Three years ago I wrote about how dumb America has become, The Dumbing Down Of America, going from a nation that put men on the moon to a nation where we worship transvestites and allow adult men to shower naked with teenaged girls. As a kid I would have fully expected, based on where we were in the early 70s putting men on the moon, that by 2023 we would have landed manned missions on Mars and be building permanent settlements on the moon. At a minimum. Even now it seems like that should be attainable. We already have the foundations figured out from 50 years ago and as I like to point out, the computing power in the desktop I am sitting at would dwarf all of the computers they had available when planning out the moon landing. Thanks to men like Wernher von Braun and Jack Crenshaw, and not a team of super brilliant black women (see: We Wuz Assternotz And Sheeit!), the math to get a manned launch out of the atmosphere, over to the moon, landing the lander on the surface of the moon and then doing the whole thing in reverse and bringing that crew back home safely was figured out the old fashioned way.
More than half a century after the first moon landing, this last week hasn’t filled anyone with optimism for the future of space travel. First, the enormous SpaceX Raptor made it only 24 miles up before coming apart as the 33 engines failed. It did manage to wreck the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center with it’s 17 million pounds of thrust.
Then yesterday an unmanned lunar lander attempted to land on the moon, it would have been the first private craft to do so. It did not land very smoothly, nor did the stock price of ispace…
Japan’s Ispace Shares Crash On Lunar Lander Fail
Shares of Tokyo-based ispace tumbled after the private company said its Hakuto-R Mission lander probably crashed while on approach to land on the lunar surface.
Recall, we provided a live stream of the lunar landing on Tuesday afternoon. About 25 minutes into the planned landing, there was a communications mishap.
Well, it turns out the lander probably crashed:
“It apparently went into a freefall towards the surface as it was running out of fuel to fire up its thrusters,” Ryo Ujiie, the chief technology officer, told a news conference on Wednesday.
Shares of ispace trading in Tokyo crashed 20% on the news.
They did achieve 8 of their 10 mission goals, but the big one didn’t happen…
The mission was run by a Japanese company, ispace, with a rover “developed by the United Arab Emirates” on a SpaceX rocket from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. They did get some nice pictures from lunar orbit…
…but pretty pictures don’t make up for a crash landing.
I don’t pretend to understand the math required to get a rover onto the surface of the moon but I do know that they shouldn’t have to be building this from scratch. When a new iPhone is designed, I assume Apple doesn’t start from scratch, they use the existing technology and tweak it. Wouldn’t it seem that half a century of space flight experience and unimaginable advances in computing power would make this process a whole lot easier than it was when I was in diapers?
Far from a bright and exciting new future of space exploration, we are apparently moving backwards. Sure we have faster computers and phones and streaming video speed but all of that is improving existing technology. I fear we are approaching a new Dark Ages as technology begins to fail and the number of people smart enough to fix it diminishes until there simply are not enough of them left to keep the toilets flushing and the lights on.
We could have been reaching the stars but instead we are left with fat black women twerking on cop cars.
Honestly, I hope we don’t go to the moon. It’s just a waste of our money. But then, that’s the real reason they do it. Not to advance science. Not to show how magnificent the human mind is. Just to have an excuse to borrow more money into existence to keep the treadmill going. The good thing is that once the kneegrows are in charge, we won’t have any more problems. The built Wakanda in Africa, they can do the same in the rest of the world. *snicker.
Still falling.
We have a ways to go before hitting bottom.
As soft a landing as possible is all I am trying to accomplish at this point.
The moon shot program was mostly funded before medicare started to ramp up. It’s astonishing how npc leftists who revere medicare can’t make the connection when they ask “How come we can’t fund infrastructure etc. like we used to?” Because we are spending money on a lot of other things that we weren’t spending it on back then.
Yesterday I was playing with a federal budget simulator. I gutted federal education spending, zeroed it out except for some vocational training programs, slashed military by 1/3 to 1/2, increased social security retirement age to 69, cut EBT in half, doubled tariffs, substantially cut taxes on middle class, lower middle, and lower class, left Medicare alone but gutted the Obamacare subsidy, gutted federal support for arts and broadcasting, big cuts to HUD…… and voila, I had a balanced budget with a very slight surplus
Thing is, most of that, while not doable politically, is very doable practically. The nation would deal with it. Most of what I cut is useless, waste, or counterproductive.
What would anybody want to go to the moon for anyway? There’s nothing there but rocks
Jeffrey: Generally in agreement with you here. Most budgetary spending is due to now de rigueur ‘mandates’ that are peripheral to most people’s well being and the nation’s interests. People had more practical education and skills 150 years ago when most didn’t even finish 8th grade. The tests necessary to qualify as a teacher at age 16 would stump today’s college graduates. And ‘retirement’ did not exist as a concept – you worked until you were no longer able, and then family took care of you while you did whatever you could (shelled peas, or whittled useful implements) to help the family.
Redo your budget computation and remove social security entirely (of course, that also means removing the government’s seizure of money fallaciously claimed to be for funding it). No one owes anyone else years of paid vacation. Save and/or invest what the government steals for purported social security and fund your own retirement . . . and cost of living increases. (And before any self-righteous boomer or silent screeches about my view, I’m 64 and don’t expect or plan on receiving a penny.)
I look at the moon and space not as a future living space for mankind, but more as a symbol of the pinnacle of the intersection of White curiosity and ingenuity and competence. Now all degraded and going, going, gone.
