If you went through a Taco Bell drive through, you'd still be "driving to Taco Bell" even though you just drove around the building and never went inside.
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2026
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Explain Like I'm Five
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People keep mentioning this but isn't it more of a definition of to and towards?
It's more about intention. You went there, you did some stuff, and you came home. It's not like they're going somewhere else and just happened to end up by the moon, the point of the trip is a lunar flyby and they made it. Hence, moon mission.
It's how language works.
We are flying to the moon, not to land on it, but to orbit it. That's still to the moon. We're not flying to the sun, or flying to mars. We're flying to the moon.
Because we're flying to the moon.
Plus from a news standpoint it sells better than to say "around".
Don't get hungup on this, it's just part of the process of eventually landing.
Would you say Voyager didn't go to Jupiter because it didn't land?
No I would say Voyager is doing a Flyby....sorry kind of nerd came out.
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It's Apollo 8, but with 60 more years of experience, more computer power than the entire world had at the time, and 10,000x the budget.
They are only going back to what they should have been doing in the 70s. I'm happy they are finally doing it, but I never understood why they abandoned it in the first place.
Cuz they are going to the moon, they just aren't going to go on the moon.
When I say I'm going to a football game, I'll sit at some distance and watch it, not walk on the pitch.
Same thing here.
Being 5000 miles away you won't see much.
It's a shuttle run. More literally than usual.
Am I visiting (going to) Yosemite, or driving around it?
Did you visit the grand canyon if you did not go to the bottom but only stood on the rim?
Did you visit the grand canyon if you did not go to the bottom but only stood on the rim?
Yes. Did you visit it if you flew over it on a commercial flight?
Much more similar to a chartered helicopter flight, which are quite popular at the Grand Canyon.
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Because some people in this world are mentally normal and use language in mentally normal ways.
The moon is far away. Like really far away. They ISS is hard to get to, and the moon is 1000x farther away. So, just getting far enough to swoop around and come back is an achievement in its own right.
Also, it is part of a series of missions that will culminate in humans walking on the surface of the moon once again.
It's not actually flying per se, more like a very complicated falling with style.
Why would they say we are flying around it when this is a flyby mission?
If martians flew around the earth they would be flying to earth.
Like Operation Epstein Fubar, it's all distraction-theatre.
"See how GREAT we are??" "accomplishment", while gutting the government & bombing hospitals & universities, for sake of getting the Epstein files off of the criminals named in them.
( & getting the heat off of the "DOJ" which admitted to shredding some of them, holding-back 47k of them, etc )
( & getting the heat off the ICE quota-based-deportations regime )
etc.
Artemis is an immense waste of money.
Worse, it's got a fundamental design-flaw which means if any of its 4 main-engines "anomaly" during takeoff, then the mission's at-least destroyed, possibly killed.
Notice that with SpaceX's rockets, you can have an engine-anomaly & it'll just make the launch more-difficult?
There are sooo many engines, that each-engine's % of the work is small-enough, that the rest can carry it, if 1 fails.
With Artemis?
ANY engine which fails, & the mission's DEAD.
They engineered it to be incapable of dealing-with such statistically-inevitable failures.
That's irresponsible, in my eyes.
Falcon9 & Starship both have loads of engines, & can deal with 1-failure, properly.
Why go against sane engineering-principles?
Because the point of the thing is institutional validation, not optimal use-of-resources.
As Feynman grated against, last century, it's simply the wrong culture that's running the show.
Business-culture instead of engineering-culture, was what killed people in the shuttlecraft..
Artemis is produced by institutionality-instead-of-right-engineering, from what I can see.. & NASA's having about 1/4 of its budget gutted immediately, so .. Artemis gets funded, but NASA's real missions get discarded?
Theatre, not NASA work.
< shrug >
_ /\ _
Plus there’s the issue that they’ve been struggling to launch more frequently than every two years. If something happens, everyone is stranded where they are, and it’s not like anyone on the moon could survive there an extra two years.
While I see the reasoning for Artemis in the beginning, it’s been clear for years that it’s a poor choice
We are going to the moon. Artemis II is going to bring humans further from earth than any human has ever been, and doing a drive by like this is part of the process of landing on the moon
doing a drive by
GTA 6: Moon DLC confirmed?!
Further how? I've admittedly not looked anything up but the Apollo missions orbited the moon as well.
They're going higher around the far side of the moon than previous missions, so further from earth
Artemis II won't fully orbit it, it slingshots around it.
Which means it will fly higher over the lunar service, and while it's on the far side will be further away from earth than previous missions.
Cause when dad went to the store to get smokes......
Because it sounds better, more historic, more impressive. I’ve seen several outlets say “travel further from earth than any other humans” and I think that’s the angle that should be taken here since we aren’t actually going to the moon, we are actually going around it, going as far away as we ever have which is incredible in and of itself then returning. Considering what country NASA is located in I doubt the symbolically inflated language is an accident
When you do a free return trajectory around the moon, you first "fly" towards the moon, and then you "fly" away from the moon.
Propoganda
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