I like how most people's reactions at this point are "yeah, whatever", as if it's every day that humans observe the far side of the moon with a naked eye through a window :). We do know what it looks like and we have photos from the surface, yes, but seeing the reaction from real people who're actually there does hit different, at least for me
Speaking for myself (who has been fascinated with the space program since I was a small child), any joy I might feel around Artemis II feels tainted, by the immense amount of pork involved (SLS is called "Senate Launch System" for good reason) to the point where Artemis is more corporate welfare that happens to involve the Moon than a real space program, and by my belief that it is intended to be little more than a quick, dirty, and vainglorious Apollo repeat by a failing government.
I ran across this video[0] yesterday with Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about how it’s always been political. The first moon landing was more about global politics than science. As a child you likely weren’t concerned about that side of it, or were shielded from it.
It isn’t always the purist motivations that push the human race forward, but forward it moves us.
I don't think OP's problem with it is that it's "political" but that it's a product of pork and corporate welfare. The political thrust of the Apollo program was more "beat the Russians" and less "funnel money into dozens of already-rich corporations in favored districts." Even thought there was a lot of that, too. Modern space (and defense) projects seem to be almost 100% "pork funnel" and zero anything else.
I know the RS-25 engines[0] (aka SSME, Space Shuttle Main Engine) were "reusable" in an academic sense (needing a ton of refurbishment after each use) but it hurts my heart that we're dropping them in the ocean and it makes it hard for me to feel good about the Artemis program. It's irrational but it makes the kid who loved the Space Shuttle (which, itself, was a political pork barrel and a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none kind of program) sad.
The manned space program launches from Florida but is controlled from Houston. Why? Wouldn't it make more sense to have both in the same place?
Florida is because there's no other safe place in the US to launch a big rocket on an easterly trajectory* than Florida. Or the extreme southern tip of Texas, which SpaceX uses.
Houston is because NASA needed LBJ's support. They even named the place after him.
* Why easterly? Because that's the direction Earth rotates. If you orbit in that direction you get some free momentum from the planet itself.
I'm not being a hater, but we landed on the moon 55+ years ago and now we're doing a flyby with 35+ year-old engine tech. It's good that we're doing something but we should be doing better.
In 2-3 years we should expect a Starship mission to Moon, at a much more sensible scale, as in the amount of scientific gear and actual researchers delivered to the surface (and then back).
There is literally not many things in life I hope so much for than starship success. Sounds strange perhaps but I just love space and I hope it succeeds.
Funnily I absolutely despise Musk at the same time for being absolute buffoon
I see what you mean, but I kind of understand the reaction: what does this change in 99.99% of people lives? Nothing at all. It's not necessarily ignorance.
People are struggling to afford every day life and we are surrounding by crazy things every day like cellphones talking to satellites in space. On any objective measure it is definitely amazing to send humans to the moon, but there are more pressing issues for most people right now.
If we as a species had more of our ducks in a row we may be able to better celebrate this as the achievement for humankind that it is.
If it makes you feel better, the amount of money the United States spends on space is a very small percentage compared overall entitlement spending. There is always going to be some level of inequality, so your maxim that we should only spend money on space exploration when those problems are solved just isn't workable. The enormous amount of money the United States spends on "solving" inequality and poverty begs the question of if that's even an effective or efficient allocation of resources in the first place.
people have been struggling to afford every day life for decades. So that’s nothing new. Unless only people in the 1st world count as people lol.
You’re either emotionally consumed by the human struggle or not, it’s a personality thing - in my opinion. You’re allowed to be poor and a nerd, unless I missed the memo. I’ve met poor and wealthy people that are excited by space.
Struggling to meet our basic needs is not a recent phenomenon. It has been a part of the human condition for millenia, not just decades.
Some people think that if we can just eliminate our 'struggles' by building AI tools to do the hard thinking or robots to perform all our labor; that civilization would become some kind of utopia. I don't believe that. Progress happens when we do hard things.
I don’t think people are spending their time on more pressing issues. I think they are just are hooked on an endless stream of content that is built for addiction and is always within arms reach.
nah, it just seems like that on Twitter. We have more prosperity by far than we've ever had in history, this is a time to celebrate.
We have our 'ducks in a row' more now than in the 1960's when we went to the moon because of a cold war and nuclear annihilation / escalation.
