I'm old enough to have watched Walter... he was not honest nor was he unbiased, but most did not know it because at the time there were only 3 (or fewer) channels in most places in America. Most Americans believed what they saw on the TV news, and concluded it was right because all the channels agreed on all the main points.

Walter Cronkite was a close friend of the Kennedys; he regularly stayed overnight with them and often went sailing with them, but the public knew little to nothing about this relationship. One reason the Kennedy image is so good is that Walter worked on making it that good. For example, in the aftermath of the Cubal Missile crisis, the American people were told aboutr Kennedy's determination and his getting the Soviet missiles out of Cuba... but most were never told that the American missiles were removed from Turkey as part of a quiet deal with the Soviets. Had the public known this was more of a trade in which the Soviets wanted our missiles out of Turkey, pushed a bit on Cuba, and thus got what they actually wanted, public opinion would have been different. The closeness between Walter and JFK is visible when you watch the footage of Walter reporting live on JFK;s assassination; There's a reason he cries.

Back then, all TV reception was by antenna and each area had airwaves reserved for 3 networks, then a fourth as Public Television came online. Not everybody could actually tune-in all 3 channels with decent enough reception to watch. As a result, all Americans basically only got their news from ABC,CBS,NBC and any newspaper they got. All three network news programs originated in the same city where the people running the networks and their on-air talent all knew each other and all read the same morning newspaper and all experienced the same economic conditions and were exposed to the same politics etc. If one news station reported on something with a particular spin, the odds were very high the others would have the same spin and thus the public would presume there was no other valid opinion and no other correct narrative.

The current situation is far messier, and it's a lot more inconvenient for political folks that the public now has vastly more sources of info and there's no way to get them to align or to quash alternate views and opinions, BUT there's an actual upside in the chaos: Decades ago the press knew FDR was in a wheel chair but they never told the public and the public were generally unaware. The same press were well aware of Kennedy's marital infidelities and some knew of his medical issues but they covered it up for their friend. Now, it's far harder for the press to pull this stuff off... there's always SOME source who won't shut up and won't toe the party line. Consider the recent Joe Biden kerfuffle: The networks did their usual lying, pretending there was no sign of the man's decline and even attacking any contrary voices as sources of "misinformation" but those sources were indeed able to publish and get read/seen and those sources were eventually seen to have been correct, which part of how the "mainstream" press has lost so much credibility... it's essentially a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

so bad that even geeky people are failing to stop and notice the obvious.

THIS IS NOT AN ACCOMPLISHMENT! It's not even interesting, except in the complete failure of AI it seems to be hiding by claiming a bug is a feature.

A Z-80 or 6502 based microcomputer, given a big enough mass storage device, could easily store the full text of every Harry Potter book with 100% completeness and accuracy and recover each and every sentence on demand with only a simple program on an 8-bit micro at perhaps 2MHz. To unleash an AI program on, for example a 64bit multicore processor at multiple GHz and have 42% recall is a pathetic failure. This would be obvious if people swapped-out the words "store" and "memorize" in the statements. Computers have always been excellent at "memorizing" (storing) text and "remembering" (looking up) the text later. Just as "Artificial Intelligence" is a lie (it's SIMULATED intelligence, it's not actually REAL intelligence in a man-made machine), so is "remembering" in this context where a computer is simply storing and recovering data. If it's not doing it perfectly, and it's a computer, then it's a total failure.

Somewhere somebody is either publishing junk papers as part of a PhD, or somebody is planning to snooker gullible investors with an IPO. It happens every few years with whatever the current hot buzzword is. Do we all remember "fuzzy logic" where they tried to convince us that using "greaterthan-or-equal" and "lessthan-or-equal" instead of "equal" was an amazing breakthrough and the future of all computing? (note for the young: yes stuff was more primitive back then but even our 8-bit micros had these comparisons as opcodes [eyeroll] long before the marketers of all things "fuzzy" started selling books and courses etc.)

it's not just that simple.

