In the long human effort to extend civilization beyond Earth, the hardest problems are rarely the dramatic ones — they are the quiet, technical ones, like teaching two machines to find each other in the dark. NASA's CAPSTONE 02 mission, launching in 2027, will send a pair of satellites to lunar orbit to practice the precise rendezvous and autonomous navigation that crewed Artemis missions will depend upon. Building on a 2022 proof of concept, this sequel asks not merely whether the idea works, but whether it works reliably enough to trust human lives to it. It is, at its core, the unglamorous