Transcription
Artemis 2 will experience something that no human has experienced ever. For more than 53 years, no human being left low Earth orbit, not once. The longest gap in exploration since we figured out how to explore. And it ended 4 days ago when a rocket carrying four astronauts punched through the Florida sky and aimed itself at the moon.
Artemis 2 is not a repeat of Apollo. It is not a sequel. The crew flying right now, Reed Weisman, Victor Glover, Christina Cook, and Jeremy Hansen are doing things inside that spacecraft that the Apollo astronauts couldn't have imagined. And some of what they're experiencing would have seemed to the engineers of 1972 like science fiction. So, what changed in half a century? Almost everything.
Start with the spacecraft itself. The Apollo command module gave its three-person crew about 210 cubic feet of habitable space. That is roughly the interior volume of a large closet. Three grown men sealed inside a closet for up to 14 days. Orion gives its four-person crew 330 cubic feet, nearly 60% more room. That's about the space of two minivans parked side by side with the seats removed. Still tight, still claustrophobic by any normal standard. But the difference between a closet and two minivans matters when you're a quarter million miles from the nearest hospital and you haven't been able to stretch your legs in a week.
The extra space isn't just about comfort. It changes what the crew can physically do. Orion has a dedicated hygiene bay with actual doors that close. There is a toilet, the universal waste management system, nearly identical to the one on the International Space Station. It collects urine and feces separately, processes them, and does so with something the Apollo astronauts never had, privacy. The Apollo crews used plastic bags, adhesive bags that they taped to their bodies, used in front of each other, and then sealed and stored inside the cabin with them for the rest of the mission. Nearly every Apollo astronaut who has spoken candidly about the experience describes it as one of the worst parts of space flight. The Artemis 2 crew will never know that particular indignity and honestly, that alone might be worth the 53 years of waiting.
Then there's exercise. Apollo astronauts didn't exercise in space. There was no room, no equipment, and on missions lasting less than 2 weeks, NASA decided the muscle and bone loss was acceptable. The Artemis 2 crew exercises every day except launch and landing days, 30 minutes each, on a device called a flywheel. It weighs about 30 lb and fits in a space roughly the size of a carry-on suitcase. It works like a yo-yo, a cable-based mechanism that provides resistance proportional to the force you put in up to 400 lb. You can row on it. You can do squats. You can do deadlifts. For context, the exercise equipment on the International Space Station weighs over 4,000 lb and takes up 850 cubic feet. The flywheel does a surprising amount of the same work in a fraction of the mass. Apollo had nothing. The crews came home weak. Some of them could barely stand. The Artemis 2 crew will come home having done deadlifts in zero gravity on their way to the moon, which is a sentence that would have sounded completely absurd to anyone alive during the Apollo program.
The rocket that put them there is a different animal, too. Apollo rode the Saturn 5, the most powerful rocket ever flown at that time, generating 7.5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. The Space Launch System that carried Artemis 2 off the pad on April 1st produces 8.8 million, 17% more. Both rockets are expendable, meaning they fly once and are gone, which feels almost quaint in an era when SpaceX lands boosters on drone ships. But SLS was not built to be economical. It was built to throw Orion and its crew toward the moon in a single launch. No orbital assembly, no refueling, no docking required to leave Earth's neighborhood. Saturn 5 did the same thing.
The difference is what sits on top. Apollo was powered entirely by fuel cells and batteries. Hydrogen and oxygen combined to produce electricity and, as a useful byproduct, drinking water. It was elegant but finite. Every watt the crew used came from a tank that was getting emptier. Orion unfurls four solar array wings after reaching space. Each one covered in photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight into electricity. The power supply is, for all practical purposes, unlimited as long as the sun is shining. This changes the psychology of the mission in a subtle way. Apollo crews were always managing consumables, always aware of the clock ticking down on their oxygen, their power, their water. Orion's crew still manages consumables. Oxygen and water don't come from solar panels, but the electrical margin is fundamentally different. The spacecraft systems can run longer, harder, and with more redundancy because the power source regenerates itself.