In a simple test, like start from a stop light, accelerate to some speed, go some measured distance, then decelerate to a stop, an automatic will certainly shift more efficiently than a human driver and a manual transmission... BUT such tests are not the real world, AND "efficiency" is NOT the only thing that matters, nor is one person's definition of the word "efficiency" a universal thing. While they're certainly not the same thing, these arguments are remarkably related to arguments about AI. We are told that AI can do this or that thing "more accurately" or "more efficiently" than people... yet we've all seen AI results that are pure crap. There are certainly things AI can do in some way better than a human, but there are a vast number of things where AI fails spectacularly (and actually for the same reason that the automatic transmission is not always best). AI is not actually "intelligent" at all; it's a poor SIMULATION of intelligence that does not actually KNOW anything at all (in the sense of comprehension, rather than just data storage). Similarly, an automatic transmission is not intelligent at all - it has ZERO knowledge about the intentions of the driver or what's in the immediate future. An automatic transmission can indeed more smoothly and efficiently shift from 2nd to 3rd, but it has no ability to know in advance that the driver might not want this because he sees something ahead, or has changed his mind about his planned path and is going to need to slow down. That automatic might downshift from 4th to 3rd "better" than a human, but cannot know that the human is about to want to speed up to pass a vehicle or dodge something, etc. There are many things a human does while driving a vehicle with a manual transmission, that might be better for the situation, but not "more efficient" and which no machine can apply insight to. The argument over efficiency of shifting or even over things like gas mileage achieved simply miss the point completely by reducing the overall very complex scheme of a human in a vehicle getting from point A to point B in variable traffic and road conditions etc to a simple metric on one aspect of the trip... and one that probably does not matter.

Advocates for automation, particularly where cars are involved, need to keep the real world, and real human beings in mind; Human beings DO NOT typically plan their travels (particularly travels by car) in the way that a computer would or the way an airline plans flights, etc. Humans do NOT schedule way in advance, and have a cleared path ahead of them for the trip. Humans often travel spontaneously, and frequently change their travel plans on-the-fly (sometimes between intersections) ... and we're not just talking about the human in the car of interest for arguments about transmission automation. ALL the humans in all the vehicles sharing the streets with the vehicle being discussed are doing this too... making the travel all the more unpredictable. Now, in the case of an e-car with no transmission of the sort we're discussing, and with both regenerative braking and enormous available torque available in an instant, I'm sure the computer in the car would stack-up very well against a human... but that's a very different scenario.

Spent 20 years building the ISS and never even finished it (some modules never launched and sat on the ground rusting after the Bush admin chickened-out after the loss of Columbia).

A single Starship launch could nearly match the habitable volume of the ISS.

Most people simply do not appreciate the SCALE of this stuff. SuperHeavy and Starship are HUGE. (physically, NOT in the carnival-barker speech style of the Bad Orange Man where lost of stuff is "Uge!").

The Saturn V (America's largest) and the N1 (the Soviet's largest) were both smaller and less capable.

Oh, and not a single Soviet N1 ever flew successfully - they ALL blew up.

The one-balled funny moustached one occasionally seen in lederhosen was not the leader of the GOP.

The political party in question was not officially named "Nazi" and the word is NOT an acronym (a word where each letter is the first word of a name, as-in NASA).

He, the German whose name must not be mentioned too often if one does not want to be censored, was the leader of the National Sozialistische Deutsch Arbeit Partei (National Socialist German Workers' Party). The initials were N.S.D.A.P. and can be seen in old films on some of the standards (poles used vertically by marchers with (in this case) text-bearing little cross-pieces up high on them like the party initials, or names of regions, etc) carried by marchers in parades and at rallies. In German, the word "National" is pronounced like "Nahtzee-oh-nahl", and THAT is where the "Nazi" shorthand comes from. That party was the furthest thing possible from what would be "right wing" in the USA. Can anybody seriously think somebody like Ronald Reagan would lead a socialist workers party? In Europe, where most people never knew freedom under a small and limited government, politics transitioned from Kings and Queens and Emperors, etc to various forms of big government often with a Marxist bent. As a result, the political spectrum of Europe is remarkably narrow, with so-called centrists sitting in a narrow zone between the globalist Maxist communists to the left, and the national socialists to the right... but that whole European political spectrum is just a narrow little left-wing zone all very far to the left of what was started in the USA, and it's why the political terms "left" and "right' do not map properly between the USA and Europe.

