Unfortunately all the national space agencies seem to suffer from this. Both NASA and ESA also seem to think that people are tuning in to watch the smarmy politician talk rather than the robot making its way to space/landing on another body.

Had the same issue with JWST for example.

I can imagine that this is a HN-bubble thing. Most people would probably get bored from just seeing some live footage.

Nope. Same reaction from a wide variety of people including my wife who's not in tech and doesn't know what HN or YCombinator are. She was like "let the team speak already!"

You wife probably a highly educated person sharing similar views in life like you

So what you're saying is you'd need to be an uneducated imbecile to prefer politicians speaking to live space footage.

I think you're selling uneducated imbeciles short; surely even they prefer the space footage. Only the politicians doing the speaking prefer themselves.

That is condescending nonsense. Pretty much everybody would prefer to see rocks from outer space than hearing politicians congratulating themselves and the unity of our country.

Yeah it's more likely this is a case of wants of decision makers being prioritized over wants of the audience. This event is an avalanche of prestige. Of course politicians want to soak it up.

SpaceX livestreams didn't get super popular for having a politician on them. They got popular for showing exactly what's happening with enthusiastic presenters narrating it.

Most people find speeches and politicians boring. They wanna see rockers flying, robots moving, etc.

“enthusiastic presenters narrating it.”

I seriously hate their narrators and all the cheering.

Last I heard, their narrators were regular SpaceX employees with day jobs. So somewhat understandable they have an emotional stake in mission success.

SpaceX livestream much more mundane things with tens of thousands of viewers

10s of thousands. That has to be some kind of record.

The first launch of SpaceX's Crew Dragon with astronauts on-board holds the record for the most concurrent internet viewers on a stream tracked by NASA at 10 million.

Of course if you drop the internet requirement, Apollo 11 still is by far the most live viewed at 600 million viewers.

That makes sense for Apollo 11. I expect that one won't be beat until we land people on Mars. I figured SpaceX had some much bigger viewerships than 10's of thousands. (I've watched several myself.) That number must have been on the more (now) regular things like vertical landing the same rocket for the Nth time! Thank you for the update.

Not at all! Although some of them will be people like me having it on the side monitor day dreaming while they write CRUD :)

That was very memorable- grainy photos projected on a wall while nasa admin (old white guy) briefed Biden? Jwst had a pretty well planned out program for first images including events and it just got crushed.

On the other hand, political speeches on such occasions go down as most remembered historically. The infamous quote "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." was obviously said by some politician! (or at least with non-technical motives)

They want to go down in the history books the way JFK's "we choose to go to the Moon" did without experiencing the "mind-blowing" event afterwards that made the speech historical.

Also, "we're going to the moon not because it's easy, but because it's hard"

The full version of that section is more amusing but forgotten

>> But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may as well ask: why climb the highest mountain? Why 35 years ago fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon {applause} We choose to go to the moon... {applause} We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard -- because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills -- because that challenge is one we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win. (And the others too)

(as spoken and delivered at Rice University in Houston, Texas, referencing the Rice-Texas American football rivalry, where Texas is a 10x larger university)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QXqlziZV63k&t=9m22s

https://www.jfklibrary.org/sites/default/files/archives/JFKP...

Congratulations to ISRO (and all of India) for doing not the thing that was easy, but the thing that was hard and valuable!

Here's the actual story about that quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Armstrong#First_Moon_walk

> The infamous quote "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

What makes the quote infamous rather than just famous?

Unless you were being sarcastic, it's because people don't know what the word infamous means and think it means "extremely famous".

No sarcasm, just wondering. Armstrong could have been cancelled or something. I might have missed the Two Minutes Hate [0] when he or lunar exploitation was on.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate

Could just be a misuse of infamous but could just as well be intended to refer to the fact that Man and Mankind mean the same. You need an article in front to transform "One small step for Man" into "One small step for a man" to refer to Neil himself stepping.

"One small step for a man" is what he actually said, I think, or so I've heard. Apparently the "a" was lost due to radio interference.