My grandparents were born on farms with no electricity, plumbing, there was no real 'police' no social services, no healthcare, no antibiotics, 10% of children did not make it past age 1. That's in living memory.
Despite the insanity on the news, it's mostly drama, and we still have more people coming out of abject poverty than ever.
We have 'modern world problems', they are real problems for sure, but they are of a different scale entirely.
Frankly, it may never even get that much better as we may be hitting diminishing marginal returns on 'progress' - we now have to figure out how to live 'long lives and stay healthy'.
It is a fine time to be going to the moon, but we could be doing multiple productive things at the same time. It just doesn't surprise me that there are so many people that are not caring so much about this.
it's amazing, but I'll refer you to Gil Scott-Heron for my feelings on the matter
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon
Her face and arms began to swell
And whitey's on the moon
I can't pay no doctor bills
But whitey's on the moon
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still
While whitey's on the moon
The man just upped my rent last night
Cause whitey's on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But whitey's on the moon
I wonder why he's upping me?
Cause whitey's on the moon?
Well I was already giving him fifty a week
With whitey on the moon
Taxes taking my whole damn check
Junkies making me a nervous wreck
The price of food is going up
And as if all that shit wasn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon
Her face and arm began to swell
And whitey's on the moon
Was all that money I made last year
For whitey on the moon?
How come I ain't got no money here?
Hmm! Whitey's on the moon
Y'know I just 'bout had my fill
Of whitey on the moon
I think I'll send these doctor bills
Airmail special
To whitey on the moon
I just came across this poem a few days ago and had the opportunity to think about it.
It’s a valuable perspective to hear. As someone prone to getting caught up in the breathless excitement about science, progress, human achievement, etc., it is a hard truth that these things are abstract and not relevant for people who are struggling with day-to-day life, particularly when those struggles are a result of the same government that is executing this mission.
However, the older I get, the less I bind to the idea of a single, correct truth. This perspective doesn’t invalidate the perspective that the mission is valuable. The complexity of the system in which this is taking place means that these things (moon missions and affordable healthcare) aren’t fungible for one another; his poverty wasn’t the result of the moon mission, it was the result of EVERYTHING that had happened over the 100 years prior.
So it’s useful to hear. It’s a sharp, valid reality check for those of us who like to think in big, abstract concepts. And, it’s one perspective among myriad valid perspectives.
I don't think it's actually a useful perspective at all. The poem is racial resentment repackaged as a means to guilt trip people into feeling bad about adventure, science, and exploration. Unless they were pretty well read at a young age, most millennials probably first experienced this poem in the film First Man, where it is read as a backdrop to Apollo 11 traveling to the moon. It's a great scene because the juxtaposition is stark. We can either hold ourselves back an an endless and futile journey on solving the human condition of poverty and inequality, or we can explore the stars. It's an easy choice.
Kind of a false dichotomy. How about medical care as a right for a big abstract concept? He's not anti-science here, he's against the inequality of its distribution.
That’s precisely my point. Some stanzas in the poem suggest that there’s a direct connection between the moon mission and his poverty.
> The man just upped my rent last night
> cause Whitey’s on the moon
> Was all that money I made last year
> For Whitey on the moon?
And my point then was that I can see and empathize with his frustration, but I don’t feel it’s a singularly correct perspective to the exclusion of the perspective that the missions were of great value.
The author of this poem went to great lengths to show his racism. It reminds me of a post, probably on Reddit, of a similar racist nature. Just when it's going in the other direction it's clearer.
The post was by a man, supposedly white, who had to pull his child or children from private school because he could not pay for it. His frustration was based on the fact that his taxes were higher than the school tuition, and that another student at the school, a black student, was having his tuition paid by the government. He implied that he was paying for another person's education, and could not afford his own child's education. He saw the same dichotomy as that expressed in the poem, in the other direction.
He could be expressing the generational frustration of being black in America. When things are so segregated you feel you are looking across at a different country landing on the moon, you might write such a poem.
I get the general frustration there, but it's weird to focus on NASA's budget when it's such a teeny tiny fraction of the total.
Yes, there's a lot of government waste, but NASA ain't it.
And I would suggest that the billionaire class and unfettered capitalism are far more responsible for the modern day version of Scott-Heron's woes than the good ol' government scapegoat.
