@greenhombre a valid question to ask, but of course my response is biased. My answer is we don’t even know what we don’t know about the moon. We’ve barely spent any time on or covered but the merest square meters of the surface, by humans or by robots. That’s the point of return & exploration, to advance scientific knowledge & discovery. And we have many ideas, but till we actually do it, we don’t know how to build & sustain outposts on other bodies in our solar system. Moon is where we begin.

@Trilobyter
What's the point of a flyby in 2026? Hopefully a badass 10K version of EarthRise will come out of it.

@greenhombre This is a test flight of the Artemis system, including the first crewed flight of the Orion spacecraft that I worked on. With that there are many Orion systems being flown for the very first time, such as the internal environment control and life support systems, audio communications, manual control systems, etc. It is an ambitious test flight and an essential step toward proving the spacecraft and preparing for later lunar landing missions.