After World War II there was a misguided effort in Europe, (where the only alternative to some limited form of Marxism seemed to be royals) to pretend the problem with the recently vanquished [again] Germany was the nationalism and NOT the socialism. The people of the various nations were deliberately groomed to not have pride in their nations, histories, cultures, languages, etc. They were told to eliminate their currencies and borders, and subsume their nations into a greater Europe in the form of the EU. Amazingly, the people doing this grooming often were children or now grandchildren of actual German or Austrian Nazis (go figure...) who seem to be trying to dominate all of Europe by other means than tanks and guns. Now the Europeans are unable/unwilling to defend themselves, and they're passively watching their nations and histories being destroyed by waves of immigrants who have no intention of assimilating. A bad diagnosis, leading to a possibly terminal "cure" (actually, demise). Germany had many problems in the 1930s, but national pride was not one of them and eliminating it across Europe is no fix.

"right-wing-gone-wrong" is actually not a "Germany in the 1930s and 1940s" thing.

Block I Starship was an early test article. It had 6 engines (3 sea level, 3 vacuum) which were enough for all the testing, and conserving engines is good early on when the production lines for engines are not fully-up.

With Block II Starships, they apparently re-arragned the tanks, upping the capacity of Methane and LOX, and also added some of the plumbing to prepare for Block III, which should be the version going to the Moon and Mars and which is supposed to sport nine engines. Changing the lengths, diameters, routing, and supports for all those pipes which rapidly haul immense quantities of cryogenic fluids in the presence of all sorts of thermal, and vibration, and acceleration, and ambient pressure changes probably introduced an immense number of resonance issues. Probably best to work this out now, on the block II which still sports only 6 engines than on the future block 3 which not only will lose more engines with any failure but also lose a physically bigger and more outfitted ship.

Block II Starship is sorta like the Gemini program. The Mercury program put Americans into space. The Apollo program put Americans on the Moon. The Gemini program was wedged in-between (there were actually Saturns on the pad over at complex 39 while Gemini was flying from Patrick AFB) and was a two-man system that could do Earth orbit missions but not a Moon mission. It was a faster and cheaper way to rapidly test thing like multi-day missions, space walks, rendezvous and docking, on-board computers, etc without waiting for the mighty Saturns and their new 3-person capsules to be ready.

while your post caused my response, I presume that when you read it you realized it was aimed at more than just you; a shotgun blast of attempted reason rather than a sniper shot aimed precisely at one target. You probably did not need all that I typed, but there are plenty of others around who certainly have overlapping ideas/concerns/thoughts. In the pre-Trump-escalator-descent (of 2015 when he announced his candidacy) era of Slashdot, it was vastly more possible to have reasonable discussions, and we need to find a way back. Every politician, no matter the party, makes some people happy and others mad - it's the nature of politics, but it never used to get this bizarre. This sort of thing is not sustainable.

One thing I have tried to point out to people is that the federal government originally had almost zero impact on the life of the average American, but over many decades it has grown and grown and injected itself into literally EVERYTHING. Since the government is run by politicians, this by default makes everything political. Now, when a politician does something you or I do not like, it actually impacts you or I in a way it would not have in the past. All this government involvement also makes huge opportunities for a slice of our society to make big profits from that government involvement. Some government actions help a business or industry directly, others are a bank-shot that helps by hurting a competitor or preventing a competitor from appearing, or locking-in some product or service as the "standard" one, etc. This all means lots of money is involved, and that means there's enough sloshing around to hire people to do very sophisticated manipulations of public opinion.

An awful lot of what currently ails us as a society right now, I personally believe, could be fixed by shrinking the government and getting it largely out of our lives. If I cannot shove my policy preferences down your throat with the boot of government, you'll be a lot happier and we'll have less to fight about (and the reverse is true). We can both be happier if neither can use government to harsh the other's mellow, as it were. Human nature being what it is, we probably can never get back to a government the size our founders gave us - we probably need some things like a social security safety net and so-on but they could be done far better than the impossible-over-the-long-term systems we have now. Short of getting government out of everything, however, I do not see a way to get people to be less mad at each other over stuff the people in DC are doing, or what people have been TOLD is being done there (whether true or false). The fact that we're now in an era of such massive lies and distortions where people believe what political hacks tell them to believe rather than looking at actual facts, to the point that many people actually think Musk did a Nazi salute, think Trump told people to inject themselves with bleach, etc is just reality-distorting. I just see no easy path back to sanity.

