My grandparents told me stories about watching the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. My grandfather talked about experiencing it while we sat outside and watched the Hale-Bopp comet scream by in 1997. As a child, I had always hoped that I would one day get to experience a moon mission in the way that he had.
On April 1, 2026, I finally did.
I set up the TV in The Lab at the Sandpoint library to stream the entire event from 8 a.m. until about an hour after the launch around 4:30 p.m. Anyone interested was welcome to stop in and watch NASA’s livestream of the Artemis II launch, and several people did!
Finally, at 3:24 p.m., a small group of people gathered to watch history be made. It was the first moon mission in half a century. Some wanted to watch an explosion, the rest of us were taking in history.
The crew of Artemis II (L-R, back row): Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen. Commander Reid Wiseman is front and center. Photo courtesy of NASA
The launch went perfectly. It took off at the beginning of its launch window even after an expected delay. Every system performed its job exactly as intended and, within 49 minutes, the Orion spacecraft had entered a high Earth orbit where it would stay for another day until making a series of burns that would propel it toward the moon.
By the time you’re reading this, the Orion spacecraft is either on its way back to Earth or has already landed and this article is old news.
The Orion spacecraft is set to splash down in the Pacific Ocean on Friday, April 10.
The Artemis program began in 2017 with the long-term goal of putting humans on the moon for the first time since 1972. The program is regarded as a stepping stone for humanity’s long-term space exploration and expansion, with the goal of colonizing Mars.
The moon is an attractive target for human operations for many reasons. Its uninhabitable nature is extremely conducive to human expansion, as colonizing the moon isn’t going to have a detrimental effect on preexisting flora or fauna, seeing as there is none on the moon. The moon has a weaker gravitational pull than the Earth as well, while still being within the Earth’s gravitational sphere of influence. This means that anything launching from the moon has to do a lot less work to get into orbit and move around the solar system. The lack of a noticeable atmosphere on the moon also factors into this, as a rocket leaving its surface isn’t trying to push air out of the way in order to ascend.
Artemis III will take place in 2027 to test docking the Orion spacecraft to the Starship HLS or the Blue Moon Lander, while the first crewed mission landing humans on the moon since 1972 will take place with Artemis IV in 2028. Subsequent missions will progressively establish a human presence on the lunar surface by setting up structures. These structures are designed to be somewhat modular, inflatable and radiation shielded — likely partially submerged to allow the lunar regolith (the dust and small rock debris covering the surface) to do the heavy lifting when it comes to radiation shielding.
The colonization portion of these missions will borrow from virtually every trade on Earth — construction, plumbing, coding, 3-D printing and design. Agriculture will also take center stage for maintaining a self-sustaining colony and will mark the first time ever that plants will grow on the moon.
At launch, Artemis II was loaded with 733,000 gallons of fuel. To give some perspective, an Olympic swimming pool holds around 660,480 gallons of water. Unlike an Olympic swimming pool, however, the fuel loaded into Orion was pure hydrogen and oxygen cooled and pressurized until it reached a liquid state. H2O isn’t very flammable, but hydrogen and oxygen on their own are extremely flammable, especially under pressure.
The core stage burned through 537,000 gallons of fuel in about eight and a half minutes. If that were gasoline, it could have carried a Jeep Grand Cherokee around 14 million miles and cost at least $2.2 million. Liquid oxygen has a range of about $6-$9 per gallon, while liquid hydrogen has a cost of about $14 per gallon.
In case you ever wanted to see what $10 million of fire looks like, just watch a rocket launch!
It’s easy to attach arbitrary dollar amounts to launches like this. It’s more difficult to quantify the financial gain from missions like Artemis. It’s projected that the return of investment from the Apollo missions was as high as $15 to every $1 spent on the program. Apollo had a budget of $25.8 billion in 1973 dollars, which is somewhere between $175 billion-$280 billion today. Like the moon, that’s a whole lot of cheddar.
The science goals of the Artemis II mission are primarily to facilitate the future launches. This mission was to test the life support systems, the radiation shielding and the effects of long-term spaceflight over the course of a week and a half. The astronauts identified potential landing locations for future missions and relayed color variations on the far side of the moon — the first time this has happened for half a century.
Even cooler, this is the first time humankind has been able to ride along with the crew, their entire journey captured by smartphones and an ultra-HD DSLR camera.
2028 can’t arrive fast enough.
Stay curious, 7B.
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