NASA’s Artemis II astronauts put spacecraft systems to the test on 10‑day mission
NEWS | 03 April 2026
Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. [CLIP: NASA commentator Derrol Nail counts down the launch of Artemis II: “And here we go. Ten, nine, eight, seven—RS-25 engines lit—four, three, two, one. Booster ignition. And liftoff! The crew of Artemis II now bound for the moon. Humanity’s next great voyage begins.”] Pierre-Louis: On Wednesday evening, after multiple delays, the Artemis II mission to go around the moon was successfully launched. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. [CLIP: NASA administrator Jared Isaacman: “So after a brief 54-year intermission, NASA is back in the business of sending astronauts to the moon.”] Pierre-Louis: That was NASA administrator Jared Isaacman at the postlaunch news conference. Prior to this NASA had flown nine Apollo missions to the moon, with six successful landings, but this mission marks the first crewed lunar mission since 1972. The four Artemis II astronauts, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen, will not be setting foot on the moon but rather slingshotting around it, potentially going further out into space than anyone in human history. To tell us more about the successful launch and the mission, we sat down with SciAm’s senior space and physics editor, Lee Billings. He has been covering this historic moment and is here to break it all down. Hi, Lee! Lee Billings: Hi, Kendra. Pierre-Louis: So Artemis II finally launched on Wednesday. Can you talk a bit about the launch process, like, what happened? Billings: So it was actually quite seamless. There was an issue at one point with a battery that they resolved, but it really went very, very well, especially compared to prior launch attempts both for the Artemis I mission, which was three years ago, an uncrewed, and earlier launch attempts for Artemis II. All of those earlier attempts saw issues with the Space Launch System, or SLS, megarocket that boosts the Orion capsule that the crew members are in into space, where there were leaky propellants, things like liquid hydrogen leaking out, which is obviously not a good thing because liquid hydrogen is highly flammable, so it’s kind of dangerous to have near what amounts to a giant bomb that you’re sitting on top of. So this launch attempt, they had fixed most of the things that were causing the leakage problems, and they didn’t even do what’s called a “wet dress rehearsal,” which is what they typically have done in the past for these launch attempts. This is when they pump a bunch of fuel into the fuel tanks and see if it all works and if there are any leaks. They didn’t do that this time. They just filled it up and went, and it went off almost perfectly, soared into space. It was a beautiful sight, and I got a little emotional seeing it. Pierre-Louis: The mission had been previously delayed, I know, during earlier wet dress rehearsals, and I also know that there had been concerns about the heat shield. You know, this is a 10-day mission. What can we sort of expect? Billings: So I think what people need to remember amidst all the triumph and celebration and backslapping is that this is a test flight, and these astronauts are extraordinarily brave to be on this mission because lots of things could still go wrong despite the best intentions and planning of everyone involved. So there are several high-tension moments that are coming up. The first, actually, by the time listeners hear this will have already happened, which is the translunar injection burn. That’s when the Orion capsule fires its main engines for about six minutes to propel the spacecraft on its journey to the moon. And it is not going in orbit around the moon. It is instead going on what’s called a free-return trajectory, which is when it slingshots around the moon and then comes back, and it’s all gravity, baby. No one’s really firing a lot of thrusters or trying to go into orbit or even having to do huge adjustments. It’s really a very clean maneuver, and that makes it lower risk because the more you fire the engine, the more chances are that that thing could go wrong. So hopefully, that’s gonna go well. We’re recording this before the translunar injection happens. However, the thing that everyone is really concerned about is the reentry, the atmospheric reentry, because that’s when the Orion spacecraft will be coming back to the planet, I believe, at around 25,000 miles per hour—pretty fast. And it’s gonna hit the top of the atmosphere and cause a lot of friction with the atmosphere, which means there’s gonna be a big fireball that builds up around it, and the heat shield has to work perfectly to ensure that the astronauts aren’t cooked inside or that the spacecraft doesn’t disintegrate. It’s a very big issue. On the Artemis I flight, which, again, wasn’t crewed, the heat shield for that showed some unexpected problems after it came back to Earth. It