The external shots seem to just be from the GoPro strapped to a solar panel. Didn't seen anything that looked like the shots from the Nikons onboard. Was hoping for a couple, but I know I'm just being greedy wanting all the pics
edit: exif data shows some are from a Nikon. I just want to see them all!!! My greedy line still plays
Maybe you’re being impatient, but I don’t think you’re being greedy. This is a publicly funded project. I’d say those photos belong in the public domain. Which they are.
Hah! Funny how everyone here seems to be thinking the same: They said something about "finally 4k moon rocket images" and the stuff we got in the news was like blurry 800x600 type with lots of JPEG artifacts and such.
Even the smallest resolution images I see in the link that the parent edited into their comment have better quality than what news outlets posted.
I want TIFFs that takes ages to download and I need to scroll around in/zoom out on!
They will be posted when they get them. Right now, NASA doesn't have them because they're still on the SD cards in the capsule (probably been copied to their PCDs too). There's not a lot of bandwidth to be pushing large RAW files. They have to share the bandwidth with all of the telemetry and comms. They sent some small files down just to make some PR announcements and tease what will be coming.
It is operating only when it can be pointed towards Earth, while also avoiding the Sun, which did not happen during the flyby.
The laser is on one side of Orion, and when that side is not oriented towards Earth for various reasons, the optical communications cannot be used.
For continuous communications, at least when there is no interposed body, like the Moon, multiple lasers located around Orion would be needed to ensure coverage. When by the far side of the Moon, a relay orbiting around the Moon would be needed.
Doesn't that require line of sight with limited receivers available? Maybe the current positioning is preventing it until the constellation changes. With the constellation that is the craft in respect to the two ground stations in a narrow patch of the US. I could not find anything about throughput rates except for the theoretical maximum but I also suspect that max is only in LEO.
i heard mention of 100 megabit. they downloaded 50GB of data the night after the flyby. they probably keep downloading as much as they can. and they still need to sift through all that to find the pictures worth publishing. they could do a data dump, but that's not interesting for the general public. the stuff is coming. slowly.
I was hoping that they used a medium format camera like Hasselblad or something for the larger pics... but no such luck. I guess weight might have been one factor.
Still, the pics are mind blowing. Out of this world, tbh
A 20.8 megapixel 5568 x 3712 pixels is not a shitty image. When we get to see those images, they will be much better than the GoPro images we're seeing
it was light gathering. the D5 they brought is a very old camera tech wise, but it was ideal for the low light photos of the eclipse. they also brought a Z9 for much higher resolution photos.
There is something uncanny about the bandwidth and quality of all the artifacts coming from this mission.
I've subsisted on photos from the Apollo missions and artistic renditions for so long that seeing the modern, high resolution real thing to be quite stirring in a way I didn't expect. It actually does make me believe that the future could be quite cool.
We haven't even seen the full quality images yet. They've commented that the live feed from the GoPro is a limited bandwidth because they have to share the bandwidth with running the capsule. The images from the Nikons onboard are just scaled down. My initial guess was from an export specifically to get an early dump to get everyone on the ground chomping at the bit something to see. They'll get the full images when the SD cards splash down. When those are released, I'm expecting quite a few OMG images
I wouldn't mind some raw files but I honestly don't think they'll be too strikingly different than these (make sure you're looking at the full 20 MP images which should be several MB, not the 2 MP previews at ~200 KB).
I don't know what the Lightroom* skillz of the astronauts are, but I would not be surprised if they were shooting RAW+JPEG and only processed the JPGs in Lightroom. They probably had presets to export to smaller images that was created months ago and loaded onto their PCDs. I'd imagine 4 humans in a tincan have more things to do than to be developing RAW images by digging out the details in the shadows, push the exposure and pull back the highlights, and then apply all of those settings to each sequence of images. They'll let the folks on the ground do that.
* The exif data has Adobe Lightroom Classic (Windows) metadata in it.
In that case with the metadata I wonder if the astronauts already sent the raw files over the laser link and the images were just processed by the ground staff for posting on the site.
> something uncanny about the bandwidth and quality of all the artifacts coming from this mission
Back in 2019, Robert Zubrin suggested using rovers "to do detailed photography of the [Moon] base area and its surroundings" to "ultimately form the basis of a virtual reality experience that will allow millions of members of the public to participate vicariously in the missions" [1].
On the other hand, maybe don't get your hopes up--I've only tried a few, but even the large MPG files don't seem to be "super high quality," but maybe they will meet your expectations.
I think perhaps you mean the far side of the moon. The "backside" of the moon implies a large graben stretching almost from pole to pole, and I have seen no evidence of such a geological formation in any photos.
It really is surprising being able to see the Moon isn't spherical. (Are those abberations?) It makes sene, given the moon isn't in hydrostatic equilibrium.
I have to admit, I've been an Artemis hater ($4 billion per launch lol) but the experience of watching people go back around the Moon has been incredibly inspiring, and it proves to me that maybe we can still do hard things
The US spends almost that much on net debt interest each day (~$3 billion/day[0]). Not that adding to the debt helps at all, but the old proverb about being penny wise and pound foolish seems relevant
The absolute cost isn't the problem, it's the value that we're getting from it. SLS and Artemis are both incredibly expensive and ramshackle programs, and regardless of how bad the rest of the USG might be in terms of their cost, or value, if you are a true space fan and a true American space fan, you should want this little corner of humanity to hold itself to a higher standard.
Acceptance of over costing and under delivering is exactly why the US is stuck with SpaceX as its prime space launch provider. It's only through the miracle of the vanity of billionaires that there's even a realistic second choice (Blue Origin) that might develop.
It's also this type of attitude that let's us be in a situation where we honestly don't know how well the heat shield will work on reentry (SLS launches are so expensive, and so slow to build and prep to launch, that we cannot fit in a uncrewed mission between 1 and 2 to test or validate fixes or models).
If Artemis as a program succeeds, it will be despite the incredible graft, pork, and ass covering, not because of it. I want Artemis to succeed because the achievement will be beautiful and amazing, and I want everyone to be safe and sound. I want Artemis to fail, to force a reckoning. I still believe that America has great things to offer to the world, but it's not going to be able to do that by muddling it's way through and cobbling together random pork filled programs into a vaguely inspiring shape.
The goals it to fly often - adding a SLS launch to 2027 and a second launch to 2028. This drops the cost-per-launch, which is mostly fixed. It redoes SLS to make it less expensive and more capable. It moves the lunar space station down to the surface of the moon.
And it's budgeted at $10B/3 years, which fits into NASA's budget.
Isaacman took the Artemis program and fixed it. The reckoning came, and it's looking good.
There's a lot of potential in the announced changes and what SLS/Artemis might be able to become. This shouldn't prevent us from being critical of what SLS/Artemis most definitely has been for the previous 10-15 years.
And don't be fooled about the SLS launch cadence. As recently as summer 2025, Artemis III was still a nominally a 2027 manned lunar landing (https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2025/08/18/nasa-begins-p...). It got moved to a 2028 manned lunar landing in early 2026, before being converted back to a 2027 manned test flight.
The plan for SLS also does nothing to make it more capable (though hopefully less expensive). The cancelled exploration upper stage is being replaced by Centaur V, which is a less powerful stage. Isaacman refuses (I think rightfully) to really pin down on if there a future for SLS past Artemis V. If Isaacman chooses to cancel SLS after Artemis V (which I think is a defensible course of action), then SLS would represent a ~17 year long program that cost at least 41 billion dollars that netted 5 mission launches.
And characterizing it as "moving the lunar space station down to the surface of the moon" is... kinda falling into the trap. Lunar Gateway was supposed to launch ~2028 (along with Artemis IV - from the era where Artemis III was the first lunar landing). Gateway was a gongshow, and was delayed, and now cancelled. And now the new plan says the habs (the part that people think as an actual base...) happens in Phase 3 starting in 2033. The sort term elements they are trying to reuse from gateway into near term (think ~4 years) base projects are very "ancillary".
It remains unclear if NASA will infact be able to up the launch cadence of SLS to meet the double 2028 launch requirement. While it was clear that Gateway made... very limited sense for great expense, and the new plan is certainly ambitious with what I think is a stronger value proposition, it's also basically exactly as pie in the sky as gateway back in 2019.
The fact that I am doubting NASA's ability to execute now, is the very cost of SLS (and friends).
> then SLS would represent a ~17 year long program that cost at least 41 billion dollars that netted 5 mission launches
SLS will never be worth it. But I'd discount from that price tag the continuity benefits of keeping the Shuttle folks around, and aerospace engineers employed, across the chasm years of the 2010s.
Yeah, it’d be really nice if we could somehow express the strategic capabilities maintained in these discussions. Because on the face of it, SLS looks terrible, but paying that much to maintain the national capability to make something like the shuttle and SRBs feels reasonable.
Kind of similar to farm subsidies and the strategic implications there.
> paying that much to maintain the national capability to make something like the shuttle and SRBs feels reasonable
It’s reasonable to pay something. I’m unconvinced $41bn is the correct amount.
> Kind of similar to farm subsidies and the strategic implications there
There aren’t many. Countries in which farmers aren’t swing voters don’t have farm subsidies. I’ve been looking into buying some farmland and just collecting CRP on it, for example.
