this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2026
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Explain Like I'm Five
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Like Operation Epstein Fubar, it's all distraction-theatre.
"See how GREAT we are??" "accomplishment", while gutting the government & bombing hospitals & universities, for sake of getting the Epstein files off of the criminals named in them.
( & getting the heat off of the "DOJ" which admitted to shredding some of them, holding-back 47k of them, etc )
( & getting the heat off the ICE quota-based-deportations regime )
etc.
Artemis is an immense waste of money.
Worse, it's got a fundamental design-flaw which means if any of its 4 main-engines "anomaly" during takeoff, then the mission's at-least destroyed, possibly killed.
Notice that with SpaceX's rockets, you can have an engine-anomaly & it'll just make the launch more-difficult?
There are sooo many engines, that each-engine's % of the work is small-enough, that the rest can carry it, if 1 fails.
With Artemis?
ANY engine which fails, & the mission's DEAD.
They engineered it to be incapable of dealing-with such statistically-inevitable failures.
That's irresponsible, in my eyes.
Falcon9 & Starship both have loads of engines, & can deal with 1-failure, properly.
Why go against sane engineering-principles?
Because the point of the thing is institutional validation, not optimal use-of-resources.
As Feynman grated against, last century, it's simply the wrong culture that's running the show.
Business-culture instead of engineering-culture, was what killed people in the shuttlecraft..
Artemis is produced by institutionality-instead-of-right-engineering, from what I can see.. & NASA's having about 1/4 of its budget gutted immediately, so .. Artemis gets funded, but NASA's real missions get discarded?
Theatre, not NASA work.
< shrug >
_ /\ _
Plus there’s the issue that they’ve been struggling to launch more frequently than every two years. If something happens, everyone is stranded where they are, and it’s not like anyone on the moon could survive there an extra two years.
While I see the reasoning for Artemis in the beginning, it’s been clear for years that it’s a poor choice