The astronauts aboard the Artemis II moon mission woke up on Friday, their third day in space, with a question: Could someone at mission control in Houston please tell them where to find the electric shaver? Spaceflight is profound. This afternoon, the crew is expected to break the record for how far any human has ever been from Earth. Chronicling the mission, I’ve had feelings of stomach-churning terror, heady elation and a dose of sadness about some who are no longer here to experience it all with us. But there are many mundane moments. Three men and a woman are piled into something that, most of the time, looks like the inside of a rental storage unit. Sometimes, their biggest concern is figuring out which locker the shaver is stored in. (I don’t fault them; I would not want to look like a scrub with the whole world watching me make history, either.) The internet has lit up with amusement over such everyday issues. Reid Wiseman, the mission’s commander, has been having problems getting email over Outlook. Relatable. Christina Koch can’t get the Bluetooth to sync. Happens to everyone. Down on Earth, NASA’s representatives are there for it all. “Sometimes we have to do some I.T. support,” Judd Frieling, a NASA flight director, said on Saturday when asked about Wiseman’s email issues. Among the innovations on this mission: Artemis II includes the first-ever space toilet (the astronauts’ predecessors used “waste collection bags”). And as with many innovations, the Universal Waste Management System, as it is officially called, did not work perfectly at first, leading to a lot back and forth with ground control about managing it. For all these humdrum tasks, the astronauts appear to be in awe of what they get to do. You could hear the thrill in Victor Glover’s voice as he piloted the spacecraft through a maneuvering demonstration on Wednesday night, and as he described his feelings about humanity and planet Earth ahead of Easter Sunday. “You have this oasis, this beautiful place where we get to exist together,” he said. The toilet, the email and the shaver will certainly recede from focus as the astronauts make history this evening. Some of our stomach churning may return as the astronauts disappear for a while behind the moon’s far side — NASA expects to have no contact with the spacecraft for about 40 minutes. The crew should reach a distance of 252,760 miles from Earth, breaking the record of 248,655 set by Apollo 13 in 1970. Our journalists are covering it all live. Join us here to see what they have to say.
One Way Home
On Thursday, a day after lifting off and orbiting the Earth, the Artemis II mission fired up its engines and flew away from our planet. That was the last time this mission used its engines in a major way. It’s a neat trick of Newtonian mechanics that the crew will essentially travel around the moon and drift home without again using the engines in any meaningful way. It’s almost as if you went on a 10-day road trip, hit the gas once on Day 2, and then barely put your foot on the pedal again and somehow managed to get your car back into your own driveway eight days later. This is called a “free return” trajectory. The engineers who designed the flight path have essentially aimed the spacecraft at a point in space where they know the moon will pass by. As the vehicle goes around the moon, the influence of gravity will propel Artemis II back toward Earth. That means even if the vehicle’s propulsion system failed, the spacecraft could get home. ONE NUMBER 23— That’s the percentage by which President Trump’s White House proposes cutting NASA’s budget. The administration’s proposed budget for 2027 is $18.8 billion — $5.6 billion less than the agency’s allotment for this year. The cuts were proposed on Friday, two days after Artemis II launched. Casey Dreier of the Planetary Society, a nonprofit organization that advocates space science and exploration, said Congress was likely to ignore the proposed cuts, as it did last year. How to Watch the Artemis II Lunar FlybyTonight’s main event — when the astronauts go around the moon’s far side and fall out of radio contact with Earth — is expected to occur at 6:47 p.m., Eastern time. But NASA will start livestreaming coverage at 1 p.m. on nearly every digital media service you can imagine. You can watch the event live on NASA’s YouTube channel, the NASA+ streaming service on both its website and on smart TVs, and the agency’s X account. That video stream can also be watched here on The Times’s website, where our expert journalists in Houston and elsewhere will provide updates, commentary and context about the mission. QuizScientists think an extremely expensive resource that is useful for futuristic technologies like fusion reactors and quantum computers may be found on the moon. Which is it?
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