If DOGE served for anything at all it was for showing that there isn’t even that much “waste” per se. If there’s any waste it’s in the Pentagon which can’t even audit itself, but of course DOGE didn’t even get close to that. It was all performative for them.
Yes, I remember that nihilistic piece of race rage bait and I remember it well. Now that 'non-whitey' is gliding past the moon and has shown he is past all that race-rage baiting by stating that [1] this is just — this is human history ... It’s the story of humanity — not black history, not women’s history I hope that the like of Scott-Heron and those who like to push this type of narrative are willing to finally take that hammer to ram down that nail into the coffin of the 'systemic racism narrative'.
No, I'm not holding my breath, the narrative if far too profitable for far too many people [2] to be put to rest.
Why are you so angry about a black person's perspective of what the moon landing meant to them? Rather than putting a nail in the coffin of the "systemic racism narrative", your post underlines how long we still have to go as a society to take black people's perspectives seriously, rather than simply denigrating them as "race bait."
Am I losing it? They can’t be seeing the far side of the moon right now, because they haven’t adjusted course to go round the far side of the moon yet…
So does this suggest the BBC is wrong and it’s the side of the moon we’re used to seeing, but just it’s “dark”?
But then the astronauts are saying it’s weird seeing the moon in a whole new light (excuse the paraphrasing pun).
They're already at a point where they see the moon from a different angle than we see it from Earth, enough to see a bit of the side that we can't see from here.
Imagine you're holding a ball with drawings on it. Hold it out at arms length and fix how it looks in your memory. Now bring it close to your face and move your head a tiny bit to the side. You're not seeing the whole back-side of the ball. Far from it! However, you are seeing some bits you weren't seeing before and the whole picture you can see now looks different than it did when the ball was at arm's length.
That's my guess. They're seeing parts of the dark-side of the moon because they're now close enough that they have a different viewing angle than we do on Earth. Remember, they're not flying straight at the moon. That's not how transfer orbits work.
Remember that they’re not flying towards the Moon but to a point in space where they and the Moon will be closest together in a day or two, hence the Moon is now ‘off to their side’ and they can see a segment of it that is hidden to Earth observers … I think.
Also, the dark side of the Moon is often illuminated but we call it dark because it’s also hidden from earth due to the Earth and Moon being tidally locked (the same side of each always faces the other body).
I was also very confused, but after some reading I figured it out.
> In an interview with NBC News from space, NASA astronaut Christina Koch described seeing the moon out the window of the Orion capsule and realizing that it looked different from what she was accustomed to on Earth.
> “The darker parts just aren’t quite in the right place,” she said. “And something about you senses that is not the moon that I’m used to seeing.”
They are not on the other side of the moon seeing the full dark side, but from their position they're seeing the moon at a slight angle, meaning that SOME of what they now see is "the dark side", or the part we can never see from earth since the same side always faces us
>they haven’t adjusted course to go round the far side of the moon yet
They did, 3 days ago! Maybe this is being pedantic (?) but the trans-lunar injection burn they did on April 2 put them on the complete trajectory including return to Earth. Though there are still possible correction burns that can be done to increase precision (the first 2 of these were already canceled).
It got deleted now. It would be nice to see a new versions if abailable.
So, let's make some guess, but IANAA. Orion is in the middle of the trip going to the meeting point to the Moon in a quite straight line but the Moon is still not there. It will be there in 2 or 3 days, that is like 45° of the orbit.
O . . o
Earth > . . . . Moon
Orion in 3 days
.
.
.
.
.
.
o
Moon
now
Using some sloppy Math and sloppy Astronomy, I estimate that the difference between our point of view and their point of view is 20° or 30°. So the visible surface has like a 10% difference, that is consistent to call it a "glimpse". My estimation is also similar to the graphic posted in Reddit, but I'm not sure what was the problem.
I actually can't tell the difference in the photo to save my life, but I have a friend that is astronomer and I'm sure that if I show the photo to him, he could use a sharpie to mark the difference on my screen without any problem.
I think they're saying they can see a sliver of the far side, and that seeing the moon from a slightly different angle is weird having seen the near side so often. But they didn't really make that clear.
They did that change a long time ago. They are on a course
to go around the Moon from the TLI burn (trans lunar injection) Thursday at 7:49pm EDT. They don’t need any more burns for that.
