Former NASA scientists warn of possible Artemis II spacecraft safety issue - ABC News

[hunter]

5. When Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climbed Everest in 1953 it was a grand adventure.

These days it's just an extreme sport with a disturbing fatality rate.

My grandfather was an Apollo Project engineer and I've got some of his memorabilia including his Apollo 8 medallion, which this upcoming Artemis mission will replicate.

Humans are fragile. It's incredibly difficult and expensive to keep them alive in space, even more so beyond low earth orbit. There haven't been any great technical advances in the last fifty years that make this significantly less difficult.

The technologies that have advanced very significantly are computers and robotics. Sending humans into space only gets in the way of scientific research that could be accomplished by increasingly sophisticated robots. If I was Emperor of the United States of America I'd have let China celebrate the next human visit to the moon. There's no military value in the feat.

I doubt natural-born humans will ever have a significant presence in space. Cities on Mars are fantasy. Asteroid miners are fantasy. Star Trek is fantasy.

In this universe I'm fairly certain faster-than-light travel is impossible and that only an infinitesimal fraction of simple lifeforms or machines survive interstellar distances, thus explaining the Fermi Paradox.

It doesn't bother me too much. Just as I, a mortal human being, exist for only a brief moment in this universe, so will the human species.