> SLS launches are so expensive, and so slow to build and prep to launch, that we cannot fit in a uncrewed mission between 1 and 2 to test or validate fixes or models
If they’d wanted to they could have launched an empty Orion crew module into LEO on another, cheaper, rocket and tested re-entry. The crew module by itself is less than ten tonnes.
How would they get it up to the required reentry speed for it to be a valid test? They already know the heat shield works for reentry at LEO speeds. That's not where the problems occur.
For the last 20 years NASA has intentionally run their Commercial Crew Program, which has the stated goal of developing/fostering/funding the development of commercial providers for launch vehicles.
They, by plan they explicitly laid out and implemented, decided to rely on American commercial providers. And that's what they got. And in doing so, the program ended up producing the most prolific/successful launch vehicle in history.
>> It's only through the miracle of the vanity of billionaires that there's even a realistic second choice (Blue Origin) that might develop
Yes, this is another company which the NASA commercial program explicitly funded in order to get them to develop another launch vehicle.
SpaceX is an amazing success story, both as a commercial story, and as a story of government-industry cooperation. NASA should be proud and commended for fostering SpaceX.
The question is why does SpaceX stand alone? Why did ULA stagnate? Why can't NG make SRBs that don't have nozzles that fall off? Why can't Betchel build a launch tower on time? What is it about government contracts in these other areas that led to all of this under performance?
The US benefits by having SpaceX around. It would benefit even better by having many SpaceXs around.
Oh, and also I believe it's generally understood that NASA provided very little funding for New Glenn. They gave BO a lot of money for HLS, but that's relatively recent (2023). New Glenn has been in the works since 2013 and was mostly bankrolled by Bezos, with some USAF/DoD money kicked in.
100%, and something that is underappreciated and often taken for granted nowadays, especially on our little forum here.
>>> It would benefit even better by having many SpaceXs around.
That made me chuckle, sounded to me a bit like "our house would benefit from having a few cats around". Perhaps the reason why there aren't too many SpaceX-like companies around is that it's truly among the hardest companies to ever create.
If we're going to do public/private cooperation, we still need the whole competition thing.
If we don't have it, either we're subject to monopoly, or just a State owned company, at which point, why not just cut out the middlemen and go full Nationalized?
ULA is the old guard made from Lockheed and Boeing. SpaceX is the snappy upstart moving fast and breaking things. Having the freedom to fail with experiments is a totally different methodology from any failure seen as very bad. SpaceX has never been involved in loss of life. If they ever have that happen, I'd imagine they'd be forced to stop moving as fast and quit breaking things.
Big space stagnated because they could. Their friends in Congress directed them lots of money and lots of political cover, and they both profited handsomely. Why would they change? They never had so, and I might argue that they still don't. Cost-plus contracts, years spent in expensive consulting and planning, all these mean they make money whether they go to space or not. Every five or six years, they trot out a "new" plan that purports to solve all the problems of the old plan, with exciting presentations and hired speakers, and the then-current administration sees a way to drum up political support, and the lobbyists and Congress see a way to make even more money and political favors.
And now it's over 50 years since we last landed on the Moon.
No no no no, I can't let that go. Sending astronauts around the moon has nothing to do with "knowing more about the moon". We don't need people up there to observe the moon. In fact, it's a lot easier and better to have sensors go there and automatically make measurements (e.g. pictures).
Now thinking about Mars, sending astronauts there is actually a net negative for science because it risks contaminating Mars.
We send astronauts there because it's cool, period. Science has nothing to do with it.
This FAQ from the NASA website seemed particularly intellectually dishonest:
>Why do we need astronauts to view the Moon when we have robotic observers? Human eyes and brains are highly sensitive to subtle changes in color, texture, and other surface characteristics. Having astronaut eyes observe the lunar surface directly, in combination with the context of all the advances that scientists have made about the Moon over the last several decades, may uncover new discoveries and a more nuanced appreciation for the features on the surface of the Moon.
Also we spend that much every 4 days we're in Iran, and that's only ONE of our neo-colonialist irons in the fire, as it were.
If you want to make the US financially solvent, cut defense. Defense LAPS every other budget category. Whether you want to take the conservative position on why that is (our allies freeload on our defense spending) or the Progressive one (the U.S. is an empire in decline and every major empire through history has spent vast sums to maintain itself why would the U.S. be different) doesn't change the fact that our military budgets exceed over a dozen other nations' combined, the vast majority of whom are allies.
Note there would be no veterans benefits and services without a military, so effectively the total for defense is 412 PLUS 184 = $596B, more than anything except SS.
Also note that most people consider social security to be an entirely different kind of government spending than anything else in that list.
No, if the US had no military the majority of veterans benefits and services money would still need to be spent (its mostly healthcare) it would just be bucketed under SS and Medicare/Medicaid then.
Also, without a military the US would not be even 1/3rd as wealthy as it is today, given its military created the global order that secured the last 80 years of the global economic system, shipping lanes and USD dominance. You can argue over specific wars/missions being dumb, but to pretend the overall ROI on that dominance enabling 80 years of relatively peaceful global trade hasn’t been positive is to be intellectually dishonest.
The world is currently teetering on a global economic crisis over just ONE shipping lane not being fully open for a few weeks. Read more history and you’ll see this used to be the norm.
I avoided commenting on the ROI associated with defense spending, deliberately.
Veterans get SS too, so no, costs associated with veterans wouldn't shift to SS. It is fair to suggest that the health care costs of uninjured, untraumatized veterans would just show up under Medicaid/Medicare. I don't know what percentage of veterans health care costs (not health care visits) fit in that category, versus "stuff that wouldn't be an issue if they hadn't been in the military".
People can have motivations for wanting to cut back Social Security other than "they hate working Americans". I would prefer commenters make more of an effort to understand their opponents' perspective rather than painting them in the worst light possible.
"Please note: Values displayed are outlays, which is money that is actually paid out by the government. Other sources, such as USAspending, may display spending as obligations, which is money that is promised to be paid, but may not yet be delivered."
The Biden administration's FY2025 defense budget request was $850 billion for the DoD, with the total national security budget reaching over $895 billion. The FY2026 proposal submitted by the Trump admin is 1.5 trillion for DoD.
I think the common miscommunication here is that defense is the largest part of the US discretionary budget (about half overall), but that doesn't include those non-negotiable things like Social Security, Medicare, etc .
Ignoring the fact that we aren't using money for rocket fuel (that is people are benefitting from us spending that money) the potential upside is immense. There are a time of resources available in the asteroids and a moon base makes mining those resources easier and cheaper.
The longer term value of having moon outposts for observation, mining, etc. will pay off massively.
This is way bigger than just putting people on the moon or hubris. It's the prerequisite for everything we've also said about Mars. Elon just muddied the waters so much that people are so negative about anything else.
I listened to pretty much the entire fly by yesterday, and I was imagining how I would have spent my time at the windows with a camera. Listening to the comms made me think of that episode from From The Earth to the Moon where they take the astronauts out and give them geology lessons so they could be more productive with their descriptions.
I was also very curious of their descriptions during the eclipse where the Earth shine was lighting up the dark side of the moon to such a surreal look they couldn't really describe it. They were even commenting that they didn't feel the photos being taken were doing it justice either.
I also was wondering if they will make any modifications to the capsule since covering a window to block the Earth shine caused concern on the ground from some of the readings they were getting. Assuming it was overheating as they redirected air flow to the window. Then again, the following missions won't be so concerned with a single fly by so probably not something they'll address.
If I had any doubt about crewed missions, this Artemis moon flyby is extinguishing them.
Hearing the crew discussing observations with Mission Control, moving cameras around, describing what they see, reacting to events and to curiosity and changing what they’re doing accordingly. And obviously just SO EXCITED to be doing it all. It was just amazing.
They’re still live streaming. It’s not as exciting anymore - ‘just’ on the way home now - but you can just put it on in the background and experience a tiny bit of what it’s like to be in the capsule. They’re exercising right now.
I've been trying to keep the 24 hour stream on in the background as often as possible. Some of it is silly but it just feels exciting to be able to partake in the experience remotely like this.
>that episode from From The Earth to the Moon where they take the astronauts out and give them geology lessons so they could be more productive with their descriptions.
My favorite episode of the series and I was thinking of it during Integrity's flyby.
If you stare at the picture, there's an illusion of the shadow growing and enveloping the moon further. At least for me. Quite neat. Might be something about the eyes focusing on the dark part of the photo?
I built a zoomable collection viewer for all NASA Artemis II + Apollo 8 gallery images at their full original resolutions—nearly 2 gigapixels across 104 images. Spanning 1968 Earthrise to 2026 Earthset:
It's interesting that the flights are not timed for when the moon is in the magnetosphere shadow. As far as I could gather it seems they're intentionally exposing astronauts to more radiation to test equipment (maybe with an eye to future Mars missions?). Hard to get hard details from all the press release fluffy
Maybe I'm an eternal optimist, but sounds to me like they actually tried to put themselves into space, made the assumption that anything visible past the moon must be further out and were left with "wait, I thought it was supposed to be red?"
Uninformed, but not ignorant and perhaps even interested. I hope your response started with "No, actually, even cooler: ..." and you made a space fan that day.
I'd be genuinely curious to see a list of the things they had heard of, since Artemis has been in the news constantly for a month. E.g. have they just not heard of anything (consume no news), or are they in some news silo that excludes rockets, and if so what other things does it include? We may be missing something important that we've never heard of!