Anyway, thanks for the reasonable response. Perhaps some of us can gently steer this place back to civilized discourse even when we disagree on things.

The reason there are no subpoenas being issued to examine all the lost taxpayer dollars is that the US Government is NOT paying for these flights. There are no taxpayer dollars being torched here.

You clearly do NOT "know a bit more" if you think development test rockets blowing up "isn't normal". It absolutely was during the 1950s and 1960s when all of America's front line rocket families were initially developed. The original Atlas rockets failed spectacularly and frequently...which is what made John Glenn a hero when he became the first astronaut to ride one into orbit on his Mercury flight (all previous Mercury capsule flights were sub-orbital atop the Redstone rocket). Even the Saturns were a bit sporty at first, and they were in development far longer and at vastly higher expense (the Saturns began development under Eisenhower and the contacts for the F-1 engines were signed long before Jack Kennedy was elected President. For referenceL Kennedy was sworn-in on Jan 20, 1961 and the first Saturn flew on Oct 28.1961, long before Kennedy's famous 1962 Moon speeches). Apollo 4 may not have blown up, but it was a hot mess. You may also recall that the SM on Apollo 13 (effectively the 4th stage) blew apart while astronauts were riding on it and they famously barely made it home. THAT was in a project staffed by about 300,000 people and done jointly as a government+corporations effort every national expert on anything related being made available to the program, and with national prestige on the line.

Click here or here for just a sample of your supposedly explosion-free 1950s and 1960s rocket development. Every single example shown is TAXPAYER dollars being incinerated by a big defense contractor.

Your idea that development rockets do not typically fail is completely distorted by one of the worst things ever done to the taxpayer: the "cost-plus" defense contractor contract. On many big risky military and space projects, America's big defense contractors have refused to do the work on the standard sort of contracts used for things like World War II, or regular business; they refuse to take a chance of not making big profits. As a result, the federal government started issuing contracts that paid a company whatever it cost to complete a project PLUS some percent as a profit margin (i.e. the government GUARANTEED the company it would make a big profit even if it failed). It did not take long for the big companies getting these contracts to realize that if they added lots of delays to a project, their employees would all have guaranteed jobs for longer periods of time AND the cost of the project would rise thus INCREASING the dollars in guaranteed profit. As a result, contractors started taking YEARS to do what used to take MONTHS. Instead of doing proper engineering and analysis, they'd do two or three times as much as they would on a project using their own money. We ended up with a scheme where modern rockets usually do NOT blow up on a first flight BECAUSE we vastly over-paid the supplier and the supplier spent many YEARS on the development. The SLS rocket is a great example. It's been in development for over FIFTEEN YEARS and has only flown ONCE (as an unmanned test). That works out to about $26 BILLION taxpayer dollars for that test flight. If a second flies, it will only have cost the taxpayer $13 BILLION per flight. By contrast, these Starship test flights have each cost about $100 million, or all nine so far for less than 1/26th of what the TAXPAYER paid for that one SLS flight.

Your idea of "normal" in this field is completely delusional.

Oh, and, NO, rockets in the 1950s and '60s did NOT work "near flawlessly" having been developed with "slide rules and protractors". They all had lots of issues (which is why NONE of those rockets are still in service) and rocket development in the 1960s actually was done with the help of computers, which DID exist. The struggle to develop semiconductors and smaller light-weight low-powered computers back then was to fit them INSIDE a spacecraft (or more precisely, inside the reentry package for delivery of a warhead... and oh yeah, also help humans in capsules...) There were plenty of monster-sized computers in use on the ground assisting in engineering calculations.

that you have NOTHING to say. Certainly nothing of value. It's just a massive stream of bile and excrement pumped-out by a sick, twisted, angry person posting anonymously. You're not going to persuade anybody with your total lack of facts and cogent arguments. The only thing you successfully do is advertise your bitterness, frustration and unhappiness with the text equivalent of a megaphone.

