rant filled with lack of self control, incoming.
I'm not an apologist for Artemis program. If we consider it a tack-on to the original Constellation program, this one's been trying to get off the ground almost 20 years. Mostly due to political waffling the previous 3(!) administrations. It's reached the point that SpaceX's starship will be the lunar lander, and if the powers that be were honest, doesn't really need the Artemis hardware at all. It's almost ceremonial, now. My suspicion is that once it has a few goes 'round the moon, the plan will auspiciously change and SLS/Orion will be done, last breath of the old Shuttle infrastructure. MSFC will have new toys to play with, the Northern Alabama Space Administration will be satiated, Shelby will be a nonogenarian, and the Senate Launch System will no longer be needed, not that it is now. It will have outlived most of its creators, a good many of its supporters, and will serve only as a how-not-to-do-it. Legislatures, or even space administrations, should never design a launch vehicle again.
( I just deleted a very long tedious but maybe interesting to some rant about the history of Ares V, the alternative DIRECT Jupiter 246 proposal and how that partly led to SLS and my incoherent ramblings about some of the it. I was and remain a side-mount proponent. If you are going to use the shuttle architecture, it should have been done simply. Ok I deleted that last bit but then typed it back in.) .
But in fairness to them, NASA is skipping a lot of steps that Apollo took. Artemis I is, apart from crew, a full on test to the moon without an orbital test flight. It is true that there was an Orion flight in 2014, but that was hardly even the same spacecraft. So that's a lot of things to test in one flight without adding in the extra step of an orbital injection. FRT is easier.
Artemis 2 should be the same flight, but with crew. Again a Free Return Trajectory.
Artemis 3 will have do an injection turn to match Gateway station's orbit. The HLS (Starship) will then move from Gateway to lunar orbit and then lunar landing. It will be quite a bit different from the Apollo flight scenarios.
