Humanity's next attempt to land on the Moon will be "a lot more difficult" than previous missions.
The 2026 mission to the Moon will be more challenging than previous expeditions
Charlie Duke, one of the few living astronauts to have set foot on the lunar surface, explained that the Artemis III mission to the Moon's south pole in 2026 will be far more challenging than the Apollo landings of the 1960s and 1970s as the crew will be landing a larger ship on a "rougher terrain".
Duke - who took part in the Apollo 16 mission in 1972 - told The Times newspaper: "With Artemis, the first landing mission is going to be extremely difficult. They're going into a very rough area of the Moon, the south pole region where the shadows are very deep, there are a lot of craters and hills.
"The landing site is going to have to be selected very, very carefully. And with the architecture of the mission - assembling it, fuelling it and getting it there and starting this descent - it is going to be, I think to me, a lot more difficult than Apollo was.
"Apollo was a very simple approach, with Artemis the vehicle is huge, it's 30 metres tall or more... They've got an airlock and then an elevator that they've got to deploy to get down on to the surface."