It just goes to show how normal space flight is compared to the Apollo era. All the way up to Apollo 11, people stopped what they were doing to watch. Apollo 13 grabbed some attention with the near disaster. The first Shuttle missions were watched, but people quickly lost interest. Even this going back to the moon was nothing new to the average person. When people claim it was all over the news seems like someone in an echo chamber. It might have been in your news feeds, but I doubt it was as predominate as you might think. If your "news" feed is nothing but influencers and celebrities, then NASA probably never even interrupts their feeds
There needs to be a word for that feeling of dread you get when reminded of just how feeble and weak the average human mind is, and how tenuous of a grasp on reality most people have.
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They said they were able to see a few planets during the eclipse. I know they definitely saw Mars as they were discussing the red color. They saw Venus which was visible in the live feed from the GoPro on the solar panel. IIRC, they were thinking Saturn would have been visible. My guess is the really bright dots are planets. It looks like some horrendous compression artifacts along with some possible lens distortion. My exif app says no exif data in the jpg you linked. Did you come to that image from their website that provides the EXIF to see what lens it was? Nothing looks like a galaxy in the image to me.
Edit: After further looking and some zooming into it, I'd say the bright dot closest to the moon is Venus, the next one has a red tint making it Mars, and then the last one would be Saturn with the rings. There might be a couple of galaxies in the upper left corner. I was quick to dismiss and blame on compression. The benefits of not having to shoot through atmosphere. I wouldn't have expected that detail in what I'm assuming to be a fairly fast exposure
Appreciate the detailed response. I think it would be a borderline miraculous photo if they are planets aligned in that way. Zooming they look more like artifacts or galaxies to me. I spend a good amount of time looking at planets from earth through binoculars and even with an atmosphere they resolve better than that.
I'm pretty sure I'm right about the planets. The planets are aligned that way. If you're experienced looking at them with binocs, you should be aware of that. The line the planets are on is known as the ecliptic.
I started rewatching For All Mankind a week or so before the Artemis II launch, so it's been pretty wild to watch an alt-history about people going to and settling on the Moon and Mars, and then to see real life people just starting to return to the Moon at the same time.
I imagine it depends a lot on your outlook. Someone could see the system as the thing that made the experience possible in the first place, and feel a lot of gratitude and a sense of possibility as a result.
We already have images from the far side of the moon since the 2009's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter [1].
In theory, LRO is currently flying at lower orbit than Artemis I mission [2]. Shouldn't the LRO images be better? Maybe NASA has not disclosed all images?
Honest question: why the hype with these pictures?
Zoomed into several of the lunar surface photos and noticed some of the very small impact craters are in a regularly spaced straight line.
Looks to me as if a meteorite came in at a shallow angle and basically skipped across the surface. Leaving dimpled craters as it bounced. Looks very similar to rocks skipping on a pond. Am I correct or is there another explanation for these?
A single “rubble pile” asteroid will easily break apart when nearing a celestial body, once it crosses the Roche limit. It will break apart into a perfectly straight line too (at least the impact craters will.) I would guess most of the straight-line series of craters are all caused by something like this.
Tangentially related, but there's a bunch of extremely high-resolution panorama images from the Apollo landings available at this site, for anyone who enjoys this sort of thing. https://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollopanoramas/
Was there any writeup on the actual goals and accomplishments of this mission. I'm sure there is some very valuable scientif8c data and observations done, but what exactly are those (other than 'wow' media)?
Getting the public excited also has its place. Also sending humans so far from earth has enough challenges to make it worthwile. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_II) has the experiments listed.
I see that they travelled 1.6% more distance compared to a tech that was used 56 years ago. If NASA is really excited about this, I think they are having a low news day. I'm sure they must be other goals.
The gravitational pull of the moon lifts up the ocean to cause tides. Well the Earth's gravitational pull is so strong on the moon that the heavier side of the moon always faces the Earth. This is called tidal locking. So the only way to ever see the far side of the moon is to go there. Humans have gone there before, but almost always during an Earth "full moon", which means the far side is unlit. We do have full images of the far side of the moon from remote probes, but the 21% of the far side that was lit had human eyes on it for the first time ever.
Moons get tidally locked because they're very close to their planet, so the planet's gravity is by far the strongest influence.
The planets have much more complicated gravitational interactions because in addition to the Sun's gravity, they influence each other. So you end up with things like orbital resonances instead.
A planet that's close to its star and far from other strong gravitational influences will tidally lock to the star.
wikipedia's explanation works for uniform bodies, yours doesn't. And since tidal bulges seem to be symmetric, there's no away to explain away the deformation as making one side heavier
It's because Earth pulls on the bulge in the Moon created by Earth's gravity.
It has to do with the tides. Except in this case it isn't ocean tides - it's lunar tides. Just as the Moon's gravity creates a bulge in Earth's oceans, Earth's gravity creates a bulge in the material that makes up the moon.
If Earth and the Moon didn't rotate, the bulges would "point" directly at the other body. But with rotation, the tidal bulge is a little bit offset in the direction of rotation. And the Moon used to rotate.
That offset creates a torque. Earth's gravity tries to pull the bulge into perfect alignment. Over time this slows the rotation of the moon until it stopped rotating at all.
(Technically the Moon does rotate, but it does so at the same rate that it orbits Earth. So it doesn't rotate from our perspective.)
To add: this happens because the parts of the Moon that are closer to the Earth are pulled in more by Earth's gravity, compared to the ones further away.
Consider what it'd mean if there were parts of the Earth that could not be seen from the moon, it would also mean those locations could never themselves see the moon.
Ignoring the orbital period implications, I think it'd be bigger news if either US or Europe, or Asia couldn't ever actually see the moon.
It may one day be, far in the future, although that's predicted to be so far off that Sol might have become a red giant by then, making the issue moot.
But only Luna is tidally locked at the moment. Terra is not, and its rotation still has a long way to slow down before it becomes so.
If you are on the near side of the moon[1], you will always see Earth see around Earth as it rotates and as the moon orbits it. You will also see it in different phases, like how we see lunar phases from Earth. If you are on the far side of the moon, you will not see Earth at all as you will always be facing away from it.
[1] The Earth does move in the moon's sky a bit. If you are on the near side but getting close to the far side, the Earth will be below the horizon sometimes.
I believe it's caused by even the slightest imbalance in mass. Because the moon is so close to Earth, the imbalance causes gravity to be slightly stronger on one side than the other side. Eventually, that leads to no rotation at all.
I imagine most bodies rotating around a second object will eventually lose their angular velocity.
I wish they would’ve flown by and taken a picture of the Apollo 11 lunar landing site.
I think it would’ve been a super cool throwback to the history of lunar exploration; maybe it’s just me but I think it would’ve been really exciting. It would basically be the like visiting a UNESCO (moon?) heritage site.
They would have needed a hell of a lot more camera for that, right? Even the best DSLR with the best lens is going to have a lot of trouble resolving something that small at over 4000 miles.
That's a detail a lot of people miss. Apollo missions orbited at ~150 miles above the moon while Artemis II fly-by was much further away. That was by design to specifically give them the wider view to see things missed by Apollo's closer orbits
The main point of the voyage was to see the far side, and also to report on previously-unseen portions of the Moon that hadn't really had human coverage in the past.
Since all the Apollo landings were on the near-side of the Moon, they were in fact less accessible to this crew.
My disappointment lay chiefly in their L.O.S. periods, because in 2026 why does Earth lack operational satellites that could relay comms from the other side? Or a space optical/radio telescope that would benefit massively from the darkness and shielding of a Moon-sized body? No humans necessary for that. Of course, you couldn't power such a craft with solar power...
> because in 2026 why does Earth lack operational satellites that could relay comms from the other side?
The moon is not an easy body to orbit. Keeping something in orbit around the moon requires a lot of station keeping which requires a lot of fuel. Once that fuel runs out, the orbit will not be stable. People have talked about trying an Earth-Moon L2 point, but that's not as stable as Sun-Earth L2 where things like JWST are located.
Mostly because there's been very little US activity on the Moon to justify it. Orbiting the Moon can also be a pain - its gravitational field is "lumpy" - but you can manage that by making your orbit bigger (higher). See this paper if you're interested in details as they pertain to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been flying since 2009: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20070035736/downloads/20...
China has a lunar comm relay IIRC, to support some surface operations on the far side.
That one pic with Solar eclipse is amazing. Especially with the visible stars in the background. it's rare to see a pic from a man missioned with stars being visible in the background.
Tangentially, did the NASA website move to WordPress? I thought it was Drupal, the Drupal official website even had a case study about nasa.gov. I see wp-content links on the site and there is no Drupal behaviors in JavaScript and I didn't notice any of the usual drupal classes in the source
Why is normal in quotes? Do you mean visible light vs filtered monochrome with false-color outputs or infrared/radio/x-ray like some other telescopes use? Would that be the abnormal you are referring? The Apollo images were taken with Hasselblad film cameras that were "normal" cameras[0].
I am curious to see how being namedropped by NASA affects the sales of these cameras. It's probably not as much as I am imagining but still not an insignificant number. Probably less than Nutella that accidentally flew off the shelf live on stream straight across the shot
Some of these photos look so "fake". Maybe because of how they are lit or the lack of atmospheric distortion, they don't quite looks real (I'm not disputing that they are authentic, they just look a bit weird)
Yeah, it is common for pictures in space to look like simplistic raytraced renderings because the lighting and shadows are so sharp, lacking atmospheric diffusion and scattering.
