Lunar Flyby
The first flyby images of the Moon captured by NASA’s Artemis II astronauts during their historic test flight reveal regions no human has ever seen before—including a rare in-space solar eclipse. Released Tuesday, April 7, 2026, the photos were taken on April 6 during the crew’s seven‑hour pass over the lunar far side, marking humanity’s return to the Moon’s vicinity.
> $4 billion per launch lol
The US spends almost that much on net debt interest each day (~$3 billion/day[0]). Not that adding to the debt helps at all, but the old proverb about being penny wise and pound foolish seems relevant
Also we spend that much every 4 days we're in Iran, and that's only ONE of our neo-colonialist irons in the fire, as it were.
If you want to make the US financially solvent, cut defense. Defense LAPS every other budget category. Whether you want to take the conservative position on why that is (our allies freeload on our defense spending) or the Progressive one (the U.S. is an empire in decline and every major empire through history has spent vast sums to maintain itself why would the U.S. be different) doesn't change the fact that our military budgets exceed over a dozen other nations' combined, the vast majority of whom are allies.
>Defense LAPS every other budget category.
I suppose it matters how you lump things, but for federal spending:
kipi - $678 B, Social Security
- $478 B, Medicare
- $425 B, Net Interest
- $419 B, Health
- $412 B, National Defense
- $320 B, Income Security
- $184 B, Veterans Benefits and Services
- $75 B, Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services
- $53 B, Transportation
- $43 B, Administration of Justice
- $15 B, Other
"Please note: Values displayed are outlays, which is money that is actually paid out by the government. Other sources, such as USAspending, may display spending as obligations, which is money that is promised to be paid, but may not yet be delivered."
The Biden administration's FY2025 defense budget request was $850 billion for the DoD, with the total national security budget reaching over $895 billion. The FY2026 proposal submitted by the Trump admin is 1.5 trillion for DoD.
> LAPS every other budget category.
Except for social security, health, medicare, debt interest
The longer term value of having moon outposts for observation, mining, etc. will pay off massively.
This is way bigger than just putting people on the moon or hubris. It's the prerequisite for everything we've also said about Mars. Elon just muddied the waters so much that people are so negative about anything else.
>we can still do hard things
Absolutely! What do you have in mind?
> $4 billion per launch
This is not a lot of money on a nation-state scale. It's equal to giving every person in the US about US$12.
Are full size/larger images available somewhere? 1920x1280px seems low.
Edit: Found 'em: https://images.nasa.gov/search?page=1&media=image&yearStart=...
NASA Image and Video Library, serving up consolidated imagery and videos in one searchable location. Users can download content in multiple sizes and resolutions and see the metadata associated with images, including EXIF/camera data on many images.
There is something uncanny about the bandwidth and quality of all the artifacts coming from this mission.
I've subsisted on photos from the Apollo missions and artistic renditions for so long that seeing the modern, high resolution real thing to be quite stirring in a way I didn't expect. It actually does make me believe that the future could be quite cool.
art002e009287 (April 6, 2026) – Earth sets at 6:41 p.m. EDT, April 6, 2026, over the Moon’s curved limb in this photo captured by the Artemis II crew during their journey around the far side of the Moon. Orientale basin is perched on the edge of the visible lunar surface. Hertzsprung Basin appears as two subtle concentric rings, which are interrupted by Vavilov, a younger crater superimposed over the older structure. The lines of indentations are secondary crater chains formed by ejecta from the massive impact that created Orientale. The dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime. On Earth’s day side, swirling clouds are visible over the Australia and Oceania region.
I listened to pretty much the whole fly by yesterday, and I was imagining how I would have spent my time at the windows with a camera. Listening to the comms made me think of that episode from From The Earth to the Moon where they take the astronauts out and give them geology lessons so they could be more productive with their descriptions.
I was also very curious of their descriptions during the eclipse where the Earth shine was lighting up the dark side of the moon to such a surreal look they couldn't really describe it. They were even commenting that they didn't feel the photos being taken were doing it justice either.
I also was wondering if they will make any modifications to the capsule since covering a window to block the Earth shine caused concern on the ground from some of the readings they were getting. Assuming it was overheating as they redirected air flow to the window. Then again, the following missions won't be so concerned with a single fly by so probably not something they'll address.