Everybody reading your posts can see it.

Get help. Not four our sake, but for your own.

You are not a happy and healthy person, and your life is going to be miserable.

A private company is still a private company when they sell a product or service to the government within the framework of the marketplace, which is what SpaceX does. Nobody is just giving SpaceX checks for nothing... NASA did THAT to Boeing on the SLS, where they routinely gave them large bonus payments even as they SLS rocket slipped further behind schedule and went further over budget.

When government PAYS SpaceX to haul astronauts to and from the ISS, it's because SpaceX competed in the marketplace for those contracts, and won those contracts, and keeps reliably fulfilling the terms of those contracts. None of SpaceX's competitors has succeeded in providing this service.

When government PAYS SpaceX to haul cargo to and from the ISS, it's because SpaceX competed in the marketplace for those contracts, and won those contracts, and keeps reliably fulfilling the terms of those contracts. One of SpaceX's competitors can successfully haul cargo TO the ISS but is unable to bring any back down (this would be the unmanned Cygnus resupply vessel). None of SpaceX's competitors has succeeded in providing this service (though Sierra will hopefully achieve this within the next year with their DreamChaser lifting body).

When government PAYS SpaceX to launch space probes, it's because SpaceX competed in the marketplace for those contracts, and won those contracts, and keeps reliably fulfilling the terms of those contracts.

When government PAYS SpaceX to launch intelligence gathering satellites, it's because SpaceX competed in the marketplace for those contracts, and won those contracts, and keeps reliably fulfilling the terms of those contracts.

When government PAYS Starlink for communications services, it's because Starlink offers completely unique capabilities the government wants to use. Starlink competes in the marketplace for those contracts, and wins those contracts, and keeps reliably fulfilling the terms of those contracts. Starlink then in-turn pays SpaceX lots of money to launch its thousands of satellites. None of that is any sort of a grift.

You should probably have somebody check your ass. It's not just that you brought it up in this context, but there may be something wrong with it as a side effect of trying to pull arguments from it...

I'm sure they'll be looking at that. They blocked-off some of the vents on one area so none of the Starship exhaust would go out that side, unbalancing the forces and causing the SuperHeavy to be pushed that way. I'm sure that changed a lot of the environment in that space during separation. They will have modeled that and [presumably] had decided it should work, but you always need to test this stuff in the real world. CFD is amazing and far better than it used to be, but we still have to put models into wind tunnels to see real physical objects acting in real air to correct the CFD models and then we still need to put flight articles into the real atmosphere. We humans simply do not completely understand every detail of the real world yet, so there are limits to computer models of it.

Keep in mind: The Hot Stage Adapter is a hack. Starship was not originally going to hot stage. When Musk and his team decided to switch to hot staging (something the US did on Gemini-Titan and the soviets did with Soyuz) they added the hardware to the top of the SuperHeavy booster by having it clamp on where the Starship originally did and then replicating that mechanism on top of the adapter so Starship would be structurally unchanged and would clamp to the adapter as if it were clamping to the booster. This worked for all the block I testing, but they do need to dump the adapter before flying the booster home, given all that mass was not originally planned to be sitting atop the booster on return and catch. Block II and Block III bosters are not supposed to have the adapter; they'll take all lessons learned from these Hot Stage Adapter modules and implement the right stuff in the top of the newer boosters as integrated features. Right now, having these adapters is fantastic - it lets them try stuff without changing the boosters.

You have NOTHING. No facts at all, just hatred and vitriol and, probably envy. People who do nothing with their finite lives can choose to admire the work of those who succeed wildly, or despise them for showing what was possible. You appear to be doing the latter.

SpaceX is NOT "entirely kept afloat by taxpayers" (with the obvious implication that SpaceX is subsidized). That's simply a fact, and you have ZERO evidence to the contrary because no such evidence exists.

