tef

bad poster & mediocre photographer

  • they/them

i enjoy a good "kick them while they're down" post, and the elaborate "nasa is huffing paste with their latest moon shot" essay is as good an example as any—even if the essay is from mr centrist himself.

the "i've got a great idea to build worker solidarity, may 1st seems like a good date. nothing happens then" guy, turns out he can still post. ish.

anyway.

the essay is all fun and good, but it's peppered with the usual nostalgic takes about "when real engineering was done", which happens to coincide with when the author was 8-13 years old and very excited about space.

there's your usual takes about apollo that gently skip over the whole "three astronauts burned to a crisp" bit, plus the ever present "the space shuttle was incredible engineering" take. which is true, in that they solved many problems they'd created for themselves

anyway

it would just be nice to season such takes with the occasional "nasa started life as a means to employ german war criminals to develop long range icbms" along with classics like "and every two decades management negligence kills another crew" or "we don't do it because it is easy, we do it because it lets us put more money into defence contracting"

sometimes it feels like nasa's greatest achievement has been the whitewashing. putting a badge saying "i fucking love science" on the side a nuclear payload delivery vehicle


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @tef's post:

I've got genuinely mixed feelings about that guy but if there's one thing he's not it's an unqualified NASA cheerleader, especially when it comes to the Space Shuttle. His consistent take has been that crewed spaceflight is basically a giant waste of money and that NASA has been much the worse for putting most of their eggs in crewed spaceflight as their way to defend their budget appropriation. His scathing retrospective on the Space Shuttle contains my nominee for the single best sentence to appear in popular writing about space in the past two decades: "As tempting as it is to picture a blood-spattered Canadarm flinging goat carcasses into the void, we know that the Shuttle is the fruit of what was supposed to be a rational decision making process" -- he goes on to rip apart basically every aspect of the Shuttle program, from its mission objectives to its failure as a space delivery truck to NASA's abysmal safety culture that gets crews killed.

i couldn't tell if his off hand comments about "even apollo astronauts wouldn't put up with the risk" were actually aware of said risk, but, yeah, it's good to know it was intentional