On one of Apollo missions they've read from Bible, Book of Genesis [1]. I wish they did something like that here - and I'm not even a Christian, let alone religious. They did relay some beautiful message [2] though.
I sure hope they don't. Even just the hint of connecting this achievement to the supposed Christian nature of the US would reinforce a lot of the bad things in the world right now. Namely, that we're actively at war in the middle east (Christianity and Judaism vs Islam), in a burgeoning cold war with China (more Christianity vs "godless" communists), and run by an increasingly fascistic administration (the ties between religion and government are a hallmark of fascism).
I am not a Christian, but it was arguably the Christian value system which forged the government and institutions that made these achievements possible. Such progress happens only in high trust societies.
> but it was arguably the Christian value system which forged the government and institutions that made these achievements possible.
Many of the founders were specifically anti-Christian. They were deists, and believed in a higher power, but specifically rejected the idea of a divine intervention of God or Jesus.
Christians do not own the idea of being nice to others and trusting others.
Of the 45 delegates to the continental congress, only two (Benjamin Franklin and another) were known to be deists. One's membership records couldn't be found. The other 42 were active members and on the books in their churches.[0]
Jefferson also was a deist, but he wasn't present at the constitutional convention of 1787 (though he earlier authored the Declaration of Independence).
[0] M. E. Bradford. Founding Fathers: Brief Lives of the Framers of the United States Constitution, second edition. University Press of Kansas, 1994.
It's interesting to me how cautious NASA is being with Artemis II. I wrote about the risk / mortality calculation behind this, but everything from the trajectory, the decision not to do an orbital insertion, the checkout in high-Earth orbit is very cautious.
I wish this mission took greater risks. Or, just at least go as far as Apollo 8, but stay for a bit longer, and try out new things. It would be fun to take a finicky low mass radio telescope experiment to the far side of the moon.
Just some humans doing proper awesome human stuff and being good people advancing international brotherhood and scientific advancement.
Love seeing our Ontario native Jeremy Hansen on the microphone, and those two flags properly positioned beside each other.
I'm not a Christian today, but was raised that way. This is the hopeful message I want to see on this day, and the true meaning of the symbol. Hope for all humankind. Working together.
Incredible achievement but I'll be honest — if you showed me this photo without context I would have no idea it was the far side. Just looks like the Moon. Also didn't realize we could capture an image like this in what I assumed was total darkness.
The moon is tidally locked with the Earth, which means the same side always faces the Earth. So, for example, when the moon is between the Earth and the sun, the far side (from the perspective of Earth) would be fully illuminated by the sun.
The “far side” of the moon refers to the hemisphere that can’t be seen from Earth.
They want to fly by at lunar sunrise as the shadows help see depth better. Also, they have very sensitive cameras (up to 3,280,000 ISO!); the Earth photo the other day was taken at night, so you can see how they'll be able to get detail even in the dark parts
The sun still. It's just that that side never points towards the earth, but it still gets sunlight. Same as how the side we see isn't fully lit except during a full moon.
I'm going to be VERY disappointed if there's no Pink Floyd music or commentary from the Artemis mission. Particularly now. Life's short, and one can't be serious all the time...
Wallis and Gromit would be a partial substitute, but the boomers are still around.
Absolutely. Last year we went to Italy and I played “The Count of Tuscany” in the car while driving in Chianti region. My wife does not really enjoy Dream Theater but that was in the rider for the Italy trip :-)
Yeah, if we cut back a bit on the war crimes we could easily fund both more moon missions and cool science, as well as a shit ton of great programs to help people with the basics like food and rent and health care.
I completely understand and agree. But there is still something magical about spaceflight that will forever put me in awe. It’s a small moment of wonder in a world of disappointment. I’ll take anything I can get these days
Agreed. I remember following the various Mars rover missions of the 1990s-2010s with avid interest. I have now lost my interest in space completely. The house is on fire and we're going on holiday again? It's beginning to feel almost indecent.
It isn’t always the purist motivations that push the human race forward, but forward it moves us.
[0] https://youtu.be/j_AlXChA9F4
Everything about SLS, and most of Artemis, has been dictated by Congress, often overriding expert advice.
Why not just give NASA the money and let them get on with it?