did come back to Earth successfully—no hot, nasty gases got into the crew cabin for Artemis I. But there were big chunks that were missing from the heat shield when NASA engineers inspected it, in ways that they didn’t expect to see that. And so there’s been concerns that perhaps this time the heat shield may not be as robust as had been thought. NASA has not changed the heat shield; the heat shield that went on Artemis I is the exact same type that’s going on Artemis II. But what they have done is they’ve actually changed the reentry profile. And what that means is that the Orion spacecraft will actually be subjected to higher heating during its reentry than Artemis I but for less time. It will be taking a steeper angle, a steeper dive, through the atmosphere, and engineers believe that that will reduce the chance of something nasty happening. Future Artemis missions will be using a new version of the heat shield that is meant to eliminate these sorts of problems. But we have to see. Pierre-Louis: You mentioned that this is a test flight. What are sort of the goals and the hopes for this mission? Billings: So the key goals and hopes for this test flight really involve putting the Orion spacecraft through its paces, and the astronauts are already very busy doing that. For instance, pilot Victor Glover has already demonstrated that the Orion spacecraft is able to pitch and yaw and make other precise maneuvers in orbit, and that’s a key thing. It’s also testing the life-support systems of Orion and the power systems of Orion. It’s a full systems check. Another thing that will be happening on this mission is a lot of biomedical sensing that’s gonna be taking place. The astronauts will have lots of sensors on them that they’ll be using to monitor things like their exposure to cosmic radiation. They’ll be trying on their space suits and seeing how well they can move around the cabin. They’ll even be practicing how to build what’s called a shelter inside the capsule in the event of adverse space weather, some kind of solar flare or coronal mass ejection blasting billions of tons of plasma at the spacecraft while it’s in space. What that involves is they’ll actually have to get some space luggage that’s out of stowage and put it along the thinnest walls of the capsule, and hopefully, that’ll block some of the incoming radiation. But again, it’s all a test. Pierre-Louis: If this is a test, what is the ultimate goal, or, like, where is this leading us? What is this a test for? Billings: So the ultimate goal, obviously, is boots on the moon, is landing on the moon. And originally, that was supposed to happen with the Artemis III mission. Now there’s been a replan. It turns out that Artemis III is going to stay in Earth orbit, and it’s really going to practice in-orbit rendezvous with other hardware that will then be used in future missions to take astronauts to the moon and to the lunar surface. So now it’s looking like Artemis IV, which is targeted for 2028, will be the first time that U.S. astronauts once again reach the surface of the moon. Pierre-Louis: You said “once again” reach the surface on the moon. We’ve been to the moon before. What is the point of going back? Billings: And that’s a really good question. What is the point of going back to the moon? We’ve been there; we’ve done that, right? Well, the point is, in the Artemis architecture, to eventually build a permanent lunar outpost, a moon base, and that’s supposed to be around the lunar south pole. This is a relatively hard-to-reach region, much harder to reach than the equatorial regions, which is where all of the Apollo landings basically took place. But it’s probably worth going because at the lunar south pole, it seems there are resources that astronauts could use, namely water ice that exists in some permanently shadowed craters there. We don’t quite know how much ice is there, how accessible it really is, but you can take that water ice and you can turn it into water to drink or water for lunar agriculture or, perhaps most importantly, for rocket fuel—you can make rocket fuel out of that by splitting the H 2 O into the hydrogen and the oxygen. So that’s kind of a treasure trove on the moon. And another thing that’s cool about this lunar south pole is that there are rims of many of these permanently shadowed craters that seem to have water inside them. And the rims, unlike the bottoms of the craters that are all shadowy and dark, are almost always lit up by the sun. So you have very reliable solar power there, which is pretty handy. Pierre-Louis: So we wanna establish, like, a base on the moon, but to what end, I guess? Billings: So there are a lot of different ways to answer that question, and which one is satisfactory, I think, is largely subjective. For me I’m most excited about the prospects for science on the moon and how that might be enabled by having people there. There are a few different things that come to mind. One is that on the