Anonymousabout 3 hours ago
NASA's Artemis II successfully returned four astronauts from a ten-day lunar flyby on April 10, 2026, setting a new distance record of 252,756 miles from Earth and marking the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. But the mission did not land on the Moon, and with the Artemis program having consumed an estimated $93 billion without a surface landing — and the first landing now pushed to 2028 at the earliest — serious questions remain about the program's cost, architecture, and ability to outpace China's 2030 lunar ambitions.