alt Hacker NewsI think there is a major difference though. Sports events are not pretending to be anything else. The Artemis mission claims to be advancing science and claims to be a stepping stone for an eventual moon base and a manned mission to Mars. I personally have serious questions about all of these.
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Do you really disagree that it’s advancing science? Surely actually testing hardware, building knowledge on how to run this type of mission, learning to use lunar resources, figuring out how to keep people alive, etc. will teach us things we couldn’t learn any other way.
Fwiw do share your concerns about the methods (sending humans on this specific mission is questionable, SLS is questionable compared to SpaceX approach).
I don’t have any questions about a mission to Mars, it is a stupid and pointless trip that I don’t want to ask any questions about.
The Moon, I dunno, it’s at least in Earth’s gravity well so it isn’t like we’re going totally the wrong direction when we go there, right?
At best it could be a gas station on the trip to somewhere interesting like the Asteroid belt, though.
The fact that we hope to get some new tech with this whereas sports aims for nothing is just icing on the cake. I think big space missions are worth it every now and then on a humanitarian level; even if no new discoveries are made, a new generation of engineers will become fluent in what we have already discovered. Humanity's education is not "done" when the last fact is written in a book, it needs to be constantly refreshed or it will disappear.
Even in sports you do not get "nothing", it has certainty helped advance the field of medicine.