Artemis II: Greatness Is Still Possible

The view from Artemis II of the Moon eclipsing the Sun.

Fifteen years ago I got up before dawn to watch the Space Shuttle Atlantis land for the last time. I called it "the end of the beginning." I meant it optimistically but I wasn't entirely sure I believed it.

Jennifer's brother lives across the country and is a bit of a space geek like me.  He sent me a heads-up regarding the launch window 10 days ago. I watched the SLS lift off April 1st and then checked the NASA app on my iPad every day for updates until last night, when Orion splashed down off San Diego right on schedule. Mission Control called it a perfect bullseye.

The rocket was the SLS — Space Launch System — NASA's latest heavy-lift rocket system, and it performed exactly as it should. Perhaps the biggest record Artemis II set was for distance. On April 6, the crew of Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen reached 252,756 miles from Earth — farther than any human being has ever traveled. The speeds are staggering too, 24,664 miles per hour at peak reentry.

Victor Glover said the highlight for him was watching a solar eclipse from beyond the Moon (see photo above). The sun disappearing behind the lunar disc, viewed from a position no human had occupied since Nixon was president. I find it somewhat remarkable that this is the kind of thing that can still happen in 2026 and barely penetrate the public consciousness. In 2019 I wrote a post about the space malaise — how astonishing things were occurring constantly and essentially no one was paying attention. That hasn't entirely changed. But the malaise has a limit. You can't completely ignore humans flying around the Moon.

Not everything went perfectly. The heat shield needs examination. A valve in the service module needs redesign. The toilet — I'll leave that one alone. These are not small items and the schedule pressure toward Artemis III is real. But the mission objective was to test Orion in deep space and bring four people home alive. Both accomplished. Spacecraft named Integrity by the crew, which turned out to be less ironic than it might have been.

Image credit.

Orion is what fifty years of hard lessons look like built into a single vehicle. Apollo got to the Moon on guidance computers less powerful than a pocket calculator, with no redundancy to speak of and margins that made engineers sweat. The Shuttle was arguably more complex as a machine, but it never left low Earth orbit — it was never designed to. Orion is designed for the environment beyond all of that: deep space radiation that would compromise lesser systems, reentry at 25,000 miles per hour and 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit because you're coming in from lunar distance rather than orbit, communications architecture for a place where there are no satellites to lean on, five independent flight computers because out there a single point of failure can be a death sentence. It carries everything we learned from Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, the Shuttle, and the ISS about what space does to machines and to people.

Actually, the Shuttle was more complex as a machine, but complexity was also its vulnerability — it was trying to be a spacecraft, a glider, an orbital truck, and a crew vehicle simultaneously. Orion does one thing. It carries four humans to deep space and brings them home. Its computers are 400 times faster than the Shuttle's, run four independent parallel systems, and the whole vehicle is designed to be ten times safer during ascent and reentry. Every redundancy, every system, every engineering decision points at a single focused mission. That's a different kind of achievement. Not more complex. More deliberately, ruthlessly capable.

In 2011 I wrote that the privatization of space was probably the next step. Artemis III's lunar lander is scheduled to be a SpaceX Starship. China is still out there, still serious, still the political pressure that keeps the funding from collapsing entirely. Some things are unchanged.

In 2011, I wrote a farewell to the Shuttle program in what felt like a period of American retreat.  But the direction was always correct. "Out there. Thataway." To borrow from James T. Kirk. Slower than hope, faster than despair. Fifty-four years is a long time. It is not five hundred years. Humanity still explores. This remains a simple historical fact.

I didn't get up before dawn this time. I read about it this morning with my green tea. But I felt the same thing I felt watching Atlantis roll to a stop at Kennedy Space Center — something continuous with every departure from every shore, every time someone pointed at the horizon and went.

Greater things still await, in spite of Trump and Iran and AI and the culture wars and the rest of this crazy world. This morning I smiled as I read about the return splashdown. This is the beginning of something new. The tenuous discovery of our place in the universe takes another step. We are "Go" for human lunar exploration and, perhaps, colonization. This is a moment of unfuckingdeniable human greatness.

See nine hours of lunar flyby footage here.

17 minutes of great overview video here.