Its a classic feeling when seeing things there one not normally see. There's a whole conspiracy that the war in Ukraine is fake, because video of combat looks weird compared to movies and video games.
It's a bit tricky to navigate between all the amazing photos NASA Artemis crew captured so I vibe coded (Codex) a simple site with full screen full res view and arrow navigation:
That's awesome. Since you asked for feedback, can you vibecode up a thumbnail view? Also I see a bunch more images on the NASA site. How are you pulling them?
I am really worried about their return entry. I got emotionally invested in the crew, meanwhile there have been voices saying Orion’s heat shield is made of garbagium and tested with undergrad level simplistic physics models.
Then I read about the NASA administrator being some sort of “charisma” bravado guy and the government pressures to get to the moon during Trump presidency.
How NASA safety standards are somehow 1/10 of the ones they impose on external private companies who would never be allowed to do crew launch with that kind of level of risk.
I think I am just going to forget about it for now until I hear about hopefully safe return in mainstream news so I don’t end up with heart attack. They really should take mainly single people without families on these missions imo.
I cannot fathom what it must be like to witness this in-person. The pictures are spectacular but to spend time experiencing it outside the window in your proximity must be overwhelming in the most incredible way.
Surpassing Apollo 13’s distance record after so many decades is kind of wild.
It really shows how infrequent deep-space human missions have been, despite all the progress in other areas.
This is the best shot, as it is shown with the perspective of a person inside the space ship. All the other ones are just high res versions of the Moon pics we've all seen before.
At one point, they were telling NASA that they didn't have the right words or enough superlatives. I kept waiting for them to quote Contact with "should have sent a poet"
This is a new vehicle, and this is a test flight to work out the kinks before attempting a landing. It's exactly the same way Apollo was done. Go read about Apollo 8.
They're "going to the moon" in the same way that going to the drive-through is "going to mcdonalds". I think NASA is still as good as it was, they just don't have unlimited "beat the soviets" budget anymore
> No, the Artemis II mission will not land on the moon. It is a 10-day crewed, deep-space flyby test flight designed to verify spacecraft systems before future landing missions. The crew will circle the moon before returning to Earth, serving as a critical step toward landing later in the decade.
Don't get mad at me. My question is, why did we have to send this mission? This is not the first time we are going to land on the moon, so why this prerequisite?
Are full size/larger images available somewhere? 1920x1280px seems low.
Edit: Found 'em: https://images.nasa.gov/search?page=1&media=image&yearStart=...
Try this: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/
I don’t see TIFFs, so I assume the originals were JPEG.
If anything the originals would be RAW files.
Maybe they were RAW + JPEG. That's fairly common.
Could be, we see TIFFs, after they get back.
I believe those are taken largely with Nikon z9?
D5. Old Skool.
I think they are specially modified for use in space.
Both
Z9 - last minute flight add (https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/55194523579/)
D5 - two of them (https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/55194768276/)
GoPro HERO4 - Some (4?) on the solar (https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/55193566011/)
iPhone 17 Pro Max - Although, one failed the first day (https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/55193337359/)
The external shots seem to just be from the GoPro strapped to a solar panel. Didn't seen anything that looked like the shots from the Nikons onboard. Was hoping for a couple, but I know I'm just being greedy wanting all the pics
edit: exif data shows some are from a Nikon. I just want to see them all!!! My greedy line still plays
Maybe you’re being impatient, but I don’t think you’re being greedy. This is a publicly funded project. I’d say those photos belong in the public domain. Which they are.
Hah! Funny how everyone here seems to be thinking the same: They said something about "finally 4k moon rocket images" and the stuff we got in the news was like blurry 800x600 type with lots of JPEG artifacts and such.
Even the smallest resolution images I see in the link that the parent edited into their comment have better quality than what news outlets posted.
I want TIFFs that takes ages to download and I need to scroll around in/zoom out on!
They will be posted when they get them. Right now, NASA doesn't have them because they're still on the SD cards in the capsule (probably been copied to their PCDs too). There's not a lot of bandwidth to be pushing large RAW files. They have to share the bandwidth with all of the telemetry and comms. They sent some small files down just to make some PR announcements and tease what will be coming.
There's supposed to be a 260 megabit link: https://www.nasa.gov/goddard/esc/o2o/
Maybe it's not operating as described yet?
It is operating only when it can be pointed towards Earth, while also avoiding the Sun, which did not happen during the flyby.
The laser is on one side of Orion, and when that side is not oriented towards Earth for various reasons, the optical communications cannot be used.
For continuous communications, at least when there is no interposed body, like the Moon, multiple lasers located around Orion would be needed to ensure coverage. When by the far side of the Moon, a relay orbiting around the Moon would be needed.
Doesn't that require line of sight with limited receivers available? Maybe the current positioning is preventing it until the constellation changes. With the constellation that is the craft in respect to the two ground stations in a narrow patch of the US. I could not find anything about throughput rates except for the theoretical maximum but I also suspect that max is only in LEO.
i heard mention of 100 megabit. they downloaded 50GB of data the night after the flyby. they probably keep downloading as much as they can. and they still need to sift through all that to find the pictures worth publishing. they could do a data dump, but that's not interesting for the general public. the stuff is coming. slowly.
Coming soon to the moon near you: starlink!
It looks like changing the `~large` in the image filename to `~orig` gets you the full size versions.
I was hoping that they used a medium format camera like Hasselblad or something for the larger pics... but no such luck. I guess weight might have been one factor.
Still, the pics are mind blowing. Out of this world, tbh
A 20.8 megapixel 5568 x 3712 pixels is not a shitty image. When we get to see those images, they will be much better than the GoPro images we're seeing
Some nice images with this resolution of the far side of the Moon have already been posted.
They also have a 46 megapixel Nikon Z9 which they don't appear to have used for some odd reason...
I found one taken with Z9: https://images.nasa.gov/details/art002e009301
There are some very bright noise pixels on the dark area, which is different from the noise in similar photos taken with D5 (much darker and uniform).
A common error made with "pixel peeping" is to zoom to 1:1, which shows a smaller physical sensor area with higher megapixel cameras.
The trick is to zoom to the same percentage zoom and compare side-by-side.
I did spot a few "hot" pixels visible on the Moon, but those are easily fixed in post.
it was light gathering. the D5 they brought is a very old camera tech wise, but it was ideal for the low light photos of the eclipse. they also brought a Z9 for much higher resolution photos.
And my screensaver folder grows larger...
To be fair they "only" have a 20 Mbps laser uplink from the capsule to Earth, and that's shared between all the systems and uploading images/video.
260Mbps? https://www.nasa.gov/goddard/esc/o2o/
"Uplink" means Earth to spacecraft. Spacecraft to Earth is downlink.
You can view them in full resolution here: https://zoomhub.net/showcase/photography/nasa
Should eventually be on pds atlas I hope. https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/
Thanks, these make some kickass ultrawide wallpapers.
thank you
There is something uncanny about the bandwidth and quality of all the artifacts coming from this mission.
I've subsisted on photos from the Apollo missions and artistic renditions for so long that seeing the modern, high resolution real thing to be quite stirring in a way I didn't expect. It actually does make me believe that the future could be quite cool.
We haven't even seen the full quality images yet. They've commented that the live feed from the GoPro is a limited bandwidth because they have to share the bandwidth with running the capsule. The images from the Nikons onboard are just scaled down. My initial guess was from an export specifically to get an early dump to get everyone on the ground chomping at the bit something to see. They'll get the full images when the SD cards splash down. When those are released, I'm expecting quite a few OMG images
I wouldn't mind some raw files but I honestly don't think they'll be too strikingly different than these (make sure you're looking at the full 20 MP images which should be several MB, not the 2 MP previews at ~200 KB).
I don't know what the Lightroom* skillz of the astronauts are, but I would not be surprised if they were shooting RAW+JPEG and only processed the JPGs in Lightroom. They probably had presets to export to smaller images that was created months ago and loaded onto their PCDs. I'd imagine 4 humans in a tincan have more things to do than to be developing RAW images by digging out the details in the shadows, push the exposure and pull back the highlights, and then apply all of those settings to each sequence of images. They'll let the folks on the ground do that.
* The exif data has Adobe Lightroom Classic (Windows) metadata in it.
In that case with the metadata I wonder if the astronauts already sent the raw files over the laser link and the images were just processed by the ground staff for posting on the site.
The raw files have a ton more dynamic range, however. You could pull out a lot more detail in shadows.
That’s really exciting!
> something uncanny about the bandwidth and quality of all the artifacts coming from this mission
Back in 2019, Robert Zubrin suggested using rovers "to do detailed photography of the [Moon] base area and its surroundings" to "ultimately form the basis of a virtual reality experience that will allow millions of members of the public to participate vicariously in the missions" [1].
[1] https://spacenews.com/op-ed-lunar-gateway-or-moon-direct/
I cannot wait until we get 4k video of people walking on the surface, kicking up dust.
The existing 16mm film from Apollo is roughly equivalent to 2K, and you can see dust kicked up pretty nicely!
Where can we see that in high quality? Generally if I look at YouTube it's compressed and poor quality.