And the service module, the section of the spacecraft that provides propulsion, thermal control, and life support, wasn't even built in the United States. It was built by Airbus Defense and Space in Europe, provided by the European Space Agency. Apollo was an American project from the rivets up. Artemis is international by design. A Canadian astronaut is on this flight because of a treaty signed in 2020. European hardware is keeping the crew alive. The next phase of the program involves the Lunar Gateway, a space station in orbit around the moon with modules contributed by multiple countries and space agencies. The era of one nation going to the moon alone ended when Apollo ended. What replaced it is messier, slower, and more complicated. But it also means the cost, and the knowledge, and the risk are shared.
Now look at what's behind the panels. Orion's flight computers are roughly 20,000 times faster than Apollo's. 20,000. Apollo's guidance computer had about 72 KB of memory total and could execute around 40,000 instructions per second. A modern smartphone embarrasses it. Orion runs four independent computers in parallel. Each one about 25 times faster than the computers on the space station and 400 times faster than the Space Shuttles. The cockpit is entirely digital. Glass screens, software interfaces, real-time trajectory adjustments. Apollo's cockpit was analog switches, dials, physical gauges. The astronauts had to manually read instruments and calculate corrections with ground support doing most of the heavy math.
Orion can, in theory, fly itself. It demonstrated that on Artemis 1 in 2022 when the uncrewed spacecraft completed a full lunar mission and returned to Earth autonomously. That matters more than it sounds. The Apollo astronauts were, in every meaningful sense, passengers on a vehicle that required constant ground control to function. Mission Control in Houston made most of the critical decisions. Orion shifts that balance. The Artemis 2 crew has been performing manual piloting demonstrations in deep space, physically flying the spacecraft and testing how it responds, different steering modes, evaluating how the vehicle handles when a human is actively directing it. Apollo astronauts flew manually during specific phases, docking and landing, especially, but they never flew the command module through open space the way Weisman and Hansen just did. This is a spacecraft that's being designed for a future where astronauts might need to operate independently far from Earth in situations where a communication delay of even a few seconds to the moon or up to 20 minutes to Mars makes ground control useless in an emergency.
Speaking of communication, Apollo talked to Houston using radio waves, the same basic technology as an AM radio station, just pointed at the moon. It worked. The audio was scratchy, the bandwidth was narrow, and transmitting a single photograph could take minutes. Orion has that same radio capability as a backup. But its primary system for high-bandwidth data is something entirely new: laser communications. The Orion Artemis 2 optical communication system uses infrared light to transmit data back to Earth at rates that would have been unthinkable during Apollo. By the fourth day of the mission, the system had already downlinked 100 GB, including high-resolution photographs that the crew was taking through Orion's windows. Apollo's total data return from an entire mission measured in megabytes. The Artemis 2 crew is streaming high-resolution imagery from deep space in something close to real time. When Christina Cook looked back at Earth through Orion's window, and that image showed up on screens around the world within hours, that was laser communication, doing something radio never could.
The views themselves are different, too. Every Apollo mission that reached the moon flew approximately 70 miles above the surface, close enough to see individual craters, to watch the terminator line between day and night crawl across the terrain below. Artemis 2 won't get that close. When the crew makes its closest approach on the flyby, Orion will be about 4,660 miles from the lunar surface. That's a fundamentally different visual experience. Instead of skimming over the surface and seeing a narrow strip of terrain at any given moment, the Artemis 2 crew will see the entire disc of the moon at once. The whole thing, pole to pole, filling their windows. No Apollo astronaut ever had that view at closest approach.
And because of the geometry of this particular trajectory and the timing of the launch, the crew will see something no human being has ever seen with their own eyes: the Orientale Basin. It sits on the transition zone between the near side and the far side of the moon, a massive impact crater roughly 600 miles across. Robotic spacecraft have photographed it. Orbital instruments have mapped it, but no person has ever looked at it directly. The Apollo missions were planned so that the near side was illuminated during their flybys, which meant the Orientale region was always in shadow or just out of view. Artemis 2's trajectory changes that. NASA confirmed that the crew has already photographed it through Orion's windows. For the first time, a human being looked at a feature of the moon and saw something that only machines had seen before.