The same happens with the US military, Congress constantly deleting funding for programs they don't like to fund ones they do.
I had a great Prof during my bachelor from Russia - this is what he always told -> and it makes sense: Back then was cold war
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25
Florida is because there's no other safe place in the US to launch a big rocket on an easterly trajectory* than Florida. Or the extreme southern tip of Texas, which SpaceX uses.
Houston is because NASA needed LBJ's support. They even named the place after him.
* Why easterly? Because that's the direction Earth rotates. If you orbit in that direction you get some free momentum from the planet itself.
Funnily I absolutely despise Musk at the same time for being absolute buffoon
If we as a species had more of our ducks in a row we may be able to better celebrate this as the achievement for humankind that it is.
If it makes you feel better, the amount of money the United States spends on space is a very small percentage compared overall entitlement spending. There is always going to be some level of inequality, so your maxim that we should only spend money on space exploration when those problems are solved just isn't workable. The enormous amount of money the United States spends on "solving" inequality and poverty begs the question of if that's even an effective or efficient allocation of resources in the first place.
You’re either emotionally consumed by the human struggle or not, it’s a personality thing - in my opinion. You’re allowed to be poor and a nerd, unless I missed the memo. I’ve met poor and wealthy people that are excited by space.
Some people think that if we can just eliminate our 'struggles' by building AI tools to do the hard thinking or robots to perform all our labor; that civilization would become some kind of utopia. I don't believe that. Progress happens when we do hard things.
We have our 'ducks in a row' more now than in the 1960's when we went to the moon because of a cold war and nuclear annihilation / escalation.
My grandparents were born on farms with no electricity, plumbing, there was no real 'police' no social services, no healthcare, no antibiotics, 10% of children did not make it past age 1. That's in living memory.
Despite the insanity on the news, it's mostly drama, and we still have more people coming out of abject poverty than ever.
We have 'modern world problems', they are real problems for sure, but they are of a different scale entirely.
Frankly, it may never even get that much better as we may be hitting diminishing marginal returns on 'progress' - we now have to figure out how to live 'long lives and stay healthy'.
It's a fine time to go to the moon.
They are like 50 companies making robots right now that will soon do a lot of work.
There are advances in many fields.
Headlines are dominated by something else, the 'news' is not a good reflection of reality.
That's not something to mock people for; it's a problem to apply your mind to and fix.
It’s a valuable perspective to hear. As someone prone to getting caught up in the breathless excitement about science, progress, human achievement, etc., it is a hard truth that these things are abstract and not relevant for people who are struggling with day-to-day life, particularly when those struggles are a result of the same government that is executing this mission.
However, the older I get, the less I bind to the idea of a single, correct truth. This perspective doesn’t invalidate the perspective that the mission is valuable. The complexity of the system in which this is taking place means that these things (moon missions and affordable healthcare) aren’t fungible for one another; his poverty wasn’t the result of the moon mission, it was the result of EVERYTHING that had happened over the 100 years prior.
So it’s useful to hear. It’s a sharp, valid reality check for those of us who like to think in big, abstract concepts. And, it’s one perspective among myriad valid perspectives.
That’s precisely my point. Some stanzas in the poem suggest that there’s a direct connection between the moon mission and his poverty.
> The man just upped my rent last night > cause Whitey’s on the moon
> Was all that money I made last year > For Whitey on the moon?
And my point then was that I can see and empathize with his frustration, but I don’t feel it’s a singularly correct perspective to the exclusion of the perspective that the missions were of great value.
> The man just upped my rent last night > cause Whitey’s on the moon
Be interpreted as anything other than directly blaming his poverty on the moon mission?
The post was by a man, supposedly white, who had to pull his child or children from private school because he could not pay for it. His frustration was based on the fact that his taxes were higher than the school tuition, and that another student at the school, a black student, was having his tuition paid by the government. He implied that he was paying for another person's education, and could not afford his own child's education. He saw the same dichotomy as that expressed in the poem, in the other direction.
Yes, there's a lot of government waste, but NASA ain't it.
And I would suggest that the billionaire class and unfettered capitalism are far more responsible for the modern day version of Scott-Heron's woes than the good ol' government scapegoat.
No, I'm not holding my breath, the narrative if far too profitable for far too many people [2] to be put to rest.
[1] https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-black-astronaut-on-arte...