Perhaps try the clips available at the "Video and 16-mm Galleries" from the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal:
https://apollojournals.org/alsj/alsj-video.html
On the other hand, maybe don't get your hopes up--I've only tried a few, but even the large MPG files don't seem to be "super high quality," but maybe they will meet your expectations.
They never shot 16mm film on the moon. They had weird tv cameras and took photos in 35mm.
Sure they did. Here’s some footage:
https://youtu.be/7o3Oi9JWsyM
Oh that's what the silent footage was! So sorry!
I agree 100%. Seeing the picture of the backside of the moon with the earth in view really drove home that the moon really is just a large rock.
> backside of the moon
I think perhaps you mean the far side of the moon. The "backside" of the moon implies a large graben stretching almost from pole to pole, and I have seen no evidence of such a geological formation in any photos.
thanks, I audibly laughed
> the moon really is just a large rock
It really is surprising being able to see the Moon isn't spherical. (Are those abberations?) It makes sene, given the moon isn't in hydrostatic equilibrium.
Yeah, I think we got so accustomed to that analog look that seeing them like this feels almost like viewing a World War I photo in full color and 4K.
What? The Apollo photos were with extremely high quality cameras on film. They're incredibly high resolution.
Space monkeys, moon pirates, and a Starbucks in the moon mall.
I have to admit, I've been an Artemis hater ($4 billion per launch lol) but the experience of watching people go back around the Moon has been incredibly inspiring, and it proves to me that maybe we can still do hard things
> $4 billion per launch lol
The US spends almost that much on net debt interest each day (~$3 billion/day[0]). Not that adding to the debt helps at all, but the old proverb about being penny wise and pound foolish seems relevant
0. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61951
The absolute cost isn't the problem, it's the value that we're getting from it. SLS and Artemis are both incredibly expensive and ramshackle programs, and regardless of how bad the rest of the USG might be in terms of their cost, or value, if you are a true space fan and a true American space fan, you should want this little corner of humanity to hold itself to a higher standard.
Acceptance of over costing and under delivering is exactly why the US is stuck with SpaceX as its prime space launch provider. It's only through the miracle of the vanity of billionaires that there's even a realistic second choice (Blue Origin) that might develop.
It's also this type of attitude that let's us be in a situation where we honestly don't know how well the heat shield will work on reentry (SLS launches are so expensive, and so slow to build and prep to launch, that we cannot fit in a uncrewed mission between 1 and 2 to test or validate fixes or models).
If Artemis as a program succeeds, it will be despite the incredible graft, pork, and ass covering, not because of it. I want Artemis to succeed because the achievement will be beautiful and amazing, and I want everyone to be safe and sound. I want Artemis to fail, to force a reckoning. I still believe that America has great things to offer to the world, but it's not going to be able to do that by muddling it's way through and cobbling together random pork filled programs into a vaguely inspiring shape.
This is about to change.
New NASA administrator Isaacman has redone the Artemis program. The changes were announced at the Ignition event a few weeks ago:
https://www.nasa.gov/ignition/
If you read one thing, read the sides on building the moon base:
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/2-building-t...
The goals it to fly often - adding a SLS launch to 2027 and a second launch to 2028. This drops the cost-per-launch, which is mostly fixed. It redoes SLS to make it less expensive and more capable. It moves the lunar space station down to the surface of the moon.
And it's budgeted at $10B/3 years, which fits into NASA's budget.
Isaacman took the Artemis program and fixed it. The reckoning came, and it's looking good.
There's a lot of potential in the announced changes and what SLS/Artemis might be able to become. This shouldn't prevent us from being critical of what SLS/Artemis most definitely has been for the previous 10-15 years.
And don't be fooled about the SLS launch cadence. As recently as summer 2025, Artemis III was still a nominally a 2027 manned lunar landing (https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2025/08/18/nasa-begins-p...). It got moved to a 2028 manned lunar landing in early 2026, before being converted back to a 2027 manned test flight.
The plan for SLS also does nothing to make it more capable (though hopefully less expensive). The cancelled exploration upper stage is being replaced by Centaur V, which is a less powerful stage. Isaacman refuses (I think rightfully) to really pin down on if there a future for SLS past Artemis V. If Isaacman chooses to cancel SLS after Artemis V (which I think is a defensible course of action), then SLS would represent a ~17 year long program that cost at least 41 billion dollars that netted 5 mission launches.
And characterizing it as "moving the lunar space station down to the surface of the moon" is... kinda falling into the trap. Lunar Gateway was supposed to launch ~2028 (along with Artemis IV - from the era where Artemis III was the first lunar landing). Gateway was a gongshow, and was delayed, and now cancelled. And now the new plan says the habs (the part that people think as an actual base...) happens in Phase 3 starting in 2033. The sort term elements they are trying to reuse from gateway into near term (think ~4 years) base projects are very "ancillary".
It remains unclear if NASA will infact be able to up the launch cadence of SLS to meet the double 2028 launch requirement. While it was clear that Gateway made... very limited sense for great expense, and the new plan is certainly ambitious with what I think is a stronger value proposition, it's also basically exactly as pie in the sky as gateway back in 2019.
The fact that I am doubting NASA's ability to execute now, is the very cost of SLS (and friends).
> then SLS would represent a ~17 year long program that cost at least 41 billion dollars that netted 5 mission launches
SLS will never be worth it. But I'd discount from that price tag the continuity benefits of keeping the Shuttle folks around, and aerospace engineers employed, across the chasm years of the 2010s.
Yeah, it’d be really nice if we could somehow express the strategic capabilities maintained in these discussions. Because on the face of it, SLS looks terrible, but paying that much to maintain the national capability to make something like the shuttle and SRBs feels reasonable.
Kind of similar to farm subsidies and the strategic implications there.
> paying that much to maintain the national capability to make something like the shuttle and SRBs feels reasonable
It’s reasonable to pay something. I’m unconvinced $41bn is the correct amount.
> Kind of similar to farm subsidies and the strategic implications there
There aren’t many. Countries in which farmers aren’t swing voters don’t have farm subsidies. I’ve been looking into buying some farmland and just collecting CRP on it, for example.
Yeah, there should've been a "more" in front of "reasonable". There are probably other ways to maintain knowledge of how to make SRBs.
> SLS launches are so expensive, and so slow to build and prep to launch, that we cannot fit in a uncrewed mission between 1 and 2 to test or validate fixes or models
If they’d wanted to they could have launched an empty Orion crew module into LEO on another, cheaper, rocket and tested re-entry. The crew module by itself is less than ten tonnes.
How would they get it up to the required reentry speed for it to be a valid test? They already know the heat shield works for reentry at LEO speeds. That's not where the problems occur.
>> is exactly why the US is stuck with SpaceX
For the last 20 years NASA has intentionally run their Commercial Crew Program, which has the stated goal of developing/fostering/funding the development of commercial providers for launch vehicles.
They, by plan they explicitly laid out and implemented, decided to rely on American commercial providers. And that's what they got. And in doing so, the program ended up producing the most prolific/successful launch vehicle in history.
>> It's only through the miracle of the vanity of billionaires that there's even a realistic second choice (Blue Origin) that might develop
Yes, this is another company which the NASA commercial program explicitly funded in order to get them to develop another launch vehicle.
SpaceX is an amazing success story, both as a commercial story, and as a story of government-industry cooperation. NASA should be proud and commended for fostering SpaceX.
The question is why does SpaceX stand alone? Why did ULA stagnate? Why can't NG make SRBs that don't have nozzles that fall off? Why can't Betchel build a launch tower on time? What is it about government contracts in these other areas that led to all of this under performance?
The US benefits by having SpaceX around. It would benefit even better by having many SpaceXs around.
Oh, and also I believe it's generally understood that NASA provided very little funding for New Glenn. They gave BO a lot of money for HLS, but that's relatively recent (2023). New Glenn has been in the works since 2013 and was mostly bankrolled by Bezos, with some USAF/DoD money kicked in.
>>> SpaceX is an amazing success story
100%, and something that is underappreciated and often taken for granted nowadays, especially on our little forum here.
>>> It would benefit even better by having many SpaceXs around.
That made me chuckle, sounded to me a bit like "our house would benefit from having a few cats around". Perhaps the reason why there aren't too many SpaceX-like companies around is that it's truly among the hardest companies to ever create.
If we're going to do public/private cooperation, we still need the whole competition thing.
If we don't have it, either we're subject to monopoly, or just a State owned company, at which point, why not just cut out the middlemen and go full Nationalized?
Boeing and others do complete in that area.
> Why did ULA stagnate?
ULA is the old guard made from Lockheed and Boeing. SpaceX is the snappy upstart moving fast and breaking things. Having the freedom to fail with experiments is a totally different methodology from any failure seen as very bad. SpaceX has never been involved in loss of life. If they ever have that happen, I'd imagine they'd be forced to stop moving as fast and quit breaking things.
Big space stagnated because they could. Their friends in Congress directed them lots of money and lots of political cover, and they both profited handsomely. Why would they change? They never had so, and I might argue that they still don't. Cost-plus contracts, years spent in expensive consulting and planning, all these mean they make money whether they go to space or not. Every five or six years, they trot out a "new" plan that purports to solve all the problems of the old plan, with exciting presentations and hired speakers, and the then-current administration sees a way to drum up political support, and the lobbyists and Congress see a way to make even more money and political favors.