farside of the moon, which is where a lot of these craters are around the lunar south pole—the farside being the side that never really faces Earth. Because the moon is what’s called tidally locked, always turning the same face towards Earth, we have the nearside and the farside. The farside of the moon is a great place to build a radio telescope array. In particular, you can build an array there that will be able to detect faint trickles of radio waves that come from primordial hydrogen that formed very early in the universe’s life, before we even got things like stars and galaxies, all the luminous bits that we can see more easily. There was this thing called the cosmic dark age, or the cosmic dark ages, that persisted after the big bang for hundreds of millions of years, and we really don’t have much idea of what happened in that space because it’s dark. But you can see these radio waves if you build this thing on the farside of the moon, and maybe map the dark ages in a way we never could before, and learn about how galaxies and stars and all the things that eventually led to planets and people coalesced in the very first place. The reason you wanna do it on the farside is that Earth is very noisy in radio. You can’t do it on the ground because there’s this thing called the ionosphere in our atmosphere that essentially acts like a shield against a lot of these radio waves we want to detect. And if you just launch a space telescope to do it, well, it’s gonna detect a lot of chatter from the Earth. So the moon is a natural shield, a natural platform where you can do this. And that’s leaving aside other things, like figuring out how the moon really, truly formed. We had this idea that a protoplanet about the size of Mars slammed into the early Earth very early in the solar system’s life, and from the debris of that impact, that’s how the moon formed. That’s our best theory, but we don’t really know for sure. We still need more information about that. We need to understand how geologically active the moon is, when it last had volcanism, why there are still moonquakes. Something that’s so small and tiny compared to the Earth, you’d imagine that it would’ve lost most of its heat to drive geological activity long ago. Yet we know from seismometers and other experiments that were left on the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts that there are moonquakes, that in some places it seems there was kind of recent—recent being, like, the last 100 million years—volcanic activity. That’s kind of a mystery. And even beyond that, even beyond the science, there’s also this idea that if we are ever going to expand outward into space, if that’s something we want to do—again, maybe that’s more of a subjective thing—we have to find a way to do it. We have to find a way to get started. It’s kind of hard to find a place that’s better and more conveniently located than the moon to take our first baby steps out into the solar system. So while it [essentially] doesn’t have an atmosphere, it’s not as big and attractive in some ways as a place like Mars, Mars is a lot further away and very hard to get to. So the moon is a great way to take our first baby steps out into the solar system if that’s something we want to do. Pierre-Louis: So closer to home, here on Earth, I dunno if you’ve noticed, but things are unsettled, if you will. [Laughs.] I’m not sure if you’ve been on social media, but one of the things that I’ve seen shared a lot in the aftermath of the launch is Gil Scott-Heron’s poem-slash-song, “Whitey on the Moon.” I’m not sure if you’ve heard it, but for our listeners, one of the lyrics is, “I can’t pay no doctor [bills] / But whitey’s on the moon.” [CLIP: Gil Scott-Heron performing “Whitey on the Moon”: “I can’t pay no doctor bills / But whitey’s on the moon.”] Pierre-Louis: And the song was a reaction to the 1969 Apollo moon landing. Victor Glover, who is on the Artemis II, has said that he listens to this song every Monday. And there is this kind of undergirded sentiment that at least right now it seems like we don’t have money for health care, and we don’t have money for food, and we don’t have money for climate change, but we do have money to send people to the moon, or near the moon, and there’s resentment there. And I was wondering if you understand that tension. Billings: Yeah, of course. It is a real tension. And I think that, you know, there’s a couple of things to think about. Victor Glover, when he said he listens to that song every Monday, he also said it’s about humanity—the human condition, the haves and the have-nots—and that’s something that’s not going to go away regardless of what we do out in space, I don’t think. NASA, especially when you look at its budget, which is on the order of [about] $24.5 billion each year, as of this year, that’s a very, very, very small fraction of the federal budget, and certainly, there are ways to reprioritize our spending. I guess I just feel like