SpaceX does indeed get a lot of money from the government, LIKE ALL GOVERNMENT CONTRACTORS PROVIDING PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. The military is buying launch services and Starlink communications services from Musk (a commercial transaction like any other, but SpaceX got the business because they were the vendor capable of providing what government wanted). This is NOT a handout any more than it's you giving a handout to the grocery store when you go there and buy food. NASA is similarly paying Musk to haul astronauts and cargo to and from the ISS. Again, this is NOT a handout. SpaceX is the only company currently capable of providing these services (Boeing to astros TO the ISS but could not return them even while being paid far MORE money than SpaceX, and the Cygnus can carry cargo TO the ISS but it burns up on reentry and thus cannot bring cargo back to Earth).

There's a MASSIVE difference between some company getting handouts and subsidies, and a company getting money by selling actual valuable products and services. SpaceX is doing the latter.

SpaceX also has revenue streams totally apart from the US Government. It routinely launches satellites for other companies and countries, and now one of its biggest customers is Starlink (the Musk-owned satellite internet access company). Most SpaceX launches are carrying Starlink sats and Starlink has enough subscribers now to bring in billions of dollars per year. Starlink's not only selling personal internet access, but they also have deals in place to provide direct-to-satellite service for T-Mobile cell phones and to airliners in flight and ships at sea. The Starlink customer base keeps growing and the services provided keep expanding, so the revenue keeps growing.

You people who despise Trump, and suddenly became Musk haters (either right after he bought Twitter or when he endorsed Trump) need to seek medical attention. There's nothing normal about your outrage responses. It's one thing to dislike a politician and what he does, we ALL do that from time to time. It's another thing entirely to take leave of your senses and spew venom all over the place in that situation. Get help, for your own sake. You're going to lead a miserable life.

you did not allow yourself to get sucked into the hatred vortex.

Both political parties have operators who build careers on trying to get they supporters to hate the other side as much as possible. The energy is politically useful. I'm going to say some stuff that will make me look like a Trump fanboy (unavoidable when taking certain positions or debating Trump opponents or clarifying some Trump-related thing) but what I'm trying to point out is bi-partisan manipulations and you happen to have taken the anti-Trump side, so the contrary view looks pro-Trump. Try to overlook that and examine why you are actually so fixated on this one person and so affected. There are lots of worse people on Earth and even in politics, but there are people who NEED you to hate this one.

Usually, the effort fails to fully impact the psyche of the people on the right, probably because they TEND to be more religious and it TENDS to be Judeo-Christian, so the there's self-imposed moderation to the negative impulses for most. There's a reason why every single Presidential assassin in US history has been to the political left of his/her target. People on the right mostly get worried about left-leaning leaders and hate their POLICIES, but they don't generally get more frothing-at-the-mouth. You did not see them parading around with beheaded Biden or Obama sculptures, doing theater productions of the assassinations of Obama or Biden, demanding boycotts of companies owned by associates of Obama or Biden, etc. To be clear: I'm talking generalities here, there's ALWAYS a nutjob or two exception everywhere in the political spectrum.

The ability of the manipulators on the left to get left-leaners hyper-agitated by Trump (and now Musk) has by contrast been an impressive thing to behold. They have their people convinced Trump (the guy they used to like and even award for his "patriotism, tolerance, and diversity") is a racist, that he supported Nazi skinheads in Charlottesville, that Musk is a racist who did a Nazi salute in Madison Square Garden (which they are now also convinced was a Nazi rally site of the '30s) and on and on. There are all sorts of manipulators now trying to convince people Trump just was there for a medal for giving money...they're counting on you believing Rosa Parks and Muhammad Ali would pose with a racist (and their opponents try to convince people Trump was given a medal by the NAACP, these are BOTH manipulations). They certainly do not want you knowing he blew apart the restrictions many clubs in Palm Beach had against blacks and Jews, and when forced to admit it they'll try to convince you it was all done to make Trump money (NOT that he did not DO it). Remember all those spontaneous fights breaking out at Trump rallies in 2016? How aware are you that Hillary campaign people were paying people to go to those rallies and start fights? Two Hillary campaign people were caught on video bragging about it and you can hear how it unfolded here. To be clear, this is right-leaners and left-leaners exposing the manipulation. It's all a manipulation. They do not play these games with history when it touches the people on their side of the aisle. It works (to some extent anyway) for the people pushing it, but it's making a lot of their followers miserable as they think they're now living under some hyper-oppression and cannot understand the popularity of the leader they are convinced is a fascist dictator.

