And as a matter of historical significance, this will be the furthest humans have ever travelled from Earth. We've existed for 300,000 years (homo sapiens), and no human has ever gone as far from this rock as these 4 people are about to do.

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[–] nezbyte@lemmy.world 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The furthest we’ve traveled milestone is not really worth mentioning for Artemis III. Sure they will be granted a Guinness book of world records entry for beating Apollo 13’s record by a smidge. However, it is one of the least significant accomplishments they will have on this epic journey.

[–] elephantium@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

A smidge is right. It sounds like they're going 10,000km away from the far side of the Moon. To compare, the Moon's average distance is 385,000km, so they'll actually be 395,000km away?

Except that's probably off by a few thousand km; the 385,000 figure is the average distance from the center of the Earth to the center of the Moon. Meh, correcting for center vs. radius is starting to sound like homework, so this will have to be "close enough for a Lemmy comment" :)

Edit: OP posted another article in a comment; Artemis II will actually be 432,194km away. Sounds like "a smidge" is about 10% of the distance in this case!