Man, I just wanted to see humans on the moon in my life. NASA seemed like the best bet because they’re the only agency from the space race, with the recorded experience of doing long terms Spaceflight, still doing innovative things. Roscosmos hasn’t done much new since the soviets fell apart, even though we now know they had some wacky plans for things like Tri-propellant shuttles, and Energia was an amazing heavy lift vehicle that is basically just scrap metal at this point.

I thought Elon would be the reason we didn’t go to the moon because of starship being vaporware. Turns out Elon is the reason we’re not going to moon because he wants to cover up that starship is vaporware.

Shuttering NASA is a net loss not just for the USA but for the entire species. Everything from battery powered power tools, Velcro, the glass on our phones, the little safety grooves on highway off ramps, and a thousand other advancements not even including going to fucking space, can be traced back to NASA pushing human Spaceflight to its limit. Every dollar spent on Apollo generated something like 3 dollars in growth for the US economy because of all of the R&D that companies had to throw at the problem.

I only hope that either the ESA or CNSA can actually put humans on the moon. It was insane 50 years ago and it’s insane even today, but I still think that Armstrong’s first step onto the moon should go down as one of the most important moments in human history, the first time a human left earth and put his foot down on a different celestial body is just as important as the harnessing of fire or electricity. It should be the first step of many, not just a brief footnote that marks we were there.