Artemis II, Around the Moon and Back: Wow

As I said when the Artemis II mission started, this is a big deal. Not an Easter-level big deal, but a big deal nonetheless.

Four of us — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — have gone back to the Moon.

They set a record, going 252,756 miles from Earth: farther than Apollo 13 crew’s 248,655 miles, back in 1970. But they didn’t land. So maybe I should say ‘back toward the Moon’.

Either way, as I said, it’s a big deal.

I’ve been following NASA’s live coverage of the Artemis II mission since they left.

The coverage has been 24-7, but I’ve taken the occasional break: for sleep, daily prayers, time each evening when I chat with our oldest daughter, for example. Plus all Wednesday afternoon, which wasn’t routine.

I spent Wednesday afternoon going to St. Cloud, a town about an hour down the road, for some medical stuff; and that’s another topic for another time.

Anyway, the effort of will it’s taken me to do something other than follow NASA coverage tells me that I’ve been very interested in our return to the Moon.

Science, Adventure, and Getting Bags Packed

Artemis II has had its share of awe, wonder, and collecting information about the Moon, the spacecraft, and the crew.

As NASA has been saying, this is a test flight.

Getting more information about the Moon mattered during Artemis II. But the main point this time has been learning everything possible about how both spacecraft and crew perform before going back with a lander.

That’s new and exciting.

On the other hand, the mission has had its share of more-or-less-familiar routine.

Thursday, for example, the crew was preparing for their return to Earth.

Folks doing NASA coverage pointed out that the process was like packing up after a camping trip. Looked like it, too, apart from all that high-tech equipment and microgravity: ‘down’ being more a matter of choice than an enforced obligation.

Artemis Program: Not Just Like Apollo

The Artemis II mission’s crew named their spacecraft Integrity.

The name is new, but the habit of naming isn’t: Apollo 11 Command Module’s name was Columbia.

Integrity looks a bit like the Apollo spacecraft, too, and has the same general inside layout.

But Integrity’s displays and controls look a whole lot simpler. The Apollo crew faced an impressive array of instruments and switches. Folks piloting Integrity are looking at three screens and a few dozen switches. Plus devices that remind me of notebooks I remember from the 1980s.

Something New: the Science Evaluation Room

Science has been a part of every mission to the Moon, but this mission has something new. Quite a few things new, actually.

At the moment I’m thinking of the Science Evaluation Room, or SER, near Johnson Spaceflight Center’s Mission Control Room in Houston.

There’s more to SER than just having a room full of science nerds and information tech.

For one thing, I was hearing a lot of back-and-forth conversation as Integrity went around the moon. The folks near the moon were noticing things and asking questions of the ones back on Earth, and vice-versa.

That sort of thing happened during the Apollo missions, of course. We’re humans, humans are social creatures, so we chew over information. It’s what we do.

What’s different this time around is that sharing information, raising questions, and following up on ‘oh, look at that’ items seems to be baked into mission procedure. I like it. A lot.

Reentry: A Bit Different This Time

Folks at NASA figure that if there’d been anyone aboard the Artemis I Orion capsule, they’d have made it back okay.

On the other hand, the Orion’s heat shield had unexpectedly peeled away in a few spots. It’s called “char loss”.

That’s why Integrity’s reentry is being handled a little differently. Instead of skipping over the top of Earth’s atmosphere the way Artemis I did, they’ll come in a little steeper. That way, they spend less time slowing from 24,000-plus miles per hour to 19 miles an hour. More to the point, it puts less combined heat stress on the heat shield.

Later Artemis missions will have a new sort of heat shield, but turning ideas into hardware takes time.

Ionization and Radio Signals: Vexing

During reentry, the Artemis II crew will be out of touch with folks on the ground.

It’s the usual issue. Reentering spacecraft go so fast, Earth’s air doesn’t have time to flow out of the way.

Instead, it gets compressed, heats up, and gets so hot that its atoms don’t have the usual number of electrons. The effect is called “ionization”.

Ionization affects both how radar ‘sees’ the spacecraft, and stops radio communication from getting past the ionized gas.

Being out of touch during such a vital part of a mission is a trifle vexing. Folks have been working at ways to get signals through that sheath of ionized gas. But so far, we just have to wait until the ionization goes away.

Slowing Down: FAST

I heard that Integrity will cover a bit over 1,700 miles from “entry interface”, 400,000 feet up, where it starts slowing from — never mind the numbers.

When the Artemis II crew re-enter Earth’s atmosphere, they’ll be traveling very, very fast. A little over a dozen minutes later, they’ll be floating off the coast of San Diego. Along the way, they experience about 3.9 g. In other words, they feel as if they weigh almost four times what they normally do.

Acceleration — deceleration, in this case — like that is tolerable. But it’s not at all comfortable, which is another reason I suspect space tourism will remain a niche industry for a long time. And that’s yet another topic.

A New Chapter

I’m writing most of this Friday afternoon, while Artemis II is still on its way back.

The astronauts have made their final burn: a slight course correction to get them heading for the right spot over the Pacific. If all goes well, Integrity will be in the water at about seven minutes past seven p.m., CDT, Minnesota’s time zone.

Helicopters from the USS John P. Murtha will be heading heading toward them, near San Diego; and we’ll be that much close to having people working on the Moon.

“Exciting”? Yes, definitely. For me, at any rate. And, I very strongly suspect, for anyone who realizes that we’re at the beginning of a new chapter in humanity’s saga.

I’ll wrap this up with links: first, to what I’ve said about this sort of thing before; finally, to some of the resources I used while putting this together:¹

• “Another Step in a Long, Long Journey” (April 1, 2026)
  • Looking Ahead, Thinking Back
• “Boeing Starliner in Context: Apollo, Shuttles, and American History” (May 11, 2024)
  • “Ad Astra Per Aspera”: “To the Stars Through Difficulties”
    • Lilienthal’s Letter, a Lunar Plaque, and a Work in Progress
• “Europa, Mars, and Someday the Stars” (September 30, 2016)
  • Humanity’s Future: Looking Up
    • On the Move: 1,900,000 Years and Counting
    • Toba and the Next Planet

¹ A hodgepodge of ‘for more information’ stuff:

• Wikipedia
  • Apollo 13 [an explosion on the way out encouraged ingenuity]
  • Apollo command and service module
    • Cabin interior arrangement
  • Artemis program
  • Artemis I
  • Artemis II
  • Atmospheric entry
  • Boost-glide [AKA skip reentry]
  • Communications blackout
    • Spacecraft reentry
  • g-force
  • Ionization
  • Mission control center
  • Notebook computer
  • Orion (spacecraft)
  • Shock wave
• NASA
  • Artemis
  • Crew Systems [Orion crew module]
  • “NASA Answers Your Most Pressing Artemis II Questions”
    Cheryl Warner (April 4, 2026)
  • “Artemis II Crew Members Name Their Orion Spacecraft”
    Rachel H. Kraft (September 24, 2025)
  • “NASA Identifies Cause of Artemis I Orion Heat Shield Char Loss”
    Erika Peters (December 5, 2024)
  • “Theoretical and Experimental Studies of Reentry Plasmas”
    Michael G. Dunn, Sang-Wook Kang; Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, Inc. (April 1973)
  • “On the Decrease of the Radar Cross Section of the Apollo Command Module Due to Reentry Plasma Effects”
    John W. Marini (June 1967)
• Other
  • pyrolysis [chemical changes caused by heat], merriam-webster.com