Good luck and God speed.
Reid Wiseman (NASA Commander), Victor Glover (NASA Pilot), Christina Koch (NASA Mission Specialist), and Jeremy Hansen (Canadian Space Agency Mission Specialist).
NASA’s Artemis II will see astronauts orbit the moon in a mission the likes of which have not been seen in more than 50 years.
The Orion capsule launched from Kennedy Space Center at 6:35 p.m. after NASA engineers rushed to fix several problems pre-launch. The mission will take four astronauts for a loop around Earth’s moon — including to the dark side.
Three Americans and one Canadian will be on the cramped Orion capsule for ten days.
The launch is the first step in the goal to return humans to the lunar surface. Apollo 17, which launched in 1972, was the last human mission to the moon.
Artemis II will test the life support systems and maneuvering capabilities of the Orion command module designed for upcoming moon-landings.
And right on cue, the conspiratards show up to spread their blathering g bullshit.
Johnathan Jones at Western Journal
Wednesday night, I sat in a grocery store parking lot for half an hour watching the Artemis mission to the moon on my phone with the excitement of a 10-year-old kid.
A successful launch that, God willing, will see a crew of four astronauts return home after making a pass around the moon is something historic and fun.
NASA has not ventured outside of Earth’s orbit in my lifetime, which is a big deal if you ask a lot of people.
My excitement at the launch turned to a kind of shock when the YouTube stream I was watching suggested I read the comments as they were posted in real time.
I lost track of how many people called the launch an outright fake, despite the fact that it was seen by countless people.
Artificial intelligence was named a launch culprit. Aliens were invoked. The entire event was labeled a manufactured distraction from the planet’s magnetic field dying or from hidden germs in Antarctica.
A Hollywood studio was decided on by many people as the real stage of the mission, and that was stated as a fact more times and by more people than I could count.
I shrugged it off at first, but the feeling of being outright troubled did not go away as my evening progressed.
To be clear, I wasn’t troubled that people did not share my excitement about a lunar mission. It was that more and more people are treating even basic facts as negotiable or as if everything is objective.
Of course, the spread of this social disease is not limited to space launches.
If you remind people that Israel exists in a constant state of fighting for survival and that the founding of the country was shaped by the Holocaust, some people will simply deny the Holocaust ever happened.
People will tell you your own grandfather did not actually see a death camp in Germany in the spring of 1945, at least not in the way he recounted in his later years.
They might even connect you to Mossad for reminding them that many American soldiers saw the horrors of the Second World War.
In the past, I have told people I met Neil Armstrong before he died, and what a pleasure that was. My smile sometimes faded when I was informed that Armstrong was just an actor who never even left the Earth’s atmosphere.
This pattern of suspicious, goal-post-moving thought is not sustainable as it continues to spread.
……I understand as well as anyone the importance of scrutinizing what I am being told by authority.
Now I am called a sheep for saying I watched a spacecraft take off from Florida on Wednesday evening.
In the words of more than a few commenters, “space isn’t real.”
That is no longer a fringe opinion.
Michael Knowles with The Daily Wire addressed some of this during his Wednesday livestream of the Artemis launch.
He even walked into the background of his shot and interacted with the environment to show it was real, and not simulated.
It didn’t matter to many who were watching, as doubters pivoted to claiming the grass was fake.
People are right to distrust authority. Years of media lies, government coverups, curated narratives, and failures in Washington have conditioned people to assume they are being misled at least part of the time.
At the same time, AI, deepfakes, and out-of-context videos have made nearly everything look or sound suspicious at first glance.
By the way, all this conspiracy crap happened long before AI. It started with the JFK assassination and grew exponentially from there.
………Sadly, it appears the true function of social media after two decades is that it has replaced shared facts with personal realities.
So many people have formed hives wherein they build their own version of the world and defend it. But the result is a society that cannot even agree on basic facts, like whether Michael Knowles was in Florida on Wednesday, or whether the planet is spherical.
There’s a contingent of ‘tards out there who think every single moonshot was “faked”.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), shows the Eagle lunar lander at Tranquility Base, where Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on July 20, 1969. The photos were released by NASA.
People tend to forget that we made a total of six successful lunar landings between 1969 and 1972, with Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17.
The United States has made nine crewed lunar missions between 1968 and 1972. Six of these missions successfully landed astronauts on the Moon’s surface, while two (Apollo 8 and Apollo 10) orbited the Moon, and one (Apollo 13) performed a flyby after an in-flight failure.
Apollo 8 (Dec 1968): First humans to orbit the Moon.
Apollo 10 (May 1969): Simulated landing in lunar orbit.
Apollo 11 (July 1969): First humans to land on the Moon.
Apollo 12 (Nov 1969): Second successful landing.
Apollo 13 (April 1970): Flyby mission due to explosion.
Apollo 14 (Feb 1971): Third successful
Apollo 15 (July 1971): Fourth successful landing.
Apollo 16 (April 1972): Fifth successful landing.
Apollo 17 (Dec 1972): Sixth successful landing and the final crewed trip to the Moon.
Conspiracy moonbats and Troofers believe that the moon landings were faked yet they believe that the FBI has “X-Files”, Area 51 contains the bodies of extraterrestrial aliens, the Bermuda Triangle swallows boats on purpose, and Big Foot is real.
If the Soviets and Chinese had any suspicions whatsoever of any fakery, they’d have been the first to beat us over the head with “evidence”.
I have an idea: The next trip we take to the moon, put idiots like that moron moon landing denier/film maker Bart Sibrel in the spacecraft, dump them off at Tranquility base, and leave them there. Then the LRO can make a few passes over the site so everyone can see what’s left of their bodies.
Related articles:
https://www.space.com/all-moon-missions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon
https://www.history.com/articles/us-moon-landings-apollo
Related posts:
https://sfcmac.com/40th-anniversary-of-the-first-moon-landing/
https://sfcmac.com/for-the-conspiracy-theorists-life-is-a-cover-up/