And now it's over 50 years since we last landed on the Moon.
> Why can't NG make SRBs that don't have nozzles that fall off?
To be fair, we just saw two of them work fine, with no nozzle fall-off-ages
Compared to the absolute baffling amount of money spent for military purposes, knowing more about the moon is well worth it.
No no no no, I can't let that go. Sending astronauts around the moon has nothing to do with "knowing more about the moon". We don't need people up there to observe the moon. In fact, it's a lot easier and better to have sensors go there and automatically make measurements (e.g. pictures).
Now thinking about Mars, sending astronauts there is actually a net negative for science because it risks contaminating Mars.
We send astronauts there because it's cool, period. Science has nothing to do with it.
This FAQ from the NASA website seemed particularly intellectually dishonest:
>Why do we need astronauts to view the Moon when we have robotic observers? Human eyes and brains are highly sensitive to subtle changes in color, texture, and other surface characteristics. Having astronaut eyes observe the lunar surface directly, in combination with the context of all the advances that scientists have made about the Moon over the last several decades, may uncover new discoveries and a more nuanced appreciation for the features on the surface of the Moon.
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/nasa-answers-your-most-pressin...
The word "may" does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
We spend more on debt interest than we spend on the military or anything really other than social security. That isn't a useful comparison anymore.
> The US spends almost that much on net debt interest each day
Spends, or accrues?
Same thing (for now, at least). The U.S. has only defaulted a handful of times, none that I'm aware of since 1971.
Also we spend that much every 4 days we're in Iran, and that's only ONE of our neo-colonialist irons in the fire, as it were.
If you want to make the US financially solvent, cut defense. Defense LAPS every other budget category. Whether you want to take the conservative position on why that is (our allies freeload on our defense spending) or the Progressive one (the U.S. is an empire in decline and every major empire through history has spent vast sums to maintain itself why would the U.S. be different) doesn't change the fact that our military budgets exceed over a dozen other nations' combined, the vast majority of whom are allies.
>Defense LAPS every other budget category.
I suppose it matters how you lump things, but for federal spending:
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...Note there would be no veterans benefits and services without a military, so effectively the total for defense is 412 PLUS 184 = $596B, more than anything except SS.
Also note that most people consider social security to be an entirely different kind of government spending than anything else in that list.
No, if the US had no military the majority of veterans benefits and services money would still need to be spent (its mostly healthcare) it would just be bucketed under SS and Medicare/Medicaid then.
Also, without a military the US would not be even 1/3rd as wealthy as it is today, given its military created the global order that secured the last 80 years of the global economic system, shipping lanes and USD dominance. You can argue over specific wars/missions being dumb, but to pretend the overall ROI on that dominance enabling 80 years of relatively peaceful global trade hasn’t been positive is to be intellectually dishonest.
The world is currently teetering on a global economic crisis over just ONE shipping lane not being fully open for a few weeks. Read more history and you’ll see this used to be the norm.
I avoided commenting on the ROI associated with defense spending, deliberately.
Veterans get SS too, so no, costs associated with veterans wouldn't shift to SS. It is fair to suggest that the health care costs of uninjured, untraumatized veterans would just show up under Medicaid/Medicare. I don't know what percentage of veterans health care costs (not health care visits) fit in that category, versus "stuff that wouldn't be an issue if they hadn't been in the military".
Not all of those are discretionary spending? Maybe not equivalent to include, for example, Social Security.
It is relevant if you want to attack one of the greatest achievements of the new deal and hate working Americans.
People can have motivations for wanting to cut back Social Security other than "they hate working Americans". I would prefer commenters make more of an effort to understand their opponents' perspective rather than painting them in the worst light possible.
"Please note: Values displayed are outlays, which is money that is actually paid out by the government. Other sources, such as USAspending, may display spending as obligations, which is money that is promised to be paid, but may not yet be delivered."
The Biden administration's FY2025 defense budget request was $850 billion for the DoD, with the total national security budget reaching over $895 billion. The FY2026 proposal submitted by the Trump admin is 1.5 trillion for DoD.
I think the common miscommunication here is that defense is the largest part of the US discretionary budget (about half overall), but that doesn't include those non-negotiable things like Social Security, Medicare, etc .
Trump doesn't want to do Medicare etc anymore. The states can do that now.
> LAPS every other budget category.
Except for social security, health, medicare, debt interest
> $4 billion per launch
This is not a lot of money on a nation-state scale. It's equal to giving every person in the US about US$12.
*taking* $12 from every person in the US... But I still think it's worth it.
Newsom, Mamdani, please stay away.
Ignoring the fact that we aren't using money for rocket fuel (that is people are benefitting from us spending that money) the potential upside is immense. There are a time of resources available in the asteroids and a moon base makes mining those resources easier and cheaper.
Those $4 billion per launch are about 9 hours of entitlement spending (social security & health programs).
Why is entitlement spending bad? Do you think the government should only give welfare to corporations and not people?
> $4 billion per launch lol
$1.3 billion for the mission hardware.
$2.2 billion for the single use SLS.
$0.5 billion for the launch pad.
> watching people go back around the Moon
Two of the missions were actually meant to land. One of them still may.
> $4 billion per launch
If Trump gets his $1.5T military budget, that would be about the military spend per day I think?
And 9 hours of entitlement spend
The longer term value of having moon outposts for observation, mining, etc. will pay off massively.
This is way bigger than just putting people on the moon or hubris. It's the prerequisite for everything we've also said about Mars. Elon just muddied the waters so much that people are so negative about anything else.
>we can still do hard things
Absolutely! What do you have in mind?
I listened to pretty much the entire fly by yesterday, and I was imagining how I would have spent my time at the windows with a camera. Listening to the comms made me think of that episode from From The Earth to the Moon where they take the astronauts out and give them geology lessons so they could be more productive with their descriptions.
I was also very curious of their descriptions during the eclipse where the Earth shine was lighting up the dark side of the moon to such a surreal look they couldn't really describe it. They were even commenting that they didn't feel the photos being taken were doing it justice either.
I also was wondering if they will make any modifications to the capsule since covering a window to block the Earth shine caused concern on the ground from some of the readings they were getting. Assuming it was overheating as they redirected air flow to the window. Then again, the following missions won't be so concerned with a single fly by so probably not something they'll address.
It was amazing listening to it in real time.
If I had any doubt about crewed missions, this Artemis moon flyby is extinguishing them.
Hearing the crew discussing observations with Mission Control, moving cameras around, describing what they see, reacting to events and to curiosity and changing what they’re doing accordingly. And obviously just SO EXCITED to be doing it all. It was just amazing.
They’re still live streaming. It’s not as exciting anymore - ‘just’ on the way home now - but you can just put it on in the background and experience a tiny bit of what it’s like to be in the capsule. They’re exercising right now.
https://www.youtube.com/live/m3kR2KK8TEs
I've been trying to keep the 24 hour stream on in the background as often as possible. Some of it is silly but it just feels exciting to be able to partake in the experience remotely like this.
>that episode from From The Earth to the Moon where they take the astronauts out and give them geology lessons so they could be more productive with their descriptions.
My favorite episode of the series and I was thinking of it during Integrity's flyby.
I think my favorite of all these images is https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/amf-art002e009287/. The sheer size difference, while simply a trick of perspective, makes Earth feel tiny and insignificant.
Some of my favs:
1. The moon eclipsed, with the Orion capsule (outside POV, from GoPro) - https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/art002e009567/art002e00...
2. The moon eclipsed, with the Orion capsule, and Earth crescent (outside POV, from GoPro) - https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/art002e009567/art002e00...
3. Crescent Moon, Crescent Earth (my fav!!) "A New View of the Moon" - https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/art002e009287/art002e00...
4. Artemis II in Eclipse (new fav!) - https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/art002e009301/art002e00...
I think your first link should be to https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/art002e009566/art002e00...
If you stare at the picture, there's an illusion of the shadow growing and enveloping the moon further. At least for me. Quite neat. Might be something about the eyes focusing on the dark part of the photo?
My favorite too.. one of the most awe-inspiring pictures I've ever seen.
Yeah, gives me very similar vibes to the famous "pale blue dot."
I built a zoomable collection viewer for all NASA Artemis II + Apollo 8 gallery images at their full original resolutions—nearly 2 gigapixels across 104 images. Spanning 1968 Earthrise to 2026 Earthset:
https://zoomhub.net/showcase/photography/nasa
Try different layouts with L (grid, masonry, spiral, etc.), filter by gallery or camera, WASD/Q/E/Tab to navigate.
Very cool! Nice work.
This is the best animation of the trajectory I've seen: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260406.html
Someone did a nice animation on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNQ7MoL7erI
I really liked this video! Orbits are hard to visualize but I think the choices here were very good.
It's interesting that the flights are not timed for when the moon is in the magnetosphere shadow. As far as I could gather it seems they're intentionally exposing astronauts to more radiation to test equipment (maybe with an eye to future Mars missions?). Hard to get hard details from all the press release fluffy
https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news/noaas-space-weather-mission...
I shared some of these pictures with family members that hadn’t even heard of Artemis, and one asked if the blue thing was Mars. I am shook.
Maybe I'm an eternal optimist, but sounds to me like they actually tried to put themselves into space, made the assumption that anything visible past the moon must be further out and were left with "wait, I thought it was supposed to be red?"
