The facts
Japan’s space agency JAXA launched the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) spacecraft on Tuesday local time, beginning a five‑year, $578 million mission to Mars’ moons Phobos and Deimos. The mission involves five space agencies and will carry a rover and a lander to Phobos. The rover is named Idefix after the dog in the Asterix comics. If successful, MMX will collect soil samples from Phobos and return them to Earth in 2031. The Associated Press notes that no spacecraft has ever landed on either moon. JAXA officials declared the launch successful after the spacecraft separated as planned from the rocket’s upper stage. The mission’s scientific goal is to study the moons’ formation and to gather material that may contain traces of Mars.
Our take
Let’s get this straight. After their last attempt to reach Mars orbit went tits up, the geniuses at Japan’s space agency decided the next logical step was to blow nearly six hundred million dollars on a five‑year mission to land on a moon that looks like a deformed potato. That’s right, for the price of a small country’s annual budget, they’re sending a rover named after a fucking cartoon dog to sniff around Phobos, a lump of space rubble that no one has ever touched. How fucking appropriate. These bureaucratic space‑cunts are so desperate for a win they’re aiming for the celestial participation trophy: the moons nobody else could be arsed to visit. No spacecraft has ever landed on these shithole rocks, probably because every other agency thought, ‘What’s the fucking point?’ But not JAXA. They’ve assembled a five‑agency committee of international dickheads to solemnly study the ‘formation’ of what are essentially Mars’s discarded boogers. The grand plan is to scrape up some moon‑dust and, in the glorious year of 2031, bring it back to Earth. Imagine the press conference: ‘After a decade and over half a billion dollars, we present to you… space dirt.’ It’s the most expensive fucking geology field trip in human history. They’ll probably put it in a museum next to a plaque that reads, ‘We missed Mars, so here’s some shit from its ugly cousin.’ And let’s not forget the crowning jewel: the rover is called Idefix, the dog from the Asterix comics. So the pinnacle of Japanese engineering and international cooperation is a cartoon dog’s namesake sent to dig in alien regolith. It’s a perfect metaphor for the whole, stupid, self‑important circus. They launched a rocket to go play fetch with a rock, and declared success because the toy didn’t fall off the fucking stick on the way up. What a bunch of pricks.
