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Originally Posted by Watching The World Burn
They aren't even landing in the moon to explore / perhaps expand knowledge / discover something we didn't know. They are just looping around and coming back. Why spend so much money on that?
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It is an incremental test of the SLS rocket and Orion capsule. Back during the Apollo days, they did several incremental tests before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their famous stroll. Apollo-8 flew more or less this same mission at Christmas, 1968. It was the first time that a crewed Apollo capsule left the relative safety of low Earth orbit and went around the moon.
Ironically, the Apollo-8 mission was a last-minute change of plans because Grumman had not delivered the needed lunar lander yet that they were supposed to test in Earth orbit. Today, Artemis-II is doing the same exact thing because SpaceX does not have the new lunar lander ready yet. As a matter of fact, SpaceX is sooooo far behind that NASA just recently awarded a backup lander contract to Bezos and Blue Origin.
As for the question about if this is even necessary, remember that Boeing's first un-crewed Starliner launch had serious software/computer issues, and never made it to the space station because it wound up in the wrong orbit! Their first crewed Starliner test flight to the space station ended up stranding the two astronauts there for months until a SpaceX capsule could return them, thanks to maneuvering thrusters failing during the docking. That was all just trying to get a new capsule up to the ISS at around 250 miles. The moon is about 250,000 miles away, and this is the first crewed flight of the SLS/Orion stack...and only the second flight of this rocket package total.
So, while the mission isn't landing on the moon, it *is* expanding their knowledge about the rocket and also carrying some Canadian ballast in one of the seats so that our friends to the north can say that one of them has also been around the moon.....