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i know which one id be prouder of
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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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Both? Sorry I just don't see what the dig against artamis II is for? Do you really think there is nothing beneficial in getting a human to the Moon long and eventually permanent term?
That's correct. I don't.
As long as a single person on Earth is without food, or shelter, or hope for the future, it is a fucking crime to piss away our finite resources on a barren chunk of space rock.
The Artemis mission cost four billion dollars. If that money had been used to refund USAID it would have saved, literally, based on the estimates of casualties that will be caused by USAID's defunding, two million lives. Two million of the world's poorest people, now dead or dying of starvation and disease and exposure to the elements, that we could have saved for the cost of sending a handful of the most privileged people in the world on a fucking tour of the Moon.
And it's happening now as a fucking distraction from the casualties of the war on Iran, and I don't even have words for how monstrous that is, or how angry I am at the people embracing this propaganda campaign as an "apolitical triumph of the human species".
All manned spaceflight is a waste of precious resources, but Artemis is the most repugnant, cynical, brazenly and dishonestly political waste of precious resources in my lifetime, and I am fucking older than manned spaceflight.
So, yeah, fuck this mission, fuck the entire idea of colonizing the Moon, and fuck everybody who thinks it's more important to colonize the Moon then heal the sick on Earth.
You're tilting at the wrong things. What NASA does is science. Science benefits humanity, and we always learn something by going to space, and we've been able to do experiments that would be otherwise impossible to do on Earth. In this capitalist hellscape, it unfortunately costs money to do science, so I can understand balking at the $93B + $4B price tag (spread over 7 years) but we currently spend trillions of dollars (over 7 years) just on the military and if ICE were to get their current budget over 7 years, it would also be over a trillion dollars.
We could absolutely feed and provide childcare for every child in this country for under $100B, but we don't need to defund science to do it. The annual budget of ICE alone could take care of all of that and still have some leftover.
The problem isn't spending $13B/yr on space science, it's spending $85B or $175B on ICE and the military (just as two needlessly wasteful examples; there are more).
I see your argument, but I disagree with it.
First, "science" does not benefit humanity as a whole. It benefits the rich.
"Science", as performed under capitalism, benefits those who can pay for its benefits, and widens the gap between those who can pay and those who can't. Better weapons technology benefits the people who can buy the weapons, and people who can't afford them find themselves at the wrong end of them. More efficient food production benefits the people who can buy the chemicals and machines and bioengineered Monsanto seeds, while farmers who can't afford the new technologies can't sell their crops at low enough prices to compete with the more efficient farmers and go out of business.
Every scientific "advancement" by the colonial class - with only a handful of exceptions - has led, in one way or another, to greater exploitation of the colonized class or the colonized land. The climate crisis itself is the purest example, since the impacts of the warming and worsening world are being felt most acutely by the people of colonized nations, the ones who can't afford to adapt, while wealthy western nations are simply sealing their borders and building seawalls and growing food in greenhouses using the resources they extracted from those colonized nations over the past few centuries.
And second, I get the idea that the space budget doesn't matter when the United States government wastes a much bigger amount of money on even worse things.
And if you were arguing "this is bad, but it's not as bad as a bunch of other stuff" I would be more likely to agree.
But the fact that so many on the left have positive feelings towards NASA and space exploration shows the soft power of that line item in the American budget.
Pretty much everybody on our side agrees that American military spending is a vicious waste. But a lot of us think NASA is "one of the good ones". That space exploration is something useful and positive the United States does.
And I think, if we think about what NASA's budget could be used for instead of a soft power propaganda campaign in the name of "science", we can start to question the value of space exploration and decolonize our brains a little bit more.
The FY-2027 defense budget will be 1.5 trillion.
could cut billions of dollars without seriously affecting the function of the military (although fuck the military, they deserve exactly $0.00 and all need to be put on trial for their part in this horrible Empire).
It's not because of the Artemis mission specifically that we "cannot" feed people and heal the sick. Like the cost of ending world hunger and poverty, the cost of this mission in comparison to the resources the capitalists control is trivial.
It's because the system is deliberately designed to be unwilling (antagonistic, in fact!) to do these things no matter how much money or resources are ever actually available.
It's probably a coincidence that it's happening now. This mission has been years in the making. The media is using the event as propaganda to distract from the Iran war. That being said, I will not argue that it's apolitical, nor will I argue that it's not propaganda at all. Generically, the point of televising it is to make
look good, i.e. to paper over the sins of Empire.
I honestly don't disagree with the rest of what you wrote and I'm even skeptical of the scientific utility of this particular mission, but I believe that a blanket opposition to spaceflight and space research generically is reactionary.
Fun fact: we grow enough food to feed upwards of 14 or 15 billion people. Instead of eating it, we feed it to animals, then eat them instead. If we just ate the crops instead, we could free up 60-70% of land currently used for animal agriculture.
You clearly don’t understand how much engineering, medicine, materials science, and other research happens because of manned spaceflight. Plus, there are things you can only study in microgravity.
NASA budgets definitely look big, but the value of the technology produced in that process (and consequently released to the public) dramatically outweighs the input. This has been proven over and over again.
You’d be surprised how much of that tech is used for precisely the purposes you want - feeding people sustainably, healing the sick, etc.
-"Whitey on the Moon", Gil Scott-Heron
The apollo program led to tech advancements including, among many of things, fire-retardent materials, improved parachute technologies, water filtration systems and insulin pumps, each of which has directly saved lives. Not to mention solar cells technology that will be instrumental in fighting climate change.
The moon is a big barren rock, yes. But it is one that has answers to our planets history and potentially its future. Funding scientific and engineering endeavors like Artemis is how we, as a species, advance, how we move beyond the status quo of today's world. There are WAAAAAAAY more wasteful things we spend money on than science. And while you're entitled to think otherwise, you're just wrong.
Also that you think they timed a moon mission to be a distraction for a month old war... like the original launch wasn't planned years in advance, and it was delayed anyway. There is something to distract from every fucking week now. That doesnt mean that anything else happening is a deliberate distraction or even remotely related to it. Too cynical to function.
I don't disagree with you. I just think we can do both at the same. We aren't, and it's awful. Right?