There's a solar eclipse coming, too. Not the kind you see from Earth, where the moon blocks the sun. This one happens when the Earth blocks the sun, as seen from the spacecraft's position behind the moon. It will last approximately 53 minutes, occurring about an hour after Earthrise. No Apollo crew experienced anything like it. The geometry never aligned. Artemis 2's trajectory was not designed to produce this eclipse, but the physics of the flyby made it inevitable, and the crew and science teams on the ground are treating it as a bonus observation opportunity. Imagine watching your home planet, a thin blue crescent, slowly slide in front of the sun while you float behind the moon in the deepest silence any human has ever known.
Reed Wiseman described the views so far as something no amount of training could have prepared him for. He said, "You could see the entire globe from pole to pole, Africa, Europe, and if you looked closely, the Northern Lights." That was from partway through the transit. The flyby views will be something else entirely.
The mission will also break the record for the farthest distance any human has traveled from Earth. That record currently belongs to the Apollo 13 crew, not by choice. Their free-return trajectory after the oxygen tank explosion carried them 248,655 miles from home. Artemis 2 is expected to reach approximately 252,757 miles. The difference is about 4,100 miles. That might not sound like much set against a quarter million, but the symbolism is significant. Apollo 13 set that record because something went catastrophically wrong and the crew had to survive a slingshot around the moon with a crippled spacecraft. Artemis 2 will break it because the mission was designed that way from the start. The free-return trajectory, which uses the moon's gravity to bring the spacecraft home without needing a major engine burn, was Apollo 13's emergency plan. It is Artemis 2's primary flight plan. What was once a last resort is now the architecture.
And at the end of all of it, the Artemis 2 crew will face something no human has ever survived at this speed: re-entry. When Orion hits Earth's atmosphere on the way home, it will be traveling at approximately 25,000 mph. That is faster than any crewed spacecraft has ever traveled during re-entry. Faster than Apollo, faster than the Shuttle, faster than anything. The heat shield will endure temperatures approaching 5,000°F as superheated plasma wraps around the vehicle and blocks all communication. The crew will be completely alone for those minutes, unable to talk to Houston, unable to do anything except trust the engineering.
That heat shield, by the way, is carrying its own story into this mission. After Artemis 1 returned in 2022, engineers found unexpected erosion in the ablative material. Portions of the heat shield charred and flaked off in ways the models hadn't predicted. The underlying structure held. The temperatures inside stayed within limits, but the damage raised questions serious enough that NASA convened an independent review team and spent years analyzing whether the shield was safe for a crewed flight. Some engineers objected, some wanted a redesigned shield before putting humans on top of it. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman reviewed the data, met with engineers and outside experts, and gave the go-ahead. The shield flying on Artemis 2 is essentially the same design, with the understanding that changes are planned for Artemis 3. The crew knows this. They accepted the risk. Every astronaut who has ever flown has accepted some version of this bargain: the acknowledgement that the engineering is not perfect, that the margins are real but not infinite, and that exploration requires a willingness to go anyway.
The crew itself represents something Apollo never did. Victor Glover is the first person of color to travel beyond low Earth orbit. Christina Cook is the first woman. Jeremy Hansen is the first non-American citizen. Hansen is Canadian, selected through a 2020 treaty between the United States and Canada that formalized Canadian participation in the Artemis program. Apollo was exclusively American, exclusively white, and exclusively male. Not because NASA explicitly excluded anyone, but because the pipeline that produced military test pilots in the 1960s was itself exclusionary. Artemis 2 doesn't fix that history. Nothing can, but it does mean that the first humans to see the moon up close in over 50 years look more like the species they represent.
