Don't forget about Artemis
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April 2026 is when they expect to launch Artemis II with a crewed flight to go around the moon. Artemis III will be in Sept 2027 and will land on the moon. I'm sure NASA will never miss those dates. (LOL) Anyway, it's fun to read about the full schedule, including Falcon rockets being used in a few years to deliver parts of the moon "space station" that'll orbit and critical for moon landings. The 5-minute video below provides a nice overview of the whole concept (video created 5 years ago btw).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program
Link to video -
I feel like this should be a bigger news, they rolled out Artemis 2 to the launchpad this weekend, it’s cool that they use the same crawler I believe that was used during the Apollo missions. I believe the earliest possible lunch date is February 6, with other launch dates spanning throughout the spring.
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Old-ish news but the price difference is interesting.
India successfully performed a soft touchdown near the lunar south pole on Wednesday, August 23, for its Chandrayaan-3 mission.
By doing so, it made history by becoming the first nation to land on that region of the lunar surface as well as the fourth country to ever land on the Moon.
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Impressively, Chandrayaan-3’s $75 million budget means it cost less than a number of Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters. Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic ‘Interstellar’ cost $165 million, while ‘Gravity’ and ‘The Martian’ each cost around $100 million to make.
To put things further into perspective, NASA’s Artemis I mission last year, which sent an uncrewed capsule around the Moon and back, cost approximately $4 billion.
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LOL