Wikipedia (see elsewhere for link) has good coverage of that. "A" was intended to be said, but when humans say lines like that it is common to miss a word here and there. There is no way to know for sure if he said it and the technology of the time didn't pick it up, or if he misstated his own quote.

It's like flammable and inflammable. They mean the same thing and nobody knows why we have different words for it.

At least, this is my head-canon.

Exactly! This has been my own head canon too since like decades! I was actually surprised to read in this thread that "infamous" is a negative interpretation of famous which seems like a revisionist and recent interpretation. The English language also evolves through the ages and so do the meanings and interpretations.

I think it is a sign of habitual cynicism that you assume "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." was said by a politician. I think people feel like they are defending themselves from being manipulated by not accepting anything on its face as sincere. Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.

I think the saying goes, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And knowing Freud, you know it's not just a cigar.

That's correct about Freud! I was referring to Magritte, who made the painting "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." By which he meant the image of the pipe was not actually not a pipe. Which means .. well I think you would have to read about it and I am not sure I am using the reference in the right way.

I believe Freud and the cigar is about our thoughts and impulses sometimes not having greater meaning in our subconscious. Magritte is about something different.

To his credit, Narendra Modi has increased ISRO's budget a lot. Many years they have received more than promised! So he kind of deserves to rake in the limelight.

It's also because these agencies are reliant of politicians and government institutions for funding. So there is a balance between "showing what the public actually cares about" and "keeping this guy happy so we can keep up funding / congressional support / etc."

I believe the chairman of the space agency also used the Prime Minister's mention of future projects to note it as confirmation that those projects will indeed happen i.e. be funded. That was pretty smart at @ 01:07:00 in the video.

So it's good to see it work both ways.

So many words about "success" - how about some goodies?!

(To be clear, I am happy for India, just think it could be presented better)

Right - they had a great camera running - let’s enjoy a few rolling frames of the same spot showing touchdown area and systems working

You can see the onboard camera view in the background sometimes. And the only truly hard thing about this is getting the political will for the funding, so.

Is it still updating? Was hard to tell. But just 30 seconds of that would be great

Actually not sure, the last image I caught didn't look particularly "landed".

> Why such a long political speech

ISRO is primary arm of the Department of Space which is headed by the Prime Minister. So in essence, the Prime Minister is the boss. It is not an independent federal agency like NASA.

If my understanding is correct, did the PM in his speech promise to fund a future mission to Saturn?

IIRC, he mentioned missions to the Sun, Venus and a manned space mission.

I really wish to see a lander mission to Venus. Doesn't look like anybody other than Russia has done it - that too nearly 40 years ago. The environment is so extreme that the technology - especially electronics - would have to be radically different. The data is also likely to be extremely interesting.

One of the probes from Pioneer Venus 2 (launched by NASA in 1978) briefly sent back data after impacting the surface of Venus. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Venus_Multiprobe

That's an interesting outcome! Thanks!

I am sorry I did not pay close attention to his speech. But in the subsequent speech, I think the ISRO chief did talk about a Venus Orbiter Mission.

Because the whole endeavor was financed in order for its success to be politically exploited.

They dont want us to see the little green UAPs that closely monitor what we are doing :-)

I absolutely agree that they should immediately release data & images for more technically inclined section. However the reason for speeches is entire nation is watching this event across all age group, most of them don't understand technical things, I would say even image of moon surface wont connect to most of them. Basically speeches is the way to connect & artists impression images. To give some example, people thing entire rocket goes to moon, one of the politician was wishing "passengers" on the spacecraft, reputed news channel claiming "breaking new" that there wont be delay in landing as if we can push breaks like in car or traffic on the way. So you get the point, to connect to masses they are speaking in language that everyone understand

The whole Prime Minister thing was bizarre to me .. He was like on the mission-control screen with his own panel .. it was just weird lol.. Even in the US where our presidents fancy themselves god's.. it still just had a weird perception from my point of view..

But I'm proud of the people that worked on and executed that mission for them. Obviously a moment of immense national pride, well deserved.