_20x_30.0.jpg

Beautiful.

(Those JPEGs are hueg, BTW)

Voyager 1 has already departed the solar system. For the past five years it’s been sailing between our star and another, and every day it still calls home. One day it will stop calling. For years the team has been slowly turning off instruments on both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in order to preserve the most important feature — the communication link. Suzy Dodd thinks the spacecraft have several years left. There’s no way to know for sure what Voyager’s final call will be. “You don’t exactly know when you get to say goodbye.” she tells me. “So every day you should say goodbye.”

https://longreads.com/2018/03/15/welcome-to-the-center-of-the-universe

Was recently reading a biography of Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci and there was this surprising to me part of her life in the mid-'60s when she was in the US hanging out with astronauts from the Gemini program in order to write profiles of them. She was fascinated by space travel and apparently intrigued by the astronauts, and became especially close with Pete Conrad. This work led to a book published in English as If the Sun Dies (1966). Wondered if anyone here has read it.

After the first moon landing she wrote another book about that, apparently published only in Italian in 1970.

I have an Italian copy of If the Sun Dies and enjoyed what I was able to read of it

Wow, that's cool - I gotta look for this

Think you can still get an ebook like I did

It mentions The First Law of Robotics on the first page so there’s that

So I found a copy of If the Sun Dies and this thing is amazing. I've never read such revealing character studies of the astronauts. Plus a ton of fascinating speculation, both practical and philosophical, about the implications of space travel and technological progress. And on top of that, the endlessly interesting perceptions of mid-'60s America through the eyes of a youngish Italian woman. Am only halfway through the 400-page hardcover and can wholeheartedly recommend.

I so want that book

Coincidentally, I've been reading former NASA deputy admin Lori Garver's book Escaping Gravity for the past couple of days and it's not that I *want* Artemis to fail, but it should never have gotten this far. SLS = Senate Launch System.

Scrubbed. I find the entire idea of manned space missions absurd but SLS is a special kind of terrible.

e.g., the annual budget for R01s is $2.2 billion. The cost _per launch_ of the SLS is $2.2 billion.

NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable
https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/09/nasa-finally-admits-what-everyone-already-knows-sls-is-unaffordable/

One of the commenters:

As a very junior software engineer for a potential second-tier subcontractor, I was in the back of the room at the first preproposal meeting for the Shuttle. The NASA executive giving the briefing stated that all bids should be on a "Design for Success" basis, that is, your cost estimate should assume that every component you interface to will operate according to spec. Grumbles of discontent from the hardened aerospace systems engineers in the room was met by "Do you want the business or not?" from the NASA guy. It was all shenanigans from their forward.

Well, I guess I now know why I didn't get a second interview (everything was frozen). sigh - back to the coding saltmines.

Yeah saw that news the other day. Fucking ridiculous.