Not even: Apollo 8[0] went into orbit around the moon (orbited 10 times), then left lunar orbit to return to Earth. This required mission-critical rocket burns both to enter (LOI) and exit (TEI) lunar orbit. Artemis II[1] is merely doing a "fly-by"; it'll never enter lunar orbit, a much less challenging/risky mission.
It really makes you appreciate what the Apollo program achieved. Really amazing.
TEI - trans-earth injection
For ill-informed people like me.
I am not _too excited_ about the SLS itself as it looks like a political compromise, just as the shuttle was.
But better late than never.
We could have sent the ship without astronauts to test all the systems and learn the only real valuable question: does this thing work? Instead we get drama & politics, and a much more expensive mission.
The further we go as humans is Mars, and it's useless. The next star is so, so, so far away that even considering reaching it with "something" requires a revolution in fundamental physics. No need to build rockets for that, just a whiteboard and physicists, I guess.
And saying that we go to Mars is extremely generous. The engineering of the rocket going there is fun, but if you want to send humans there, they have to survive the trip. Including, for instance, eating and drinking and breathing air for the duration of the trip. Those are not solved problems. Chances are that we as a society collapse long before we get to send humans to Mars.
And possibly even before we make it back to the moon's surface.
There was a comedian that had the observation a few years back that we've lost our saw of awe and wonder: he was on a plane when Internet was just being introduced, and it was announced on the flight, but after a little bit it stopped working and they announced 'technical difficulties' and it wouldn't be available.
The guy next to him was like "this is bullshit": how quickly the world owed this guy something that he knew existed only a few minutes before.
As he goes on: often whenever people complain about their flights, it was like a 1940s German cattle car: X happened, then Y happened. And his response is: And then what happened? Did you fly in the air? Did you sit on a chair in the sky? Like a bird, like humans have been imaging since the tail of Icarus (and before)?
Hedonic adaptation is real (which is "fine" as far as it goes, as striving for better isn't a bad thing):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
But given you're invoking history, it's easy how it is to forget the woe that humans lived in just a few decades before Apollo 8, and the incredible strides that happened (and that many people on the planet, even now, have yet to fully experience):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...
Sure, they tested it on the ground. But that's what they did for Artemis I, and we know how successful that was.
[0] <https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....>
The average person thinks NASA’s only mission of note was Apollo 11, they don’t even realize there were 5 other landings.