The crewed #Artemis II mission (1 billion 💰per person, ~$23.8 total) for a tour around the moon https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2025/12/24/nasas-artemis-ii-the-first-crewed-lunar-flyby-in-50-years is good for...

Following launch, the crew will carry out tests of the water dispenser , firefighting equipment, and the toilet . If everything looks good, #Orion will spend 24 hours in an orbit 70,000 km away from the planet. Following a series of tests and checks, the crew will conduct the Trans-Lunar Injection. A “free-return trajectory” means that even if Integrity’s engines fail completely, the moon’s gravity will naturally loop the spacecraft around it and aim it towards Earth https://news.westernu.ca/2026/01/artemis-ii-humans-return-to-moon/

if all we want to do is fly around the #Moon and back, a lightly modified #CrewDragon on #FalconHeavy could have done this at any point since 2020. It could be executed for well under $500m , roughly equivalent to a single month of burn on the #SLS and #Orion programs. That is, for the same budget, we could fly a crew around the Moon every month indefinitely https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-space-capsule-is-flaming-garbage/

#NASA #Artemis

@spaceflight

This is an extraordinarily bad take. This is like saying Apollo 8 didnt accomplish anything because they didnt land on the moon. You can do better

@Condorito so how do you explain the current voting ? Feel free to post your own poll regarding this topic, I'd share it

@spaceflight

The outcomes of elections have nothing to do with basic engineering processes.