The SpaceX flight was a test flight. Not the first operational flight we are used to seeing (think Artemis launch). Things are expected to go horribly wrong. This specific flight was a test of the launch tower, which SpaceX even terms as Stage 0, as it is a critical part of a launch success. That the SuperHeavy/Starship stack cleared the tower made the test flight a success. Everything after that was bonus data.
They tried something new/different and the results weren’t perfect, but they weren’t expected to be. That’s why it was a test flight. Also, it didn’t come apart – it was intentionally destroyed after engines started failing and stage separation failed. Again – first test flight. They learned more from this failure than they ever would have from a success.
This launch wasn’t at KSC, it was at the SpaceX launch site in Texas. The linked story even has this in the headline. Might want to correct this.
The failure of the Hakuto-R1 lander is most likely due to an act of stupidity. From what I’ve read, they didn’t survey the landing site, nor did they have any sort of radar/camera on the lander to allow for final adjustments. It is very likely the lander hit something just above the surface or landed on an unstable surface (boulder or similar) and fell over.
If this is the case, whoever did the FMEA on the landing needs to be publicly flogged. There’s absolutely zero reason to not consider the condition of the landing site. Every lander going back to the Apollo missions had carefully surveyed landing sites or a landing method that didn’t require a smooth surface.
When I was in grad school for STEM back in the 90s, one of my professors had an article pinned to his office door recounting the fate of the original Mars rover, which also fell short of expectations. I don’t recall the specifics of which part(s) of the mission failed, but I do recall the circumstances that led to the very, very expensive mishap. There was a mix-up in the software between metric and English measures. Presumably a few distances were mismatched and some sort of collision ensued. Looks like those “hidden figures” remained hidden, at least for that mission.
Nothing that the Old Negro Space Program wouldn’t have ironed out in a jiffy, I am sure. (If you are unfamiliar with the ONSP, look it up. If it has not yet been wiped clean from the Internet, you will be amused.)
Didn’t the SpaceX launch from Texas?
… First, the enormous SpaceX Raptor made it only 24 miles up before coming apart as the 33 engines failed…
C’mon Arthur, you’re smarter than this. The Starship launch was absolutely a success. All 33 rockets did not fail. About 5 did. It lost 5/33 yet still managed to punch through Max Q and continue accelerating, albeit not as fast as they intended. That is amazing in and of itself. Starship didn’t come apart. Did you even watch the launch? It flipped 3 or 4 times WITHOUT breaking apart. It blew up because they blew it up through a self destruct sequence.
If engineers had stopped working on rockets the first time a rocket went boom, we wouldn’t have gotten to the moon (assuming that really happened.)
So that Japanese “failure.”. how much you want to bet they will eventually get it right?
So, Arthur, you know Spaces X lands rockets, right? And that they lost a few to get them to the point where they can reuse a rocket 14 times?
You know the Falcon 9 has one of the safest track records for a rocket, right?
Let’s not forget that the space race, combined with our will to go to the moon and back, was the springboard from which a lot of modern technology came into being. It affected our lives, and quality of life, in many ways.
It really is shameful that so much of the current government spending is wasted. If the proper development of the high frontier had continued, we all would likely be much better off.
I think some of you guys are missing Arthur’s point. They are trying to recreate what was already done 50 years ago for the first time by white guys with slide rules (and no idea if it was possible or not) and they can’t do it.
The biggest and bestest computers, street shitter “engineers” and all the smartest people are basically just destructively testing what has already been done. They already know it’s possible and they have all the math done which is by far the biggest issue and yet. They aren’t even breaking any new ground (it’s just bigger) and still having issues.
Building a 1967 Camaro today shouldn’t require any destructive testing.
Some people are better at detecting bullshit now than they were when Nixon took a phone call from The Boys on The Sea of Tranquility.
https://www.archives.gov/presidential-libraries/events/centennials/nixon/exhibit/nixon-online-exhibit-calls.html#:~:text=On%20July%2020%2C%201969%2C%20President,Nixon%20Presidential%20Library%20and%20Museum.
Worked about as good as my sailfoam today, and much, much better than the bag phones of the mid-90s.
Imagine if we could harness the energy of twerking black women, our country would not need fossil fuels.
In order to comply with their own DEI bullshit, they’ll have to have a crew module the size of a city bus.
Imagine all those coddled freaks stampeding the hatch (a la black Friday) to see who gets to step on the moon first.
Then the nigger, cholo and tranny whip out their contraband pistols and start shooting. They only hit a couple of other freaks but put multiple holes in the module. They all die stranded.
One can only dream. “Free flights to Mars and your very own free home under the dome. Step right up to get what is yours!” Then nuke it from orbit . . . to be sure.
I sense a movie deal in your future.
I would totally watch it.
The Apollo moon landings were all a hoax. Watch American Moon (2017) documentary and read Moon Man (2021).
Diversity pets will never let us journey to the stars.
Who will provide the GIBS if that happens.
Elon can get some more government money for his Mars dreams.
Good luck with the environment on the angry red WAR planet.
Yup. The landings were all a complete hoax. If you look into this, you will find that they are still hoaxing us with the Int’l Space Station. All we’ve achieved with humans is low Earth orbit.
The reason this stuff has to be done from scratch is that they have “lost” all the original video, all the original plans, all the original test data, all the original computer programs, all the original equipment, and all the original archives. Everything that could prove or disprove what was actually achieved has been lost. Pretty convenient…
Compare the look of NASA’s lunar lander to the Japanese one. NASA’s is built with cardboard and tape.
Look up the Van Allen belt.
Or just go here and read up: https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/moondoggie-1/
The lies to, and the contempt for, the American people are the root and source of all of our troubles today. And we pretty much deserve what we’ve gotten.
The kamikaze runs strong.