I feel like this has flown under the radar. This should have been something that had a decent press build up and excitement, but unfortunately the toxic poltiical climate in the US has totally overshaddowed it.
It would be cool to see what the cockpit is like and what’s involved in their daily tasks, compared to the Apollo missions. Can it all be automated?
Spaceflight Now has a 24/7 stream running with excellent coverage that help explain the tasks that the crew and ground control are performing, as well as showing recaps. https://www.youtube.com/live/M8m9YdxgJ5g
NASA did switch to a view with some of the external cameras and sometimes some cockpit views. Their launch stream was pretty terrible. I had some family and friends (not space nerds) watching and asking a lot of questions because they were kind of interested but not getting much from the stream.
As far as “can it be automated”, Boeing Starliner and a bunch of crashed lunar landers over the last few years are examples of where human improvisation beats flight software. This mission is also testing life support systems. It’s pretty hard to make a good human simulator to test those.
I know this probably isn’t the right community to ask this but… fucking why? What do we need to do up there?
Edit: At least my ignorance has proven to be educational.
Intent is to establish a permanent moon base. Having a moon base is a prerequisite for visiting Mars - first, it’s a practice run for what you need to do to set up a base. Second, it’ll serve as a good “rest stop” for ships travelling between Earth and Mars
There’s a lot of science that was missed out on during the Apollo missions- they only sent a single geologist to the lunar surface, on the last mission. The original lunar landings generated a huge amount of scientific and technological advancement both from research on the Moon and from developing the technologies needed to get there.
In terms of lunar science specifically, studying the Moon can teach us a lot about what the early solar system was like, and what early Earth was like, because the Moon was formed very early in the history of Earth, made out of material that was largely originally part of Earth. We don’t still fully understand how or why that happened, and understanding more about the Moon could help us understand what the solar system looked like early in its history.
The ultimate goal of the program is to establish a semipermanent base on the Moon, which will allow surface science to proceed much much more quickly than could ever be done with robotics. There’s also lots of other science that can be done on how human bodies react to a higher-radiation environment in deep space like that. On Artemis II they’re actually doing some really interesting studies on how human tissue reacts to that kind of radiation.