Trump's not some super-powered criminal genius; he's a rather flawed person, like most politicians. The secret sauce is simple: Trump's just taking the 80% side of every 80%/20% issue in the country. Most people want an end to waste fraud and abuse and politicians in both parties have promised it for decades but he's actually trying to do something about it while traditional Republicans AND Democrats never actually did; the establishments of BOTH parties spent DECADES promising they would deal with this and NEITHER side did anything. Every single high-profile thing Trump is doing was at one time or another in the very recent past a DEMOCRAT position. You can find Obama Biden and Clinton all on video railing about illegal immigration and demanding deportations. You can find them all promising to eliminate "waste fraud and abuse". You can find them all wanting to stop all the involvement in foreign wars, and get our trading partners to stop cheating, wanting our NATO partners to take on more of the burdens of the alliance and prodding them to do it, etc. While you cannot perhaps find videos of Biden promising to stop all the gender stuff, Hillary and Obama both publicly championed traditional family and marriage positions, and they both claimed they wanted abortions legal BUT RARE. There's simply no position of Trump which is to the right of John F Kennedy in 1960, yet the Democrats of today still sorta worship at the altar of JFK. This is how you know it's a manipulation. LOOK at the actual policy directions and positions. Democrats within my lifetime have held every one of them, but now Trump is a "fascist" for having them and Musk is a "fascist" for supporting him?

Ask yourself how many people you personally know were just as angry about Obama and his supporters or Biden and his supporters as you are being encouraged to be towards Trump and his supporters. Did you find many of THEM who refused to be friends with (or date or marry or work with or buy stuff from, or sell stuff to) people who supported Obama or Biden? How many of them did you see physically assault people they saw with a hat or bumper sticker for Obama or Biden? As upset and frustrated as they were, how many did you see being physically violent? Consider: Trump will certainly do stuff the left does not like, just as Obama and Biden did stuff the right did not like. Trump's actually likely to have a smaller anti-left legacy than Obama's anti-right legacy, given that Obama's two terms were consecutive and HIS atty gen publicly bragged he was Obama's "wing man". The energy levels pushing the hatred are all out of proportion.

Before you jump up with a January 6th reference, go look at actual video of that day WITH THE SOUND OFF so you do not hear a biased commentator telling you what to think about what you're seeing. Watch to see what percent of the crowd actually does any violence and then observe how many only did violence AFTER attacks by capitol police. Ask yourself why Capitol police opened doors for those people, escorted them around, invited them in, etc and why so many stood passively and watched the protesters walk about in the building without ordering them to leave. Then ask yourself why you were told many police were killed by the protesters that day (none were) and why one who died in his home a day later from a stroke was given a Capitol routunda ceremony and presented as having been killed by protesters (the autopsy showed no such thing). Hint: There's a reason why the same people who want you mad also refused to allow you to see 99% of the Capitol Hill security video. That building belongs to the American people, the videos all belong to the American people. What are you not allowed to see?

There were tons of right-of-center Americans who really hated what LBJ was doing to the country and disliked the man himself very intensely. They disliked his election tactics and campaign. They disliked what he was doing to the economy, doing with the bureaucracy, foreign policy, etc. That did NOT stop them from being enthusiastic about the Apollo program and the people doing that work, no matter how politically entangled those people were with LBJ. There were lots of Americans who did not like what FDR was doing politically or to the government and the economy before and during WWII, but that did not make them hate all of his associates and the war effort.

The political manipulators on both sides were not as skilled in the sixties. They've had about 6 decades to increase their effectiveness.

People NEED you upset. The opponents of those people NEED their people upset. The more the better from the perspective of these toxic operators. With government involved in nearly everything, there's BILLIONS and perhaps even TRILLIONS of dollars on the line with all the policy changes that can result from any presidential election. Just what will these people DO for a billion (or a trillion) dollars?

Stop playing the game.

