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OT: Remember when space achievements were front page news?

The U.S. just landed on Mars. Elon Musk's SpaceX launched 64 satellites from one reused booster.
And so on. Have these become too routine, or is the American public too consumed by politics and sports?
I think the Cold War gave those accomplishments more meaning.
Plus, I think the average American can't correlate the accomplishments with any direct benefit to themselves or the country.
 
The U.S. just landed on Mars. Elon Musk's SpaceX launched 64 satellites from one reused booster.
And so on. Have these become too routine, or is the American public too consumed by politics and sports?
The American publicly is ignorant and doesn't really care to be enlightened. They have their smartphones. What else do you want them to think about?
 
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And so on. Have these become too routine, or is the American public too consumed by politics and sports?

It's weird about those two subjects. Politics has a direct effect on the lives of everyone while sports/entertainment are simply diversions from our everyday lives. Nowadays too many people think the opposite is true. Your favorite team losing isn't going to change the course of your life. People get more upset with their team's QB throwing an interception on the last drive of the game than they do with their elected officials being incompetent. corrupt, self-dealing, etc.
 
It's weird about those two subjects. Politics has a direct effect on the lives of everyone while sports/entertainment are simply diversions from our everyday lives. Nowadays too many people think the opposite is true. Your favorite team losing isn't going to change the course of your life. People get more upset with their team's QB throwing an interception on the last drive of the game than they do with their elected officials being incompetent. corrupt, self-dealing, etc.
At times thinking and doing the opposite is effective though.

 
The U.S. just landed on Mars. Elon Musk's SpaceX launched 64 satellites from one reused booster.
And so on. Have these become too routine, or is the American public too consumed by politics and sports?
What an accomplishment! They also landed the reused Falcon booster on a drone ship in the Pacific. They can probably use it again! It's sad that this is not lauded the way it should be.
 
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The U.S. just landed on Mars. Elon Musk's SpaceX launched 64 satellites from one reused booster.
And so on. Have these become too routine, or is the American public too consumed by politics and sports?

While I do largely agree with you, in defense of the public at large, we have already launched thousands of satellites into space before and landed on mars 9 times successfully. In the past, when it was done for the first time, it was a big deal. I suspect the first manned mission to mars would garner the same attention as the first manned mission to the moon.
 
Was listening to a segment on NPR today about the landing (NPR's show '1A') and the science and engineering brilliance it took to land the InSight on Mars is mindboggling. Went from something like 1,000mph to 5mph before landing on the surface. Additionally, the mission this time is a first - a sort of 'check up' on the planet's interior. One thing I didn't know is that Mars doesn't have an electromagnetic field, but it is believed that it used to (also believed it may have one time been inhabitable).

You can listen to a nice chat with some of the folks involved here:

https://the1a.org/audio/#/shows/2018-12-04/the-more-you-know-about-mars/116277/@00:00

Pic from InSight...

https%3A%2F%2Fspecials-images.forbesimg.com%2Fdam%2Fimageserve%2Fab38d98fe8104cedbe9e5ce3cc9d94df%2F960x0.jpg%3Ffit%3Dscale
 
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I tend to think that average people probably have a pretty fuzzy conception of the difference between science fiction and reality.
 
Putting stuff in space has been happening for decades. Why would it be front page news? There's no front page glamour in the changing mechanism in which what's already been done a bunch of times is now being done.
 
In IT we predicted this phenoma we named informania. It was a fast approaching time when there was simply too much information to comprehend on a daily basis. It was a correlation to Future Shock. I believe that day has arrived.

It isn't as bad as I feared. People end up picking and choosing the data the want to understand. For me, Mars is great but if it isn't a candy bar, doesn't affect me. The fear today IMHO it's that people tend to just hear what they want to hear. I call this the survivor phenom. That TV show films thousands of hours of film and then edits it down to create a predetermined plot, real or not. So the press does the same with pelosi and trump. Supporters have the data they want to love them, haters have the data they want to hate them
 
I believe that manned events garner more attention than these unmanned achievements. Many folks at NASA predicted that the retirement of the shuttle and the limited number of manned events would cause the public to lose interest.
 
I believe that manned events garner more attention than these unmanned achievements. Many folks at NASA predicted that the retirement of the shuttle and the limited number of manned events would cause the public to lose interest.
Here's a question for everyone: How many people have been to the International Space Station? I can't say that there has been that much interest in those manned missions.
 
The U.S. just landed on Mars. Elon Musk's SpaceX launched 64 satellites from one reused booster.
And so on. Have these become too routine, or is the American public too consumed by politics and sports?
Remember when you believed what you read and watched on tv in the news was the truth? Total propaganda now. All I want is the news not the writer's or broadcasters slant on their opinions.
 
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