Even with the carzy shit going on the Earth?
America reaches out to engineer a trip to another planet….
(Progressive’s surely ain’t for the money spend on this?)
NASA’s majestic new rocket soared into space for the first time in the early hours of Wednesday, lighting up the night sky and accelerating on a journey that will take an astronaut-less capsule around the moon and back.
This flight, evoking the bygone Apollo era, is a crucial test for NASA’s Artemis program that aims to put astronauts, after five decades of loitering in low-Earth orbit, back on the moon.
“We are all part of something incredibly special,” Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the launch director, said to her team at the Kennedy Space Center after the launch. “The first launch of Artemis. The first step in returning our country to the moon and on to Mars.”
For NASA, the mission ushers in a new era of lunar exploration, one that seeks to unravel scientific mysteries in the shadows of craters in the polar regions, test technologies for dreamed-of journeys to Mars and spur private enterprise to chase new entrepreneurial frontiers farther out in the solar system….
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As China and other countries are vying to explore space, Wednesday’s launch also highlights a growing philosophical tension about how America should pursue its space aspirations. NASA has spent more than $40 billion to date to get Artemis off the ground. The expenditure illustrates how the space program continues to resemble the way that the Pentagon builds aircraft carriers and F-35 fighters — expensive and slow, but primarily controlled by the federal government because no commercial market yet exists for the kinds of large rockets and deep-space transports that NASA considers to be necessary for its moon exploration program….
image…Credit…Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images