This broad-spectrum anger aimed at a politician and his supporters does not generally hurt him or them. It's just corrosive of the soul... of the person doing the hating. Help yourself have a happier life. DISLIKE and DISAPPROVE of Trump and his supporters all you want FOR THEIR ACTUAL ACTIONS, but don't let others talk you into HATING and particularly for things that are not even real or for things the people encouraging hatred have actually themselves supported/done.

Somebody else beat me to the point that Artemis II is sorta a four-person repeat of Apollo 8 (loop around the moon sans lander), and the Artemis III with landing attempt is currently pushed back to 2027 or 2028, but I wanted to toss in a bit more for you and others to consider:

Elon just tore down the High Bay in Texas (the original hangar for constructing full-height Block I Starships and SuperHeavies) and is clearing the ground to put up a so-called "gigabay" building right next to (or attached to) the brand new MASSIVE factory there which is still not fully up-and-running. At the same time, he's doing the foundations for another gigabay and setting up a factory at KSC in Florida. This means that unlike a traditional rocket company (like Boeing building an SLS launch vehicle) he will NOT be spending YEARS hand-building each individual rocket. Musk's SuperHeavy+Starship rockets are going to begin pouring out of the factories at an insane rate.

Elon also is completing construction of the second launch pad in Texas, and his team is prepping another pad in Florida at KSC (the tower is already up and they're building the flame trench and launch platform), with environmental studies underway for (apparently) two more pads in Florida. If the new pads workout, he'll presumably update the initial Texas pad (which needs a lot of work between flights) to the new design and those pads will be able to launch, catch, and re-launch rockets without refurbishment between operations (a world first for heavy lift rocketry).

What this means is potentially test flights every week or so in the not-too-distant future. We could see more SuperHeavy+Starship flights in 2026 alone than all the Gemini and Apollo launches, combined. With SuperHeavy catches underway (an already thrice-proven thing) SpaceX will likely have so many boosters kicking around that they'll run out of places to park them. The rate of developmental progress we're all likely to see in the next 24 months will be something the world has never seen before. I'm not going to be the least bit surprised if they fulfill their contracts and land humans on the new schedule, start deploying the newer full-function big starlinks by the Starship load, and but a batch of Tesla robots onto Mars in the next window. As they solve each problem, the subsequent launches will tackle more new problems, with each success checkbox enabling multiple new developments. The rate of progress will leap after the first fully orbital Starship flight, and the new facilities will amplify the development pace. We're all going to have to learn to think entirely differently about what rocket development looks like. This will be more like hamburger production at some point. The limiting factor on how frequently SpaceX can fly is likely to be [a] FAA limits, [b] how fast he can get cryogenic fluids delivered to his launch complexes, and/or [c] burn-out of his workers. That's NOT the normal thing in spaceflight. Normally the limit is launch vehicle and spacecraft production rates.

I'm a natural pessimist, and rather than being a Musk fanboy, I was rather skeptical about the guy long ago, and never expected him to be able to clear all the government red tape and succeed, but I've done my time in the aerospace industry and this guy and his SpaceX people are doing great work and breaking all the development models. I wish the FAA guys would have gotten out of his way long ago - they know far less about rockets and spaceflight than his people do and they cannot keep up with that unprecedented development pace. As an agency, they're also severely risk averse and do not want to have to explain to congress why they approved something that went badly, so for them the easy and safe path is to not approve things or approve them very slowly and with heavy regulations. They'd have NEVER allowed the Wright Brothers to fly, or Wiley Post, or Charles Lindbergh, etc. Had the FAA managed to adapt to a faster pace with a different dev model, or had they gotten out of the way, I suspect we'd have seen an in-orbit fuel transfer by now. Werner Von Braun and James Webb had no FAA oversight while sending men to the Moon on Apollo - if they had, they never would have been able to do the project. FAA involvement in spaceflight is a new thing and a now obvious mistake. The fact that SpaceX is succeeding even with this massive bureaucratic monkey on their back simply makes Musk and Shotwell and the entire SpaceX team all the more impressive.

These are apparently some of the most motivated, competent, capable, can-do people in the country right now.

Hope that offers you a more encouraging perspective.