NASA is returning humans to the moon.
The agency’s Artemis II mission is scheduled to launch Wednesday, sending four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the moon.
These astronauts — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Hammock Koch from NASA and Jeremy Hansen from the Canadian Space Agency — will be the first people to fly inside NASA’s Orion spacecraft as it launches atop the agency’s Space Launch System rocket.
They won’t land on the moon, but they will be the first humans to leave low-Earth orbit in more than 50 years.
The Artemis II mission will bring diversity and international partners into deep space. Its crew will have a unique vantage to observe the far side of the moon, and they will ensure Orion can keep humans safe before a later Artemis flight returns astronauts to the lunar surface.
It’s a big mission for a big year in America.
“We’re going 250,000 miles from planet Earth, and it just so coincidentally happens to be the 250th anniversary of the United States of America,” Wiseman said during a news conference. “It definitely gets us fired up.”
Here’s more about Artemis II, its astronauts and what the mission hopes to accomplish.
Read on for more, it’s a gift link. I admit this snuck up on me, in part because of everything everywhere all at once going on right now, and in part because I’m honestly not sure there’s anything that could happen with Donald Trump’s name attached to it that could make me feel joy. That’s not fair to the astronauts or to everyone at NASA and the Canadian Space Agency who are making this happen – if you want to claim I’m a Trump-Derangement-Syndrome-addled broken joyless loser because of this, I won’t pay any attention to you, but you can make the claim if it makes you happy – but welcome to our present. I promise I’ll try my best to drown out the distractions and enjoy what is legitimately cool about this. I probably won’t have a Krispy Kreme Artemis II donut, though, not unless someone brings a box of them to the office. Shipley’s, man, what were you doing? I first noted this mission and crew back in 2023, when the launch date was supposed to have been November 2024. That would have been a hell of a thing. NPR, CNN, and Space.com have more.
NASA lost hundreds of millions of dollars and almost 4,000 employees, including many of its most experienced scientist, engineers, and critical staff, when Elon Musk’s DOGE took a dull hatchet to the agency. The anti-science zealots in the Trump administration have been purging qualified people in favor of hacks and sycophants since day one. I really hope the people responsible for the success of this mission are not cut from the same cloth as Musk, Hegseth, Bondi, McMahon, Noem, Gabbard, Mullin, Patel, Kennedy et al.
@Woah…. kinda.
“Around 870 to 3,000+ employees left in various rounds of buyouts and early retirement offers intended to reduce the need for layoffs.”
You/we can blame DOGE for that 4K figure, but the reality is, the folks who took the early and mid-year DRP (deferred resignation program) option left of their own accord, not because they were forced out via firing or laid off. The problem at NASA, as well as all the other government agencies, is that DRP, for the most part, ‘took’ the seasoned, tenured, most knowledgeable people who were already eligible to retire or just didn’t want to deal with the bureaucratic bullshit any more, and left in place the ‘newbies’ who needed to remain employed..
@ C.L. – “Take this buyout or roll the dice on getting laid off” sounds like duress to me – particularly in light of Vought’s stated desire to “traumatize” the Federal workforce.
@Mollusk – I’ve worked for the Fed for going on four decades. No one who took the DRP at my office (and we lost roughly 40% Staffing in my department) took it due to a fear of being laid off. They either had the years in and could have retired anyway, said ‘F It’, I’m tired of this bureaucratic bullshit’, or said ‘F It, my passions lie elsewhere’. If you took the DRP in March (you had to complete your ‘application’ on Feb 10th), you remained on the books and got paid until Sept 30 without having to do a thing – plenty of time to pursue other interests or pursue none at all.
Was the process designed to reduce the size of govt ? Absolutely, but what’s happened is that you now have the work being done by individuals without 30+ years of experience.
@C.L. – Thanks for the clarification – you’re certainly closer to the fire than I am.