The reason nobody’s paying much attention to this mornings’s Artemis ! moon launch, apart from the just-announced scrubbing of today’s lift-off? It’s all robotic — live astronauts (including the first woman and first person of color) won’t land on the moon until 2026, or so the projections suggest.
The purpose of tpday’s flight is/was basically to test things out, or to send the ship into space and toward the moon without anything going horribly wrong.
Led by NASA, Artemis is a partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA), Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).
If successful (and there have been plenty of delays), the Artemis program will return humans to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. As Artemis is far more divers=e and progressive-minded than classic NASA was, the odds of a Moon-based astronaut swatting golf balls (as Alan Shepard did in February ’71) is unlikely.