The biggest thing to me is that the Soviets congratulated us on it.
The Soviet Union choosing to go along with the fake moon landing instead of calling the USA out is the absolute dumbest part of the whole thing.
Dude the flat earth people sent one of their leaders up into low orbit. When he came back and said the earth is round cuz he saw it, instead of believing him they just kicked him out. Some people are just beyond reason.
Does anyone know why the rocket needed to be “the most powerful” when it only got them out of Earths atmosphere? Is the crew module just that heavy that it needed it?
Partially, yeah. Crewed spacecraft by necessity weigh significantly more than uncrewed, because life support is very heavy. But they also want to take that very heavy spacecraft further away from Earth than any crewed spacecraft has ever been before, which means they need to take a lot of fuel; yes, it’s a gravity-assisted free-return trajectory, but it still needs fuel for course corrections and other orbital dynamics. Plus, it’s a two-stage spacecraft, while the Saturn V was three-stage, so it’s got to carry a lot more dead weight a lot further than before.
All of that together means they needed the most powerful rocket ever. The lander mission will almost certainly be even more powerful than that, because while it won’t need to go as far, it’ll be carrying another spacecraft.
EDIT: Actually, to correct my last statement, potentially not! Turns out the current plan for Artemis IV is to send the lander on ahead and have it waiting in lunar orbit for the astronauts to get there. So potentially all of the Artemis missions could be launched on this same configuration of rocket.
