The launch date of Artemix II for a 4 astronaut flyby of the moon is planned for September of next year (2025).
Do you think NASA will be able to make this date? (https://www.nasa.gov/event/artemis-ii-launch/)
It’s a very exciting time to see something like this, something humans haven’t done for 50 years.
And as a matter of historical significance, this will be the furthest humans have ever travelled from Earth. We’ve existed for 300,000 years (homo sapiens), and no human has ever gone as far from this rock as these 4 people are about to do.
The furthest we’ve traveled milestone is not really worth mentioning for Artemis III. Sure they will be granted a Guinness book of world records entry for beating Apollo 13’s record by a smidge. However, it is one of the least significant accomplishments they will have on this epic journey.
A smidge is right. It sounds like they’re going 10,000km away from the far side of the Moon. To compare, the Moon’s average distance is 385,000km, so they’ll actually be 395,000km away?
Except that’s probably off by a few thousand km; the 385,000 figure is the average distance from the center of the Earth to the center of the Moon. Meh, correcting for center vs. radius is starting to sound like homework, so this will have to be “close enough for a Lemmy comment” :)
Edit: OP posted another article in a comment; Artemis II will actually be 432,194km away. Sounds like “a smidge” is about 10% of the distance in this case!