Peregrine lander: Propulsion failure threatens US Moon mission
www.bbc.com
A US spacecraft launched from Florida to land on the lunar surface encounters propulsion problems.

Due to a power issue, it looks like the lander may now no longer have sufficient fuel to make a controlled landing on the moon. This was the lander that was set to carry human remains to the moon despite objections from the Navajo nation. Hopefully, this discourages any future attempts at such a stunt, since instead of a permanent mausoleum your ashes may instead be stranded in orbit or scattered amongst the moon dust if the thing crashes.

  • WithoutFurtherBelay [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    4·
    10 months ago

    I think it isn’t really possible to measure usefulness vs cost in a solid objective way, so it’s probably best to just say it’s wasteful until we achieve global communism, at which point we’ll make the sun cannon a globally available utility

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      4·
      10 months ago

      In the liberal economy we have, we can compare the cost of such an endeavor to the cost of other endeavors – building hospitals or whatever – and then consider the respective likely outcomes and ask “Which is preferable?” Wasting money on some stupid vanity project that defaces the last clean surface people get to see is made all the more egregious by the ravages of poverty that we can see down on Earth, and pontificating about “what is the point of anything, rlly?” is just a crass deflection from that fact.

      • WithoutFurtherBelay [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        Yeah and I’m not justifying the weirdo rich man sending rocket debris into space

        I wasn’t trying to deflect from anything, what the rich person is doing is dumb. They’re instating an actual physical claim on the planet which is idiotic in every way.