Due to a power issue, it looks like the lander may now no longer have sufficient fuel to make a controlled landing on the moon. This was the lander that was set to carry human remains to the moon despite objections from the Navajo nation. Hopefully, this discourages any future attempts at such a stunt, since instead of a permanent mausoleum your ashes may instead be stranded in orbit or scattered amongst the moon dust if the thing crashes.
The moon belongs to everyone; we should resist those who want to turn the cosmos into the playground of the rich. There is no scientific or public value in erecting such a mausoleum with public funds just because a few (presently dead) billionaires thought it would be neat. The fact they could afford to partially fund such a mission just goes to show that they had far too much money to spend in a productive or even recreational fashion: that money should have been expropriated and NASA or any other space program shouldn’t need to be servicing such macabre fantasies.
Of course, many cultures across the world have had and continue to have a reverence for the moon along with the earth itself, and turning it into a graveyard for the fanciful rich should be generally offensive.
making use
weasel language. Of course we should allow scientific exploration of the moon. We should not allow private commodification of the moon. You conflate the two like a weasel. There is no utility in allowing rich creeps to dump their corpses on the moon, in fact it just interferes with scientific endeavors.
