The pink elephant here is that you have to try to be impressed by things like this. And try somewhat hard. It's a low quality picture of the Moon, the same body we had astronauts walking on and live-streaming footage from literally more than half a century ago. If we were coming from a background of zero, this would be amazing. But as we aren't it's really kind of a sad reminder that technological progress, or even stability, is not a given.

By contrast when one watches the Falcon Heavy land [1], it's enough to give you goosebumps. I've shown that video to quite a lot of people outside the space world, and the most common response has been "Is that real!?" Even look at the YouTube comments and it's suddenly enough to even turn the internet into a domain of hope and aspiration. The problem is almost nobody knows about that, let alone the major ongoing progress since, or the implications of things like Starship.

So I think, without much to be truly inspired by, people are (perhaps subconsciously) simply discounting the possibility of space going anywhere during their lifetimes. If Starship achieves even a fraction of its potential, I would expect views to change. Because that genuinely does create the possibility of an exciting sci-fi style future, as opposed to just trying to recreate the 60s.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbSwFU6tY1c

You're describing marketing, and marketing of an idea is important - I agree.

However, you also need to have a population that cares about science, engineering, exploration, etc. I don't believe what gets people into engineering and science is because of how engineering and science are marketed. It certainly doesn't harm anything by marketing it, my opinion is that it is a small component of the overall picture.

>I don't think pretty pictures are going to sway public opinion all that much.

James Webb Space Telescope?

Personally, I'm not impressed by SLS or Orion, but that's because the whole project is pork and bull and not worth the money, time, and other irreplacable resources spent.

720p pictures aren’t swaying public opinion no.

But an 8k multi-cam livestream of the whole thing would have had people glued to their screens.

Would it? I don't personally know anyone who has an 8k display, and I don't know that many people who knew about the SLS launch attempt last week until after it happened

I'll admit up front it isn't the same thing, but go back and watch the video of Musk's car floating in orbit after the Falcon Heavy first launch. It's still impressive as hell to rewatch because its well lit and high quality