It’s a go.
Launches about half past midnight my time, so I’ll most likely be well off into log sawing land.
It’s not that what Artemis II is going to do hasn’t been done before. It’s that it’s emblematic of the ability to pick yourself up and dust yourself off. I can relate.
And yes, being as 2026 is way different from 1968 from a media and technology perspective, NASA will stream everything, except for the 45 or so minutes blackout once they’re behind the Moon on the far side. It may be the biggest internet stream in history so far.
All four of the Artemis II crew were born in the second half of the 1970s. Like a certain someone I know.
4/4
Click to enlarge. This is a screenshot from earlier today, inside the capsule, as it was around 60% of the way to the Moon.
This is a surreal image.
First off, about “that.” I’ve been too happy about the fact that this mission is even happening and so far has been successful to let myself get my usual disgruntled about the affirmative action of it all. I’ll sperg out maybe sometime later.
But that’s not what jumps out at me.
The last time any human beings were this far away from Earth was of course the final Apollo mission, 17, in December 1972.
One is wearing an Apple Watch and doodling around on a tablet. The other is wearing an Under Armour shirt and is wearing some sort of FitBit on his wrist.
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Under Armour. All companies that did not exist the last time humans were that far from Earth.
Apple’s 50th anniversary of founding was in fact on A-II’s launch day this past Wednesday. Microsoft, founded about a year before. Google and UA, 1996.
That’s not including the fact that there’s no way that silicon development and other technological necessities were that far along in 1972 for smart watches and tablet sized true Turing devices to exist at that time. The tablet by itself probably has more raw computing power than the entire set of computers used to power the whole Apollo program.
So it leads to the black pill in all this: Why did it take us so frickin long just to do this again with all the technological wind in our sails?
4/5
OTOH, with Microsoft..
Someone snarked that it’s the first ever software support ticket from space.
Countenance Blog 
Only five remaining living astronauts from the Apollo program, ranging in age from 90 to 96, Buzz Aldrin being that 96. Yeah, it’s been awhile.
Re the first woman (Christina Koch) to voyage beyond low Earth orbit and orbit the Moon.
She is 47 years old, meaning that if she has had children, she has had all the children she’s going to have. If Artemis II turns out to be a tragedy, it will affect the human population trajectory zero.
However, if humanity is to become a truly space-habiting species, this was inevitably going to have to happen. Remember, no procreation without fertile girls and women, full stop.
It’s why British colonization brought women along from the jump, to make sure that the men got with their own women instead of indigenous women. In contrast to Spain.
On the flip side, experiments with mice in space have been less than encouraging in terms of the ability for mammals to have healthy and normal procreation in zero gravity environments.
Late update and self-reply, and relevant news.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/human-spaceflight/menstruation-in-space-will-be-studied-for-1st-time-with-operation-period
I looked up when John Glenn (1921-2016) orbited the Earth, first time it was done. It was on February 20, 1962. The flight lasted four hours and 55 minutes. I remember it well. I was in the Sixth Grade.
We listened to the radio coverage start to finish in our home room. I recall Glenn’s first orbit. It was assumed he could land back on Earth, but told Control, “Go, Go.”
After his second orbit, Glenn again said, “Go, Go.” I was in awe of the nerve that John Glenn had. After the third orbit, he came down back to Earth.
It was a very big event at the time.
First paragraph is even more poignant because if you have any conscious memory of the final Apollo mission at all, you have to be (whatever age you were that you could start absorbing news) plus 53 years 4 months.
Though he makes a slight error. SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn in 2024 peaked at 870 miles from Earth, which at time was the first time since A17 that any humans were any further than 250 miles away.
https://x.com/anishmoonka/status/2039467828693315951
Something else I missed that someone else brought up. Just as the six remaining who either walked on or orbited the Moon are now between 90-96 yo, anyone who worked in any meaningful scientific or engineering way on Terra Firma with the Apollo program is also pretty old by now, and presumably every single one of them is retired. Assume you had some fresh out of college 22 year old working on A17 in ’72. That makes him born in ’50, and 76 years old this year. That is probably as “young” as it gets, most were significantly older.
Which means that NASA has nobody left who has any experience coordinating and organizing such long road trips. No institutional experience, which is just that valuable.
Which in turn is one of the items of importance of A-II. That we re-learn how to walk, so to speak. (Just as I had to do literally et al, relatively recently. That’s why I take A-II rather personally, in the metaphor of getting up and off the ground.) Plus re-build the institutional experience and inertia to where it’s a permanent fixture at NASA.
We have to get back into the habit of being able to do half million mile roadtrips as a matter of second nature. If we want to go to more distant attractions.
