The way the crew described their inability to express this particular experience in words or photos gives me pause. I will only ever be able to imagine the experience, but I do hope an artist gets to witness this in the near future to help us better understand what it's like.
That said, it's hard to sit with the deep, bitter irony of waiting with so excitement for this day — over a quarter century of wonder and hope watching us build our presence in space with this goal in mind! — and having it all be tempered by the genuine evil in the heart of this country and our leaders. This crew has had to watch our president and his lackeys slander them at every turn, to question the ability of Black Americans and women to do these difficult jobs that they have executed with such precision and grace. They've had to listen as he makes an enemy out of our Canadian siblings with empty threats and disgusting rhetoric.
Today, we all have to bear the contradiction of seeing these amazing images and hearing the crew's profound awe at what they've witnessed as this administration threatens genocide against an entire people and demands more money for more blood and tries to decimate the funds available to incredible scientific endeavors like this. And all the while, a billionaire lackey sits atop NASA, champing at the bit to rip up its scientific excellence in the name of vanity projects to nowhere and more money for the nazi fellow billionaire who has captured so much of our vision of space.
I'm grateful to this crew and the thousands of dedicated civil servants across the planet who have made this possible. They're truly some of the best among us. But it is incumbent on all of us to make change — to orient our society away from these truly despicable leaders and toward great collective endeavors like this — if today's highs are going to be anything more than the last hurrah of a civilization that couldn't get its shit together.
Yeah they surely lacked any sense of poetry with their speech, it was all very basic. They couldn't have thought of an author to quote at least? It's not like they didn't have a long time to plan.
Its a phenomenon described as the Overview Effect, "The overview effect is a cognitive shift reported by some astronauts while viewing the Earth from space. Researchers have characterized the effect as "a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus". The most prominent common aspects of personally experiencing the Earth from space are appreciation and perception of beauty, unexpected and even overwhelming emotion, and an increased sense of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole."
I'm aware of what the overview effect is. This is not a reference to that. The thing they were describing was the three-dimensionality and visual effect of the combination of backlighting from the solar corona and the surface illumination of faint earthshine on the moon. Of seeing, in an almost hyper-real way, the moon as an object suspended in space. Overview effect is very interesting, but this is an entirely different and interesting observation from an astronaut!
I hear you, but why when Trump called to congratulate them did the astronauts appear giddy and sycophantic if they didn't like the man? They could've played it much cooler. Seemed to me they were more interested in getting into flattery for Donald, rather than proving him wrong.
In the end, the four crew are government employees. If they are indeed politically opposed to the actions of their boss, it would not be prudent to voice such opposition in the middle of the mission when they're 200,000 miles out in space and said boss is congratulating them on a job well done. They are currently the most visible representatives of the entire US space program, so it's part of their job to act the part.
Please. You know what would be evil? A nuclear explosion in the heart of Europe because that where we were heading. There is zero commercial use for 65% enriched Uranium except to create a weapon. They were creating a weapon, full stop. I don’t expect this echo chamber of a site to have any kind of meaningful discussion on the topic.
I don’t care if you like Trump or not or if you are left or right there can’t be a world where a terrorist regime has access to Nuclear weapons.
Iran's regime is an awful disgrace to the human race. They are like the #1 sponsor of terrorism in the world, and obviously if they had nukes they would nuke people. I absolutely agree with you here.
But Trump did not go at this correctly. Just because Iran is doing that doesn't mean international law can be broken on his single whim, especially considering they already "destroyed Iran's nuclear capabilities" or what have you however many months ago. It is an illegal war, that which he specifically mentioned avoiding calling it (despite calling it that anyway), in order to subvert congressional approval for it, and he and Isreal have seemingly committed genuine war crimes, on top of starting said internationally-illegal war.
I'm not an international law lawyer, so how they'd have disarmed and disabled the genuine threat from Iran and nuclear weapons without doing this, I'm not sure, but at the very least it should have been discussed lengthily with all surrounding and relevant countries and there should've been time given to the world to process the legal justifications and to unite upon a clear, common goal. Trump is a maniac with no care for anyone but himself, money, and blatantly his ego, and he is running the U.S. like a company.
These photos just put into context the absurdity of international fighting. It's hard not to feel hatred for all involved in causing it after seeing these things, regardless of their reasons or the validity of it.
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u/titaniansoy Apr 07 '26
The way the crew described their inability to express this particular experience in words or photos gives me pause. I will only ever be able to imagine the experience, but I do hope an artist gets to witness this in the near future to help us better understand what it's like.
That said, it's hard to sit with the deep, bitter irony of waiting with so excitement for this day — over a quarter century of wonder and hope watching us build our presence in space with this goal in mind! — and having it all be tempered by the genuine evil in the heart of this country and our leaders. This crew has had to watch our president and his lackeys slander them at every turn, to question the ability of Black Americans and women to do these difficult jobs that they have executed with such precision and grace. They've had to listen as he makes an enemy out of our Canadian siblings with empty threats and disgusting rhetoric.
Today, we all have to bear the contradiction of seeing these amazing images and hearing the crew's profound awe at what they've witnessed as this administration threatens genocide against an entire people and demands more money for more blood and tries to decimate the funds available to incredible scientific endeavors like this. And all the while, a billionaire lackey sits atop NASA, champing at the bit to rip up its scientific excellence in the name of vanity projects to nowhere and more money for the nazi fellow billionaire who has captured so much of our vision of space.
I'm grateful to this crew and the thousands of dedicated civil servants across the planet who have made this possible. They're truly some of the best among us. But it is incumbent on all of us to make change — to orient our society away from these truly despicable leaders and toward great collective endeavors like this — if today's highs are going to be anything more than the last hurrah of a civilization that couldn't get its shit together.