gravity's rainbow

🎵"Once the rocket goes up, who cares where it comes down, that's not my department." Says Wernher Von Braun 🎵

I get the meme and the juxtaposition is... depressing, but it's sad how people don't realize that this is an international mission - Jeremy Hansen is a Canadian, 1/2 of the capsule was built by the ESA, the DSN sites are in the US, Spain and Australia... This really isn't a singularly American affair, and it's rather bleak that we can erase all that cooperation because of this stupid fucking war.

sending a rocket around the moon to collide on enemy territory on the way back is what i call a pro gamer move

Also, "thank God I'm off that godawful fucking planet, even for just a little while" - Artemis crew member

Imagine gravity is fractal... because light is just a wave, and gravity is just a wave... So imagine there's a big piece of glass that splits up gravity like a prism, so that there's, like, blue gravity and yellow gravity. And then somebody gets hit by the red gravity, and it makes them super heavy, so they have super strength, but, like, they're also really slow. And another guy gets hit by microwave gravity. So he's trying to zap everybody, and just when he's about to zap the main guy, we see a lady come out, and she turns out to be Ultraviolet Girl, and she has Super-Speed, so she beats him. And it, like, also gave her giant cans.

—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

—Bradley Lovell, The Looker

For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads: "We came in peace for all Mankind." As the United States was dropping 7 ½ megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock.

• Carl Sagan

It'd be ironic if the crew ultimately lands in Iranian airspace.

Humanity is capable of wonderful things and horrible things, usually both at once. A cursory glance at history reveals a readily visible long precession of cruelty and thoughtlessness, but it also shows cooperation, beauty, altruism, and resistance to cruelty.

Insisting that we should never look at the good things because the bad things exist does not make the world a better place. It's good that we're going back to the moon. We're going to learn a lot. Some of those things will help us, others will hurt us, but there's something to be said for our species using some portion of its effort to help us better understand our world.

Maybe things like going to the moon can create opportunities to stop doing things like murdering each other en masse.

its wild watching these assholes meme and do nutella commercials while riding an ICBM research prototype over WW3