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11151740-racism-is-not-dead...
So does this suggest the BBC is wrong and it’s the side of the moon we’re used to seeing, but just it’s “dark”?
But then the astronauts are saying it’s weird seeing the moon in a whole new light (excuse the paraphrasing pun).
I don’t understand.
They're already at a point where they see the moon from a different angle than we see it from Earth, enough to see a bit of the side that we can't see from here.
That's my guess. They're seeing parts of the dark-side of the moon because they're now close enough that they have a different viewing angle than we do on Earth. Remember, they're not flying straight at the moon. That's not how transfer orbits work.
Also, the dark side of the Moon is often illuminated but we call it dark because it’s also hidden from earth due to the Earth and Moon being tidally locked (the same side of each always faces the other body).
> In an interview with NBC News from space, NASA astronaut Christina Koch described seeing the moon out the window of the Orion capsule and realizing that it looked different from what she was accustomed to on Earth.
> “The darker parts just aren’t quite in the right place,” she said. “And something about you senses that is not the moon that I’m used to seeing.”
They are not on the other side of the moon seeing the full dark side, but from their position they're seeing the moon at a slight angle, meaning that SOME of what they now see is "the dark side", or the part we can never see from earth since the same side always faces us
They did, 3 days ago! Maybe this is being pedantic (?) but the trans-lunar injection burn they did on April 2 put them on the complete trajectory including return to Earth. Though there are still possible correction burns that can be done to increase precision (the first 2 of these were already canceled).
Illustrated: https://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/comments/1sd797j/the_moon...
So, let's make some guess, but IANAA. Orion is in the middle of the trip going to the meeting point to the Moon in a quite straight line but the Moon is still not there. It will be there in 2 or 3 days, that is like 45° of the orbit.
Using some sloppy Math and sloppy Astronomy, I estimate that the difference between our point of view and their point of view is 20° or 30°. So the visible surface has like a 10% difference, that is consistent to call it a "glimpse". My estimation is also similar to the graphic posted in Reddit, but I'm not sure what was the problem.I actually can't tell the difference in the photo to save my life, but I have a friend that is astronomer and I'm sure that if I show the photo to him, he could use a sharpie to mark the difference on my screen without any problem.
Your illustration is about right, but the angle they're catching now is even a bit further than you've shown.
No course adjustment is necessary (at least in the sense of an engine burn). The moon's gravity will sling them around and back toward Earth.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4tDZye57D4
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELslc6O4UVk
Many of the founders were specifically anti-Christian. They were deists, and believed in a higher power, but specifically rejected the idea of a divine intervention of God or Jesus.
Christians do not own the idea of being nice to others and trusting others.
Jefferson also was a deist, but he wasn't present at the constitutional convention of 1787 (though he earlier authored the Declaration of Independence).
[0] M. E. Bradford. Founding Fathers: Brief Lives of the Framers of the United States Constitution, second edition. University Press of Kansas, 1994.
Photo and video gallery: https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/journey-to-the-moon/
I wish this mission took greater risks. Or, just at least go as far as Apollo 8, but stay for a bit longer, and try out new things. It would be fun to take a finicky low mass radio telescope experiment to the far side of the moon.
It's already risky enough: https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....
It has always been a touch-and-go affair
Who downvotes that? It is true.
Edit: maybe you can illuminate why you downvote?
(The moon has an albedo of 12%)
Love seeing our Ontario native Jeremy Hansen on the microphone, and those two flags properly positioned beside each other.
I'm not a Christian today, but was raised that way. This is the hopeful message I want to see on this day, and the true meaning of the symbol. Hope for all humankind. Working together.
Still think what he said is worth hearing.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWvRjeEgecb/?igsh=MXZoYjZobDM...
I still liked what he had to say so gonna leave up the link itself
Better information density.
It is the moon.
> Also didn't realize we could capture an image like this in what I assumed was total darkness.
The "Dark Side of the Moon" is a misnomer. It gets as much light as the side we can see.
The “far side” of the moon refers to the hemisphere that can’t be seen from Earth.
and since launchpad is in the north hemisphere, Moon has to be at the south part of its orbit
Wallis and Gromit would be a partial substitute, but the boomers are still around.
https://www.ign.com/articles/2015/08/05/nasa-releases-a-gif-...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo