I realize English is not your native language so please elaborate on your point because right now I don't see any.

Different philosophies:

-“Our spacecraft is the most complex machine in the world!” - NASA


-“The best part is no part.” - SpaceX

I should pay more attention, but then again I had it right, just that I'm already way behind on the predictions as I read that this project is already years behind schedule and billions over budget.

The piece I read said that the projected cost for this moondoggle is 93 billion. Dollars.

And you can bet that if this is the published figure, the actual cost to American taxpayers is way more than that. And it's far from done running over.

For her part Kamala Harris, who somehow has a part to play in this by being in charge of the space council on space said

"We come together in this space to see how much space there is, and how much space there will be. Space is our history and our future. Our today and yesterday. But most importantly, space is our future, today. Space is big, But together, we can make space a little smaller. We remain committed in our resolve about space, because space is the place, together"

Just compare the timeline of progress of the Apollo missions. Far less advanced technologies and unexpected accidents all the while we were going thru one of the most turbulent times in our country's history.

It's a reflection of the time we are in. More averse to risk, and far less averse to spending money (that we don't have).

Ummm... what are you getting at? That post seems to be a non-sequiter.

Ayup! NASA will have a part to play for some time to come, even if Artemis doesn't pan out. The knowledge/experience and facilities are too important to just throw away.

I will watch the launch(es) with interest, and hope things go well, as the money is already spent/committed. I think SpaceX has a better approach and ultimately will be the workhorse needed to make us multi-planetary. Plus, as a general principle, I prefer to see private enterprise step up and have government activity curtailed to things that only government can accomplish.

In fairness to NASA, they could not have been certain that SpaceX would have been as successful as it is back when Artemis was conceived... but somewhere along the line they probably could have switched horses, except for the political realities of various parts of the project spending money in numerous different congressional districts. So it goes.

Hopefully they get some bang for the ridiculous amount of bucks that has been poured into Artemis, and hopefully some sort of long term value is derived from spending more time on the moon. Personally, I'm far more interested in seeing a presence established on Mars. (It would be nice if Buzz Aldrin lived to see us set foot on Mars.)

Yep.

But I'm also pulling for Charlie Duke because he's the only South Carolina Moonwalker and I have his autograph (actually a nice letter), and he's the youngest Moonwalker so he stands a good chance of being the last Apollo Moonwalker to leave us.

Why they didn't try sooner in last 53 years?

When we had the space shuttle, could had been very easy to land on the moon with it.

Whaa ?

NFB, do you think before you post?

Where is the big long runway? No air on the moon either.

I wasn't sure this was worthy of its own thread, and it seemed to fit in with this general topic - video of all of the Apollo Moon landings from the Lunar Landers. There was a lot of actual piloting going on with those landings, and I am not sure people are really aware of that anymore.

LOL In this case I really hope NFB is just trolling and is not actually serious.

I kind of like NFB's posts, and he may have a point as this Newspaper headline from 1988 attests:

I wonder what that girl in the upper right corner looks like now?

Uhhmmm, that’s not a B-52.

I used to love reading the Weekly World News whenever we went over to my grandfather's house as a kid. He had stacks of them. We all knew they were a farce, but the satire was often grand.

That's interesting, and there's no accounting for taste, as this forum repeatedly proves.

For me, he's interesting because I've never seen anyone who knows less about everything. No matter the subject, he's never heard of it before. So much so that a few years ago I speculated in a post that NFB was actually cryogenically frozen in the 1930s and recently thawed out. As he awoke from his frozen slumber he found in front of him a PC with SimHQ and Wikipedia bookmarked. And since then we've all been taken along on his journey of discovery.

LMAO. That's a great analogy DBond.

On a related note, I really do find it fascinating how much this site has changed over the past 21 years. No doubt much of that change has to do with the changing ownership of the website but I think it's mostly due to the declining popularity of message boards in favor of other platforms like Reddit.