There's also a quieter experiment happening inside the cabin that Apollo never attempted. The crew is being monitored for the biological effects of deep space radiation in ways that go far beyond what any Apollo mission tracked. Radiation dosimeters, sleep pattern analysis, cardiovascular data – all of it is being recorded to understand what 10 days outside Earth's protective magnetic field does to the human body. In low Earth orbit, that magnetic field deflects most of the dangerous charged particles from deep space, trapping them in concentrated bands called the Van Allen belts. The International Space Station orbits safely below those belts. Every crewed mission since Apollo 17 has stayed below them. The Artemis 2 crew punched through both belts on the way out and will punch through them again on the way home, exposed to the very radiation those bands concentrate. Apollo astronauts did the same, but the medical monitoring was primitive by comparison. Some Apollo crews reported seeing flashes of light with their eyes closed, cosmic rays striking their retinas. We know more about what causes those flashes now. We know the risks are real and cumulative. The data from this mission will shape every deep space crew selection and mission duration limit for decades to come.
Four people are in deep space right now. That is the most humans in deep space simultaneously in the history of our species. Apollo never sent more than three beyond low Earth orbit on a single mission. Artemis 2 has four. They're eating rehydrated meals from a food warmer about the size of a briefcase. They're sleeping in bags attached to the walls of a cabin not much bigger than a walk-in closet. They're exercising on a 30 lb yo-yo. They've already seen parts of the moon that no one alive has ever seen. And by tomorrow, they will have traveled farther from Earth than any human being who came before them.
And they're doing all of it in a spacecraft that is, if we're being honest about it, still a capsule. Bigger than Apollo, smarter than Apollo, better equipped, better connected, better in almost every measurable way, but still a capsule. Still a metal shell with a heat shield on the bottom and a parachute system on the top designed to keep four people alive in the most hostile environment human beings have ever entered. The fundamental engineering problem hasn't changed since 1968. You need air, water, food, heat management, radiation shielding, a way to slow down, and a way to survive the landing. 53 years of technological progress have made every one of those systems lighter, faster, more reliable, and more capable. They haven't made any of them easy.
The Artemis 2 crew will splash down in the Pacific Ocean sometime around April 11th. Recovery ships will be waiting. Airbags will inflate around the capsule to flip it upright if it lands on its side or upside down. Another feature Apollo didn't have. Divers will approach the bobbing spacecraft, open the hatch, and help four people climb out into the sunlight. Those four people will have completed the first crewed mission beyond Earth orbit in more than half a century. They will have tested every system that future crews will depend on to actually land on the moon. They will have seen things that change how they understand their own planet, their own smallness, their own luck at being alive on the one rock in the solar system where you can breathe outside.
When the Apollo astronauts came home, they came home as conquerors. The moon had been the target and they hit it. When the Artemis 2 crew comes home, they'll come home as pathfinders. The moon isn't the destination anymore. It's the first stop. Everything this crew is testing – the life support, the navigation, the heat shield, the communications, the exercise equipment, the toilet – all of it is being validated. Not just for lunar missions, but for the journey that comes after: Mars. Orion has already been evaluated for a 1,000-day mission profile when paired with additional habitation modules. The data the Artemis 2 crew is collecting right now, including how their bodies respond to deep space radiation, how they sleep, how their cardiovascular systems adapt, will directly shape the spacecraft and the mission plans that send the first humans to another planet. Apollo proved we could leave. Artemis is figuring out how to stay gone.
Right now, as you hear this, four human beings are closer to the moon than anyone has been since December of 1972. They're looking out windows that are bigger and clearer than anything Apollo offered. They're transmitting images home at speeds that make Apollo's radio look like smoke signals. They're flying a spacecraft that can think for itself. Built from 3D printed parts and powered by the sun, carrying the lessons of 53 years of trial and error. Lessons paid for in failure and patience and money and time. They are not repeating what Apollo did. They're picking up a thread that was dropped in 1972, pulling it forward and weaving something new.
And tomorrow, they fly behind the moon for 40 minutes. No signal will reach them. No voice from Earth, no data link, no connection to anything human except the three other people floating beside them in a capsule 250,000 miles from home. The Apollo astronauts knew that silence, too. It is the one experience that hasn't changed. The moon still blocks the signal. The void is still the void. And for those 40 minutes, the Artemis 2 crew will understand something that no amount of technology can mediate: the ancient, irreducible fact of being alone in the dark, farther from home than any road or wire or beam of light can follow. That silence is the same. Everything else is new.
Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.