"The entire mission" does that include time spent in Gateway? Does it include time when all humans are still on Earth but there's a Starship depot in orbit getting refueled?

@Mqrius if this is about the 8days timing, it would be from Earth takeoff to Earth landing.

I’m thinking the clock starts when the rocket countdown hits 0. Does that answer the question?

@mattyb The Artemis 3 landing will be done with Starship. There will be several launches, first a Depot Starship, then several Tanker Starships to fill up the Depot, then HLS Starship that gets refueled from the Depot. HLS Starship then goes on its way to Gateway in lunar NRHO orbit.

Meanwhile, astronauts launch on SLS in the Orion capsule, and also go to Gateway. There they transfer to HLS Starship for landing on the moon. After that they take off from the moon in HLS, then go to gateway, where they transfer back to Orion and then go back to Earth.

My point is that there's several different rocket launches involved, and the launches start well before the astronauts actually go to space. It's not a single launch like the Apollo missions. Do you start the clock when the astronauts get launched off Earth, or do you start earlier when Depot Starship launches?

@Mqrius ah. thank you for explaining rockets to me. I had no idea how any of this worked, my mental model for this all is still in the 70s.

Let’s start the clock from when the astronauts leave the earth to make this as close to an even comparison as possible. I’ll update the answer to be clearer.

@mattyb Aight that works! Yeah it's gonna be interesting to see the whole thing develop over the next few years.

@Mqrius i’m weirdly excited at the prospect of getting to see a moon landing in my lifetime.

also i wonder what the flat earthers are going to think when we go back to the moon with 4k cameras.

Artemis III has already been delayed, does that count as disrupting the original timeline?

@NathanScott

what will be true of the journey from earth to the moon and back

No, the timeline would be from post-takeoff to landing on earth. I’m not counting weather delaying takeoffs either.