Around the Moon again

At 6:35 p.m. on April 1, an SLS rocket lifted Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canada's Jeremy Hansen off a Kennedy Space Center pad. Five days later their Orion capsule rounded the far side of the Moon, lost radio contact for forty minutes, and at its peak sat 252,756 miles from home — past the mark Apollo 13 set in 1970, and farther than any human has ever been. They splashed down in the Pacific on April 11.

The last time a human being saw the Moon fill the window, the crew came home in December 1972.

It is the first time people have left low Earth orbit in fifty-four years, since the last Apollo crew came home in December 1972. Nobody alive under that age has watched humans go to the Moon in real time. Artemis II is a test flight — no landing, just a loop and a return — but it is the rehearsal that has to work before NASA can put a crew back on the surface.

The flight was quietly shaped by its predecessor. Artemis I, the uncrewed 2022 run, came back with a heat shield that charred unevenly, so engineers scrapped the planned dramatic skip-reentry for a steeper, simpler dive — caution rewriting the trajectory of the crewed flight. The crew also spent part of the mission thawing a frozen clog in the toilet's vent lines with onboard heaters. The hard part of going back is not the rocket; it is the thousand mundane things that have to not fail at once.