Saketh's Blog

Last week, for the first time in over 50 years, humans traveled to the Moon and came back.

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, splashed down off the coast of San Diego on April 10, completing a nearly 10-day journey that took them 252,756 miles from home. That’s not a typo. Over a quarter of a million miles.

Artemis II was the first crewed flight beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. If you were born after 1972, no human had ever done this in your lifetime. Until now.

What actually happened up there

The crew launched on April 1 from Kennedy Space Center with 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. They named their Orion spacecraft Integrity, which feels about right for a mission that’s been years in the making and had a lot riding on it.

This wasn’t just a joyride though. The crew tested life support systems, confirmed Orion can sustain humans in deep space, and took manual control of the spacecraft during piloting demonstrations to validate its handling. That data will directly inform how NASA runs docking and rendezvous operations on future missions when crews need to transfer to lunar landers. They also ran science experiments studying how human tissue responds to microgravity and deep space radiation, because understanding what the body goes through out there is a prerequisite for anything more ambitious down the road.

They broke a record too

Their lunar flyby took them farther than any humans have ever traveled, surpassing the distance record set by the Apollo 13 crew in 1970. They flew 694,481 miles in total.

Apollo 13, of course, only got that far because something went terribly wrong. Artemis II got there because everything went right.

The small detail worth knowing about

The mission carried a zero-gravity indicator, a little plush toy called Rise that floats in the cabin to show the crew when they’ve reached weightlessness. It was designed by an eight-year-old from Mountain View, California, chosen from over 2,600 submissions across more than 50 countries. The design was inspired by the Apollo 8 Earthrise photo and shows the Moon wearing Earth like a baseball cap.

Commander Wiseman was supposed to leave Rise behind in the spacecraft for later retrieval. He said he felt bad leaving it, so he tucked it into his dry bag and brought it home. Honestly, same.

What comes next

It’s worth being clear that this was a test flight. A hugely significant one, but a test flight. The next mission, Artemis III, will test integrated operations with commercially built Moon landers in low Earth orbit. After that, NASA is targeting early 2028 for the first actual lunar landing, the first time a human steps onto the surface since 1972.

What just happened was the dress rehearsal. And by all accounts, it went really well.