Uninformed, but not ignorant and perhaps even interested. I hope your response started with "No, actually, even cooler: ..." and you made a space fan that day.
I'd be genuinely curious to see a list of the things they had heard of, since Artemis has been in the news constantly for a month. E.g. have they just not heard of anything (consume no news), or are they in some news silo that excludes rockets, and if so what other things does it include? We may be missing something important that we've never heard of!
It just goes to show how normal space flight is compared to the Apollo era. All the way up to Apollo 11, people stopped what they were doing to watch. Apollo 13 grabbed some attention with the near disaster. The first Shuttle missions were watched, but people quickly lost interest. Even this going back to the moon was nothing new to the average person. When people claim it was all over the news seems like someone in an echo chamber. It might have been in your news feeds, but I doubt it was as predominate as you might think. If your "news" feed is nothing but influencers and celebrities, then NASA probably never even interrupts their feeds
There needs to be a word for that feeling of dread you get when reminded of just how feeble and weak the average human mind is, and how tenuous of a grasp on reality most people have.
What is the licence on these images? I can't seen anything on the site or in the HTML.
I've been waiting for a new Earth Rise/Set shot (which is thankfully at least 5568x3712px from a NIKON D5).
Edit: https://www.nasa.gov/nasa-brand-center/images-and-media/
> You may use this material for educational or informational purposes, including photo collections, textbooks, public exhibits, computer graphical simulations and Internet Web pages.
Works of the US government are not copyrighted.
There is none, they're automatically public domain.
Mostly true. There are some restrictions on images containing NASA logos or NASA employees, for example. https://www.nasa.gov/nasa-brand-center/images-and-media/
Only the ones not containing the NASA logo or the astronauts are public domain.
Are the bright spots to the lower right in this photo galaxies or just camera artifacts[0]? Unreal photo either way.
[0]https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/art002e009301/art002e00...
They said they were able to see a few planets during the eclipse. I know they definitely saw Mars as they were discussing the red color. They saw Venus which was visible in the live feed from the GoPro on the solar panel. IIRC, they were thinking Saturn would have been visible. My guess is the really bright dots are planets. It looks like some horrendous compression artifacts along with some possible lens distortion. My exif app says no exif data in the jpg you linked. Did you come to that image from their website that provides the EXIF to see what lens it was? Nothing looks like a galaxy in the image to me.
Edit: After further looking and some zooming into it, I'd say the bright dot closest to the moon is Venus, the next one has a red tint making it Mars, and then the last one would be Saturn with the rings. There might be a couple of galaxies in the upper left corner. I was quick to dismiss and blame on compression. The benefits of not having to shoot through atmosphere. I wouldn't have expected that detail in what I'm assuming to be a fairly fast exposure
There is EXIF available in the original version: https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/art002e009301/art002e00...
It's taken with an AF Nikkor 35mm f/2D on a NIKON Z 9.
Appreciate the detailed response. I think it would be a borderline miraculous photo if they are planets aligned in that way. Zooming they look more like artifacts or galaxies to me. I spend a good amount of time looking at planets from earth through binoculars and even with an atmosphere they resolve better than that.
I'm pretty sure I'm right about the planets. The planets are aligned that way. If you're experienced looking at them with binocs, you should be aware of that. The line the planets are on is known as the ecliptic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecliptic
Also, if you look at the famous family portrait, you'll see they're in a pretty straight line as well
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/first-ever-solar-system-fa...
From left to right: Saturn, Mars and Mercury.
I started rewatching For All Mankind a week or so before the Artemis II launch, so it's been pretty wild to watch an alt-history about people going to and settling on the Moon and Mars, and then to see real life people just starting to return to the Moon at the same time.
Wonder how it feels after being out there, seeing that, then coming back like alright back in the system I go.
I imagine it depends a lot on your outlook. Someone could see the system as the thing that made the experience possible in the first place, and feel a lot of gratitude and a sense of possibility as a result.
You might like this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect
I can experience it just by watching these pictures, I cannot imagine how intense it must be for astronauts.
It's a movie but I felt it in 2001 Space Odyssey when they show the transition of the bone to space exploration
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpvOUnz4T7Q
Amaze, amaze, amaze!
Loved the Project Hail Mary quote from one of the mission controllers. :)
This bright spot in world news has been good for my mental health and general motivation. Thank you NASA!
We already have images from the far side of the moon since the 2009's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter [1].
In theory, LRO is currently flying at lower orbit than Artemis I mission [2]. Shouldn't the LRO images be better? Maybe NASA has not disclosed all images?
Honest question: why the hype with these pictures?
[1] https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4109
[2] Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) -> ~50 km vs. Artemis I -> ~129 km
It's the difference between buying a postcard of a place you've never been and having a photo you took as a memento.
They are not shy about publishing LRO data. It looks like this (one for each LRO camera, narrow angle then wide angle):
https://data.lroc.im-ldi.com/lroc/view_lroc/LRO-L-LROC-2-EDR...
https://data.lroc.im-ldi.com/lroc/view_lroc/LRO-L-LROC-2-EDR...
Feel free to assemble these into nice composites or 3D renders.
i choose to believe it is done solely to annoy the flat earthers
Just wanted to say how moving I find these pictures. Proof of what humanity is capable of :)
Zoomed into several of the lunar surface photos and noticed some of the very small impact craters are in a regularly spaced straight line.
Looks to me as if a meteorite came in at a shallow angle and basically skipped across the surface. Leaving dimpled craters as it bounced. Looks very similar to rocks skipping on a pond. Am I correct or is there another explanation for these?
If I am understanding correctly you are seeing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crater_chain which are craters caused by debris blasted out when another crater is formed.
Thank you! Glad to see there's a Wikipedia article about it. And good to learn the formal name for this formation: "catena" (plural "catenae").
A chain of meteors would strike the surface in a line as the moon moves
A single “rubble pile” asteroid will easily break apart when nearing a celestial body, once it crosses the Roche limit. It will break apart into a perfectly straight line too (at least the impact craters will.) I would guess most of the straight-line series of craters are all caused by something like this.
Strafing fire from an alien warship will leave similar craters, assuming sufficiently large kinetic energy weapons.
Tangentially related, but there's a bunch of extremely high-resolution panorama images from the Apollo landings available at this site, for anyone who enjoys this sort of thing. https://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollopanoramas/
Was there any writeup on the actual goals and accomplishments of this mission. I'm sure there is some very valuable scientif8c data and observations done, but what exactly are those (other than 'wow' media)?
Getting the public excited also has its place. Also sending humans so far from earth has enough challenges to make it worthwile. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_II) has the experiments listed.
> sending humans so far ...
I see that they travelled 1.6% more distance compared to a tech that was used 56 years ago. If NASA is really excited about this, I think they are having a low news day. I'm sure they must be other goals.
Can someone ELI5 how it is one side of the moon is never seen on Earth? The moon orbits and also rotates, does it not?
The gravitational pull of the moon lifts up the ocean to cause tides. Well the Earth's gravitational pull is so strong on the moon that the heavier side of the moon always faces the Earth. This is called tidal locking. So the only way to ever see the far side of the moon is to go there. Humans have gone there before, but almost always during an Earth "full moon", which means the far side is unlit. We do have full images of the far side of the moon from remote probes, but the 21% of the far side that was lit had human eyes on it for the first time ever.
But why does this not happen to planets themselves in relation to the sun?
Moons get tidally locked because they're very close to their planet, so the planet's gravity is by far the strongest influence.
The planets have much more complicated gravitational interactions because in addition to the Sun's gravity, they influence each other. So you end up with things like orbital resonances instead.
A planet that's close to its star and far from other strong gravitational influences will tidally lock to the star.
I think the explanation is wrong: wikipedia offers a completely different explanation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking.
Planets can become tidally locked to the sun- mercury is. Probably the timescale required for the other planets is just much longer
EDIT: Apparently mercury isn't actually tidally locked to the sun, TIL
I don't see how my ELI5 disagrees with the wikipedia article.
wikipedia's explanation works for uniform bodies, yours doesn't. And since tidal bulges seem to be symmetric, there's no away to explain away the deformation as making one side heavier
It's because Earth pulls on the bulge in the Moon created by Earth's gravity.
It has to do with the tides. Except in this case it isn't ocean tides - it's lunar tides. Just as the Moon's gravity creates a bulge in Earth's oceans, Earth's gravity creates a bulge in the material that makes up the moon.
If Earth and the Moon didn't rotate, the bulges would "point" directly at the other body. But with rotation, the tidal bulge is a little bit offset in the direction of rotation. And the Moon used to rotate.
That offset creates a torque. Earth's gravity tries to pull the bulge into perfect alignment. Over time this slows the rotation of the moon until it stopped rotating at all.
(Technically the Moon does rotate, but it does so at the same rate that it orbits Earth. So it doesn't rotate from our perspective.)
One consequence of that is that the Earth, as seen from the nearside of the Moon's surface, just hangs there, never moving, apart from a small wobble.
The moon is tidally locked to earth, we only ever see one side.
To add: this happens because the parts of the Moon that are closer to the Earth are pulled in more by Earth's gravity, compared to the ones further away.
The missing piece of information: the moon is not perfectly sphere shaped, the bulge has more mass, and is attracted by the earth more.
Is it 2-way? I guess moon see all around earth, or no?
Consider what it'd mean if there were parts of the Earth that could not be seen from the moon, it would also mean those locations could never themselves see the moon.