ultimately we can walk and chew gum at the same time. It’s possible to have a robust program of space exploration—you can spend money on that, and you can do it well—and you can also take care of your people and try to promote peace and try to save the climate. You know, I think it’s important that we remember that this sort of thing is not just about science; it’s also about inspiration. And some of this has to do with geopolitical notions of soft power and showing what the American system can do or other systems. You know, right now we’re in a space race with China, and I think that if China beats us back to the moon, for instance, in this notional space race, well, people will be looking at that and saying, “Hmm, China and its way of life, maybe that’s better than the American way of life.” And then also, I think it’s important to remember, yeah, the inspirational aspect of this, where I watched the Artemis II launch with my two young elementary-school boys, and it was amazing to see how enthralled they were by it and how they all of a sudden started thinking, “Oh, well, maybe I could be an astronaut too, Papa. Oh, you know, I need to go do my push-ups and make sure I read my book before bed tonight to make sure I can maybe be an astronaut someday.” It’s also important, I think, to have other types of role models to look up to and to be able to maybe emulate. For instance, back in the Apollo era, every astronaut was a white man. Most of them had military backgrounds. Now we have an African American going to the moon. We have the first Canadian going to the moon. We have the first woman going to the moon. Our culture has shifted and progressed enormously, I think, since the Apollo era, and we’re going to see that reflected in the people that we send to the moon and how we comport ourselves there. I feel like it’s a way of putting our best foot forward, and I feel that the inspiration and the model of that is important. Pierre-Louis: I wanna take us to maybe a more interesting topic, which is the toilet [Laughs] on, on Artemis II and how it’s a really big deal that there’s a toilet on Artemis II. Can we talk about that? Billings: Yeah, of course, the toilet. So it’s called the Universal Waste Management System. And it’s a way to boldly go where no one has really gone before because back in the Apollo missions, everyone had to actually strip down and basically stick bags to their rear ends to go, and they couldn’t even poop or pee, necessarily, at the same time. So it was really crude back then, really nasty. You’d get unappetizing floaters in the Apollo cabin ... Pierre-Louis: [Laughs.] Billings: Not great. And so the astronauts hated it. And NASA, in its great wisdom, said, “Well, we’ve gotta put our best minds on this and design a better way,” and they did. This Universal Waste Management System actually flew to the International Space Station some years ago. And it lets you strap yourself in. It has a door, which is cool because back—even in the space shuttle, it was at best a curtain. And in the Apollo era, there was nothing; people could just stare at you while you did your business. It’s also got attachments for both male and female astronauts, which is kind of a big deal. And most importantly, you can poop and pee at the same time. So you could say it’s a quantum leap into the real final frontier of how we’re gonna do our dirty business when we’re going around the moon or elsewhere in space. And it seems to be working pretty well, although mission specialist Christina Koch actually radioed down to Houston, saying, “We’ve got a potty problem,” and they were able to troubleshoot the situation, fix the fan and make sure that when they do go to the moon, they’re able to boldly go where no one has gone before. Pierre-Louis: So this mission may also be the furthest a toilet has ever gotten, is what I’m hearing. [Laughs.] This mission is still ongoing. Can you tell our listeners where they can continue following your coverage on it? Billings: Of course! They can come to ScientificAmerican.com. They can tune in to our social feeds on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and other places, and we have lots of updates, stories, in-depth dives into the science, breaking news coverage—you name it, it’s there. So please tune in, read our stuff, come check it out, and we’re glad to have you on board. Pierre-Louis: That’s it for today! One thing before we go: if you were expecting today’s episode to be about the book Hell’s Heart, we delayed it in light of Artemis II. But we will be airing that episode soon. See you on Monday for our weekly science news roundup. Science Quickly is produced by me, Kendra Pierre-Louis, along with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news. For Scientific American, this is Kendra Pierre-Louis. Have a great weekend!
Author: Sushmita Pathak. Kendra Pierre-Louis. Lee Billings. Fonda Mwangi. Alex Sugiura.
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