It's going to look silly when the two spacecraft dock in lunar orbit and then the larger of the two craft descends to the surface. It's definitely going to cause a "wait, why are we..." moment for anyone watching.

I really wonder about the politics of making that "wait..." moment happen sooner.

@DanHomerick I see people saying it's a waste of money to fly SLS for this purpose...

Friends have I got news for you about using SLS for any purpose!

@Mqrius I didn't realise that they only have three of the interim Delta upper stage, to use before the much more powerful exploration Exploration Upper Stage.

I know people are speculating that you could launch SLS and Orion to LEO without it, and then you'd have the last Delta upper stage for Artemis 3.5 (the one to actually land on the moon), but just expanding on Dan's point of the politics - imagine if you didn't have that stage and the EUS was two years away, what might you do?

@JoshuaWilkes I don't know but it'd probably make a mess of all the Artemis 3 markets that didn't put caveats in their descriptions :D