Ignoring the orbital period implications, I think it'd be bigger news if either US or Europe, or Asia couldn't ever actually see the moon.
This is the best ELI5 explanation I have heard. Thanks !
It may one day be, far in the future, although that's predicted to be so far off that Sol might have become a red giant by then, making the issue moot.
But only Luna is tidally locked at the moment. Terra is not, and its rotation still has a long way to slow down before it becomes so.
If you are on the near side of the moon[1], you will always see Earth see around Earth as it rotates and as the moon orbits it. You will also see it in different phases, like how we see lunar phases from Earth. If you are on the far side of the moon, you will not see Earth at all as you will always be facing away from it.
[1] The Earth does move in the moon's sky a bit. If you are on the near side but getting close to the far side, the Earth will be below the horizon sometimes.
> The moon orbits and also rotates, does it not?
and one cancels the other, yes
I believe it's caused by even the slightest imbalance in mass. Because the moon is so close to Earth, the imbalance causes gravity to be slightly stronger on one side than the other side. Eventually, that leads to no rotation at all.
I imagine most bodies rotating around a second object will eventually lose their angular velocity.
Yes and its rotation is synchronized to earth. See the animation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking
thanks, that's probably the best animation I've seen explaining a tidal locked moon.
I wish they would’ve flown by and taken a picture of the Apollo 11 lunar landing site.
I think it would’ve been a super cool throwback to the history of lunar exploration; maybe it’s just me but I think it would’ve been really exciting. It would basically be the like visiting a UNESCO (moon?) heritage site.
They would have needed a hell of a lot more camera for that, right? Even the best DSLR with the best lens is going to have a lot of trouble resolving something that small at over 4000 miles.
That's a detail a lot of people miss. Apollo missions orbited at ~150 miles above the moon while Artemis II fly-by was much further away. That was by design to specifically give them the wider view to see things missed by Apollo's closer orbits
The main point of the voyage was to see the far side, and also to report on previously-unseen portions of the Moon that hadn't really had human coverage in the past.
Since all the Apollo landings were on the near-side of the Moon, they were in fact less accessible to this crew.
My disappointment lay chiefly in their L.O.S. periods, because in 2026 why does Earth lack operational satellites that could relay comms from the other side? Or a space optical/radio telescope that would benefit massively from the darkness and shielding of a Moon-sized body? No humans necessary for that. Of course, you couldn't power such a craft with solar power...
> because in 2026 why does Earth lack operational satellites that could relay comms from the other side?
The moon is not an easy body to orbit. Keeping something in orbit around the moon requires a lot of station keeping which requires a lot of fuel. Once that fuel runs out, the orbit will not be stable. People have talked about trying an Earth-Moon L2 point, but that's not as stable as Sun-Earth L2 where things like JWST are located.
Mostly because there's been very little US activity on the Moon to justify it. Orbiting the Moon can also be a pain - its gravitational field is "lumpy" - but you can manage that by making your orbit bigger (higher). See this paper if you're interested in details as they pertain to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been flying since 2009: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20070035736/downloads/20...
China has a lunar comm relay IIRC, to support some surface operations on the far side.
I hope they listened to Dark Side of the Moon on the flyby.
Luckily the far side of the moon wasn't the dark side of the moon on this trip.
it mostly was, it looks like
it's full moon
Matter of fact, it's all dark.
It can be any colour you like.
> that's no moon.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/55194334756/
This is an amazing image.
That one pic with Solar eclipse is amazing. Especially with the visible stars in the background. it's rare to see a pic from a man missioned with stars being visible in the background.
Gorgeous, awe-inspiring photos.
Tangentially, did the NASA website move to WordPress? I thought it was Drupal, the Drupal official website even had a case study about nasa.gov. I see wp-content links on the site and there is no Drupal behaviors in JavaScript and I didn't notice any of the usual drupal classes in the source
NASA migrated thousands(!) of their sites to WordPress back in 2023. I think it had to do with user-friendliness of the Gutenberg editor.
We're so not accustomed to moon pictures taken with "normal" cameras. These almost look like 3D renders to me, it's incredible
Why is normal in quotes? Do you mean visible light vs filtered monochrome with false-color outputs or infrared/radio/x-ray like some other telescopes use? Would that be the abnormal you are referring? The Apollo images were taken with Hasselblad film cameras that were "normal" cameras[0].
[0]https://www.hasselblad.com/about/history/hasselblad-in-space...
I think they mean "consumer" or "off the shelf" as opposed to "custom build for the mission", we've seen iPhone and GoPro photos
What's custom built? They're using stock Nikon bodies, and as you've said iPhone and GoPros. Where's the confusion?
They shot these pictures using the Nikon D5, Z9, as well as iPhone and GoPro.
I understand what cameras were used. I'm asking why normal was in quotes. What else would there have been?
A camera you can order on Amazon in the next 5 minutes
I am curious to see how being namedropped by NASA affects the sales of these cameras. It's probably not as much as I am imagining but still not an insignificant number. Probably less than Nutella that accidentally flew off the shelf live on stream straight across the shot
Some of these photos look so "fake". Maybe because of how they are lit or the lack of atmospheric distortion, they don't quite looks real (I'm not disputing that they are authentic, they just look a bit weird)
Yeah, it is common for pictures in space to look like simplistic raytraced renderings because the lighting and shadows are so sharp, lacking atmospheric diffusion and scattering.
Its a classic feeling when seeing things there one not normally see. There's a whole conspiracy that the war in Ukraine is fake, because video of combat looks weird compared to movies and video games.
It's a bit tricky to navigate between all the amazing photos NASA Artemis crew captured so I vibe coded (Codex) a simple site with full screen full res view and arrow navigation:
https://nasa.puma.tech
feedback welcome
That's awesome. Since you asked for feedback, can you vibecode up a thumbnail view? Also I see a bunch more images on the NASA site. How are you pulling them?
yeah, this was a one time sync. which source do you prefer for full list? and for thumbnail view, would you like a T shortcut or any other button?
this is really helpful. such beautiful photos.
I am really worried about their return entry. I got emotionally invested in the crew, meanwhile there have been voices saying Orion’s heat shield is made of garbagium and tested with undergrad level simplistic physics models.
Then I read about the NASA administrator being some sort of “charisma” bravado guy and the government pressures to get to the moon during Trump presidency.
How NASA safety standards are somehow 1/10 of the ones they impose on external private companies who would never be allowed to do crew launch with that kind of level of risk.
I think I am just going to forget about it for now until I hear about hopefully safe return in mainstream news so I don’t end up with heart attack. They really should take mainly single people without families on these missions imo.
Very cool pictures, especially those ones backlit by the Sun are something new. ie real photos that we usually only see in sci-fi games or movies.
But the real question is: Who of those 4 clogged up the toilet? That's what the public demands to know.
Really cool! Artemis III will be even more breathtaking I think https://www.nasa.gov/mission/artemis-iii/
I cannot fathom what it must be like to witness this in-person. The pictures are spectacular but to spend time experiencing it outside the window in your proximity must be overwhelming in the most incredible way.
The best camera position for landscape photography. Well done.
There’s something off about gps coordinates in EXIF data
which photo has gps in the EXIF?
https://images.nasa.gov/details/art002e009286
Stunning!
The solar eclipse pictures are absolutely beautiful.
Surpassing Apollo 13’s distance record after so many decades is kind of wild. It really shows how infrequent deep-space human missions have been, despite all the progress in other areas.
What a trip. They must all be so excited!
I hope they will come back as ambassadors of peace.
odd they don't do a carousel. I get that it's not necessary and minimalism has a joy of it's own, but click-through would be useful.
Amazing ! looks cool!
what about a video ?
This is the best shot, as it is shown with the perspective of a person inside the space ship. All the other ones are just high res versions of the Moon pics we've all seen before.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/amf-art002e012279/
The eclipse photos are absolutely jaw-dropping.
I've been thoroughly disappointed in NASA's handling of "public relations" part of the mission
every significant achievement point became a publicity stunt of lowest quality, with forced line reads and little practicality
I'm eagerly awaiting future engineering challenges and science results - but I'd want NASA to concentrate on that first, and farce show-making second
At one point, they were telling NASA that they didn't have the right words or enough superlatives. I kept waiting for them to quote Contact with "should have sent a poet"
> Lunar Flyby
I though they were going _to the moon_, not "flyby".
NASA is a pale reminiscent of its former self. Sad.
This is a new vehicle, and this is a test flight to work out the kinks before attempting a landing. It's exactly the same way Apollo was done. Go read about Apollo 8.
They're "going to the moon" in the same way that going to the drive-through is "going to mcdonalds". I think NASA is still as good as it was, they just don't have unlimited "beat the soviets" budget anymore
These things are so damn cool!
honest question - why any talented people would still work for NASA when real projects are from companies like spacex?
God, they must have hated being forced to speak to the president
From Google AI Review:
> No, the Artemis II mission will not land on the moon. It is a 10-day crewed, deep-space flyby test flight designed to verify spacecraft systems before future landing missions. The crew will circle the moon before returning to Earth, serving as a critical step toward landing later in the decade.
Don't get mad at me. My question is, why did we have to send this mission? This is not the first time we are going to land on the moon, so why this prerequisite?
To come up to speed and see what still works and what doesn't. To try out the new stuff.