Moon across the space river

This is a very warm image for me. I used to have a postcard of it as a kid. As well as some other soviet works on the space theme.

Returning to today, Artemis II is a modern lunar spaceflight mission. It is a part of NASA's program to return humans to the Moon. Launch is scheduled for April 1. So it happens just in 2 days. There will be 4 people on board. They plan to orbit the Moon without landing and come back to Earth. I think it is incredible. It is going to be accomplished with several successive stages. One of the major ones is an orbital flight around the Earth, meticulously testing all the systems. Before making a calm leap toward the Moon. It sounds to me like the first proper step in human space exploration. Not the go go go rush. But a robust move toward settling a human on the Moon. I hope that ultimately it will be about setting up a station, doing experiments and learning new things.

When I was reading some news about space mining intentions it was pretty sad to observe for some reason. Finally we can see the actual people heading there with slightly different intentions. Possibly building, growing plants and conducting scientific research. I wish this happens before some crazy giant robot lands on the Moon to shred and savage out rare earth metals. Nowadays everything is so driven by commercial success. So I highly doubt that any progress is even possible without corps being able to extract billions. And we all know the moral nature of the subject.

So this mission looks like a relief to me. I bet it still depends largely on money, but with humans on board things could take some really interesting turns.