As a person born many years after the first moon landing, I always thought it was fucking ridiculous that we managed to put a machine on a celestial body thousands of miles away from our fucking planet. That puts our species’ relative IQ compared to other species at 100,000. Back in the Stone Age, our peak achievements were running a long time and throwing objects accurately and at high speed, which allowed us to pwn just about everybody else. Now we’re using chemistry and engineering to produce rockets that can move complex objects off the fucking planet to a spheroid object we can see in the sky. Like, what the actual fuck?

Due to sociopolitical issues, I have a fairly negative view of our species these days. But when you look at our technological achievements, you have to sit back and just stare in awe at what we’ve been able to accomplish. We’re homo sapiens, fuck you. Our closest relatives (chimps) are four times as strong as us, fuck them, we experiment on you to learn about ourselves. Elephants, dolphins, crows, and orangutans trail us in intelligence, LMAOROLF, keep playing with them mirrors we gave you. We are so fucking OP we domesticated cows so hard their anal gas is a threat to the fucking planet. We’ve genetically engineered dogs into the most prolific and diverse species on Earth, and other animals actively seek us out sometimes, because they’re like “holy shit, humans do magic, maybe they can get this weird plastic shit off my ass,” and we invented that plastic and put it there in the first place. We are the fucking bomb, for better or worse. Nothing compares to us. We are functionally gods, fuck you.

For many reasons, humans suck, fuck us. But god damn, you better fucking respect.

Suck it Russia

Fantastic achievement.

Nice to hear after seeing the disastrous landing by Russia.

Kudos to the entire team that made this possible.

Congrats to India/ISRO!

A wave of nervous excitement has gripped Indians in recent days as the scheduled descent approached. Temples and mosques held special prayers for a safe landing. On the banks of the River Ganges in Varanasi, Hindu monks bestowed blessings on the mission and blew conch shells.

At street parties on Wednesday evening, Indians celebrated the double triumph of being the first to land on the south pole and the fourth to land on the moon.

In the final few minutes before touchdown, the lander executed a complex manoeuvre, slowing down from 3,730 miles an hour to nearly zero and turning from a horizontal to a vertical position.

The right tilt and thrust at this moment were vital. If too much force was applied, the lander would have toppled. Too little force and it might have hit the lunar surface at the wrong place.

It was this end manoeuvre that went wrong in the final few minutes of India’s last moon mission in 2019, when the lander failed to change position and hurtled towards the surface during the final braking phase.

Well, I’ll be damned. I was super happy for India, but now I feel a bit of their pride too.

Congratulations all involved! Hell of a job. Well earned.

I hope they don’t fall off!

👍 India

Let’s fuckinggggggggggggg gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!! I just watched this live!!!

Moon first too!

This is cool. I like that we’re paying attention to the moon again. We should already have people living there.

Well done, India!!!

Hey they made it. I posted the article when it launched.

Congratilations to Indian scientists and engineers. To the hell with India PM sucking lavrov cock in Cape Town the same time.

Please go find the Russian crash site and take photos. So much wasted schadenfreude if we don’t get to actually see the mess.