Unless folks are hearing that they did this I smell marketing and/or PR as the main driver of the action.

There are streamers who's whole thing is watching these alerts and setting up bobbleheads and glasses of water and stuff to show the shaking. It's so so so cool. Look at what we can do for each other you guys :')

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imH-ZyXwX5Q

Still, it's true that parts of the far side are still unseen by human eyes (if you consider pitch black landscape to be "unseen" which I think is fair given the lack of any significant illumination as you point out).

The thing that is happening for the first time on this mission is humans personally observing much of the far side in daylight. For the Apollo missions the far side was mostly dark because they wanted a high sun angle at the landing site on the near side. Many uncrewed orbiting cameras and even a recent Chinese lander & rover have taken photos of the far side.

It also states that these will be images "from the surface" of the Moon which is wildly off base. Artemis II is not landing... Of course it's true that this O2O technology could be used for high bandwidth livestreams from the surface on future missions, if this test works well.

I don't even think this O2O system will be used for live video during Artemis II. This and several other similar articles all appear to reference a NASA press release that is about the technology in general. The mission-specific NASA reference I found[1] says they will transmit a pre-recorded video "in the lunar vicinity" at 4k using the O2O system, so I would guess this claim of a "livestream" is just misstated.

[1]: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/a2-reference...

The idealist in me says we should still build a simple to use publishing and discovery system for hypertext that can be self-hosted and self-networked for the day the next generations realize they need it (authoritarian control of the Internet, collapse of social media, infrastructure instability, climate apocalypse, whatever). I suppose my idealism is still pretty pessimistic, but then it is Monday.

I'm not sure that's the right answer here, but I think it ticks a lot boxes for the state.

Reading between the lines of the summary a bit, it sure sounds like NASA program leadership was essentially doing pro bono PR for ol' pal Boeing at the expense of crew safety to placate Boeing's feeling of SpaceX being NASA's new favorite. Followed by Boeing again falling on the sea of sharp daggers held by their army of subcontractors.

That said, the announcement of this mishap reclassification does have a certain fleeting, bias-shaped odor, given Isaacman's proximity to Musk.

https://apnews.com/article/faa-el-paso-texas-air-space-close...

Pentagon wanted to test the new laser but didn't give FAA enough information to assure safety of the NAS and civilian aviation (when, where, effects, etc.) so they felt forced to pull the big TFR lever. They fired the laser of at who knows what and then FAA lifted the TFR.

There was still hardware redundancy though. Operation of the plane's elevator switched to a secondary computer. Presumably it was also running the same vulnerable software, but they diverted and landed early in part to minimize this risk.

So not just redundancy but layers of redundancy.

g, the net acceleration from gravity and the Earth's rotation is what is 9.8m/s² at the surface, on average. It varies slightly with location and altitude (less than 1% for anywhere on the surface IIRC), so "it's 9.8 everywhere" is the model that's wrong but good enough a lot of the time.