I noted in the post about one of them wearing an Apple Watch. I looked it up, and the two way radio watch in the Dick Tracy cartoons wasn’t introduced until 1946, even though the DT cartoons started in 1931.
Something to notice about the Artemis II telemetry.
The rate at which it is moving towards the Moon (according to the data) is much slower than the rate at which it is moving away from the Earth.
Ordinarily, that would not be possible. If you’re going from city A to city B at 60 mph, then you would get 60 miles more distant from city A and also 60 miles closer to city B with every passing hour.
Remember, this is space.
City A and city B are fixed in place (relative to the Earth).
However, the Moon is in motion, an orbital one, around the Earth.
A-II is moving at the speed it is currently moving both away from the Earth and to the general point where it will meet the Moon. But, because the Moon is in orbit around the Earth, the Moon isn’t at that rendezvous point yet, it itself is on the way there.
Which means that, as A-II has been moving away from the Earth and towards the Moon, the Moon is offset in its orbit, namely at the capsule’s right relative to moving away from the Earth. And because of that triangle geometry, that is why the distance to the Moon (measured to where the Moon actually is at the moment, not where it will be at the point of rendezvous) is decreasing more slowly than distance away from Earth.
Incidentally, this is why there are two different and both correct figures for the time it takes for the Moon to orbit the Earth. One figure is 27.3 days, the other is 29.5 days. The lower figure is called the sidereal (side+real) orbit, which is, 360 degrees by the protractor. The higher figure is called the synodic (Synod, as in assembly, think Lutheran Church Missouri Synod), which depends on three or more bodies in assembly. In this case, the Sun-Moon-Earth alignment. In the 27.3 days it takes for the Moon to go 360 degrees around the Earth, the Earth itself has orbited the Sun. Which means that the Moon needs another 2.2 days to orbit to where it returns in the perfect line between Earth and Sun (the “synod” between them). If you’re measuring orbit from new Moon to new Moon, or it even works for full Moon to full Moon.
The 2026 spin on Gil Scott Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon.”
https://x.com/MichaelARothman/status/2039383650140398036
A very sped-up simulation.
https://x.com/NASASolarSystem/status/2040922935460823546
In anticipation, Jim Lovell recorded this before he passed.
https://x.com/NASA/status/2041171245027541434
There’s this.
I also hear that NASA’s official YT stream from the Lunar flyby yesterday (early this morning my time) was one where the anchors and narrators used the number “67” in some way several times, and, predictably, the kids in the live chat went nuts.
https://x.com/latestinspace/status/2041244621859172439
Landing happened while I was asleep in a small shared hotel room in Budapest, and they nailed it on both time and location better than Nadia Comaneci. Which is really remarkable, considering, like I wrote days ago, NASA has no institutional memory on how to do these half million mile (A-II really went 694k miles) roadtrips. Not bad for first time in a long time.
Now that it’s over, it’s time for the yeahbuts and nowwhats and the whatabouts and for the other shoe to drop. Including discussing the obvious thing that I deliberately blocked out of my mind out of jubilation that A-II was even happening and going and went well.
https://www.amren.com/commentary/2026/04/are-race-and-sex-differences-relevant-for-space-travel-and-exploration/
All this expands the number of human beings who have either walked on the Moon or had some sort of rendezvous with the Moon, which in turn are the only people who have ever voyaged beyond low Earth orbit, from 24 to 28.
Furthermore, the youngest member of the Artemis II crew (Koch) was at the time of the mission older than the oldest Apollo astronaut who made it that far (Alan Shepard). Meaning that A-II’s crew are the four oldest people who have ever been to the Moon slash beyond LEO. And therefore, the oldest of the A-II crew (Weisman, 50) is the oldest individual ever. The Canadian (Hansen, 50), a few months younger.
So both Weisman and Hansen are 50. Neither one of them look it, both look significantly younger.
That’s one of the the things about humanity of recent times that you don’t notice until someone figures it out or points it out. That, in very short order, people of the same age started looking younger. 50 in 2026 doesn’t look like 50 in 1946, for example.
The cause is obvious: Post-WWII, for most first world people, there have been no extended periods of severe economic depression or mass society encompassing warfare. And thus, no massive pandemic epidemic stress causing serial chronic events. Combined with the modern economy tending to reward neoteny and later personal financial and otherwise maturity.
More space news. Obviously, humans will never be able to set foot on Venus. The only real possible human settlement of Venus will be in its orbit and high above, at about the point where the pressure is the same as Earth ground level.
However, a big step has just been taken to being able to have relatively long lasting remote probes on the surface.
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-new-computer-chip-could-finally-withstand-the-hellscape-of-venus