Author: Pen Smith

So the Artemis II astronauts are currently on their six-day trip to the moon and they’ll potentially head further than any human has been before, going around the moon and back. That’s a long way to go without a rest stop…

Because they immediately hit a snag when the fan in the urine part of the waste management system malfunctioned. Thankfully, the problem was assessed on the ground and a solution quickly implemented much to the relief of the astronauts.

“Happy to report that toilet is go for use,” Mission Control radioed the astronauts. “We do recommend letting the system get to operating speed before donating fluid, and then letting it run a little bit after donation.”

Although one ‘stronaut couldn’t wait and already had to go in a bag which is how the toilet-less Apollo astronauts had to do it back in the 60s. Ew.

To Boldly Go

Btw, did anyone watch the launch? It was pretty cool, idk, I’ve never seen a live rocket launch before and I thought it was pretty cool. Like you forget, right? You see enough in movies and clips from previous launches that it’s become commonplace and you forget that it’s actually an awesome thing. Like feat of human engineering type stuff.

Oh wait, this is ostensibly a finance blog so I guess I should discuss the price here.

This is NASA’s biggest rocket ever and the first step in the next era of space exploration: sending people to the moon and beyond. So obviously it’s expensive and the whole program has already cost $93 billion (2012-2025) and each individual launch costs upwards of $4 billion.

Now lots of people say that’s an expensive waste of money and that we should sort out our problems down here first. And sure, we should, but we can and should do both. People are working hard to solve our problems down here, yeah they probably need more money but it’s not like NASA isn’t taking money away from them.

NASA is relatively cheap, I mean, for comparison, the US defense budget is up to a trillion dollars a year whereas NASA is $24.4 billion a year. 0.35% of government spending. I’d say this whole thing is worth it as a side project.

Because think about it, what are you going to do when you solve all the world’s problems? Let’s say there’s no more war, no more poverty, no more climate change, no more inequality, everyone has the personal freedoms they desire, then what? What is humanity going to do once everything’s sorted? Probably go to space, right? Ok, now how likely is it that we’ll ever solve all those problems? We’re humans, we’ll always have problems, we’re always going to fight. So why wait for everything to be perfect before we begin some side quests?

Do you have your whole life in order before you start pursuing your dreams? No, you know that time doesn’t wait. You start doing it now.