Plethoraofclethra

And this flower, we tell children, if you let it bud and bloom and age from sun-yellow flower to moon-white seed, you can then pluck it and blow its seeds away to make a wish.

It's probably already been spread around here enough already, but in case anyone's missed it; 7 hours after launch, commander Reid Wiseman, dealing with tech issues, uttered the generational quote "I have two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one of those are working."

After fixing the issues that were afflicting the onboard toilet, mission specialist Christina Koch (who has quickly become my favourite of the four) laughingly said “I’m the space plumber, I’m proud to call myself the space plumber.”

On Easter Sunday, the Artemis II crew hosted a makeshift egg hunt, by hiding packets of dehydrated scrambled eggs around their Orion capsule.

The way the crew always makes sure to make it very clear they're in space when doing interviews. From stuff like Wiseman just hanging out floating sideways on screen or Koch letting her hair loose so it can freely span out flowing around her.

While in transit, the crew decided to record a parody of those bad 80s sitcom intros where everyone turns and smiles at the camera.

When the crew reached the furthest point from Earth in the mission, they jokingly clambored over each other in an effort to get to the far side of the capsule, so that they could individually claim to be the furthest person from earth.

At the same time, on the ISS which was at the time on the other side of earth, the 7 astronauts onboard had a light-hearted race to the far side of the station, making jokes about being the furthest humans from Artemis.

On the way back to earth, NASA actually managed to establish an audio call between the crews of the ISS and Artemis II (where they shared the above info), and Koch called one member of the ISS crew, Jessica Meir, her "astro-sister" as the two of them previously spacewalker together in 2019. Meir then responded I'm so happy that we are back in space together, even if we are a few miles apart" (a few here being 230,000).

2PUNIC2WAR

PUNIC WAR: Carthage Drift

PUNIC FOUR

i am not being metaphorical, i work in a garden center, stop buying plants 'to bring in the bees and butterflies' and then immediately poisoning every caterpillar that dares to consume a single leaf

Hey.

The fascists don’t like NASA.

They don’t want stuff like this to happen.

They want to give NASA’s budget to the already bloated military.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s fine to celebrate a massive peaceful scientific achievement that’s a collaboration between the US and Canada space programs during a time when there’s so much bad news elsewhere.

but DO techbros like nasa? a lot of techbros i see are super into the idea of privatized space travel industry and colonizing mars, the first of which nasa is directly opposed to, and the second which nasa isn't really focused on.

The Artemis Accords are one of the first large-scale civil policies about space and related activities to come about since the Outer Space Treaty in 1967. NASA wants to hold people (at least a little) accountable for the junk they're leaving in our orbit, and not enough people talked about this shit back when it got signed, so I wanna talk about it now

Sure you can see the Artemis mission and coverage as propaganda, just about everything these days could be interpreted that way. But ask yourself. Propaganda FOR WHAT. What is the coverage trying to show us? What is it making us feel? What is it trying to convince us of?

It's not propaganda for US spending. Literally ONE day after launch the White House released the President's Budget Request which proposes cutting NASA spending by 47%

It's not propaganda for corporate space industry. The launch system has some corporate partners but it is largely a publicly-funded NASA project. The rest of the mission is essentially entirely publicly funded. The major corporate players (SpaceX, Blue Origin) have basically zero involvement in Artemis at the moment and have not been mentioned or included or referenced in any way in any of the coverage (that I've seen)

It's not propaganda for American superiority and nationalism. One of the four astronauts is from Canadian Space Agency. The Artemis program has multiple international collaborators. And the Artemis Accords, mentioned above, are intended as the basis of a new era of multi-national space exploration.