Artemis II test flight heads toward the moon

[THEME MUSIC] KATHLEEN DAVIS: Hi. I’m SciFri producer Kathleen Davis, and you’re listening to Science Friday.

SPEAKER 1: 10, 9, 8, 7, RS-25 engines lit, 4, 3, 2, 1, booster Ignition. And liftoff. The crew of Artemis II now bound for the moon. Humanity’s next great voyage begins.

[ENGINE ROARING]

SPEAKER 2: Good roll pitch.

SPEAKER 3: Roger, roll pitch.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: That was Wednesday’s launch of the Artemis II mission. Four astronauts are now well on their way towards the moon. They’re planning to swing around in a lunar flyby before heading back to Earth about a week from now. This flight has been a long time coming. The Artemis program has faced several delays, and the overall Artemis program to return to the moon is in flux as well. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman recently announced a shift in focus to building a moon base.

Here for an update on the Artemis II mission and longer-term plans for the moon is Brendan Byrne of Central Florida Public Media. He’s also host of the Are We There Yet? podcast. Welcome back, Brendan.

BRENDAN BYRNE: Hey. Thanks for having me.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: OK. So you were at the launch that we just heard. I’m so jealous. Set the scene for us. What was that like?

BRENDAN BYRNE: It was a scene that I have never seen before. There were so many people out there watching this launch countdown. I got there probably about nine hours before T-minus 0, and it was already buzzing with energy. The launch itself was also like nothing I had ever seen before. SLS is a massive rocket. And as we heard that countdown there, we saw the engines light. We saw the solid rocket boosters light. And then we saw the vehicle start to move off the pad but quite silently. We see things faster than we can hear things.

But once the sound of those SRBs hit us, it shook your body. You don’t see a launch. You don’t hear a launch. You feel a launch. And that was certainly the case with SLS. Those SRBs cracked the air. It sounded like a flapping flag. And just to watch this bright orange beam followed by this puffy, cloudy tail behind it head eastward and downrange was just an incredible sight.

And to think, all of that power, 8.8 million pounds of thrust, all of that noise and forces we were feeling 4 miles away– it was wild to imagine that there were four people atop that rocket, making this incredible journey.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Right. As a space nerd, were you extremely jazzed?

BRENDAN BYRNE: Absolutely. Absolutely. Kathleen, any launch is really, really cool, right? They never get old. I’ve probably covered at least a hundred of them at this point. But whenever there’s people on board, there’s a little extra special jazz, as you would say, in these missions. But especially knowing that there were four people on top of this one, leaving this planet and whipping around the moon for the first time in over 50 years was just really, really incredible.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Well, give us a thumbnail of the mission plan for this trip. Who are the astronauts? What are they going to be doing?

BRENDAN BYRNE: Yeah. You got three NASA astronauts and one from Canada– Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and then Canadian Space Agency astronaut and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen. This is a test flight. They are really going to be checking the Orion space capsule out for future missions. This is the first time it is flying with a human crew. The first hour or two they were in space, they began doing these tests.

One of the stages of the rocket that they used to actually boost it into that higher orbit, when it was all out of fuel, they decoupled from it. So the capsule and service module came apart from it. And Victor Glover grabbed the controls of Orion and started flying around the spent rocket stage. This was to test the manual controls of Orion and really see how it handles in space. And this is important because future Orion space capsules are going to need to dock with the lunar landing vehicle that will take astronauts down to the surface of the moon.

They’re also testing the life support systems, so the oxygen, the water, the toilet, which they ran into a bit of an issue with. The toilet is very important. But they were able to get it fixed. And then they’ll be flying around the moon, as you mentioned, slingshotting around the moon at around 5,000 miles above the surface of the far side of the moon. So this is a viewpoint that human eyes have never seen before.

And they’ve got training from geologists to actually look for certain geological features on the moon, take photos, and then send them back. All of that is happening. And while they’re going to and from, they’ll be doing medical tests on themselves. Really, we’re learning a lot about the effects of deep space travel on human beings because we haven’t done it in a half a century.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Wow. If all goes according to plan on this flight, what are the next steps for the Artemis program?

BRENDAN BYRNE: So the next steps, if all goes well, will be Artemis III. And this is a bit of a shift from earlier plans. Artemis III will not head to the moon. It’s going to head to low Earth orbit, NASA says, by mid 2027 to test commercial landers. Now, there are two companies that are building landers that will eventually take humans to the surface of the moon– SpaceX and Blue Origin. If these vehicles are ready, they’re going to launch them into low Earth orbit, and Orion will dock with them.

So Apollo did this early in the program as well. They proved that they could dock with the lunar lander. So that will be Artemis III. That’s another very critical test. Artemis IV is going to send humans to the moon using one of these landers. They will fly into lunar orbit, head down to the surface of the moon, and then come back. And then from there, on Artemis V and beyond will be missions to the surface of the moon.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: This program has had a fair number of setbacks and delays. Is that all behind us now, or is that thinking a little too optimistically?

BRENDAN BYRNE: I will say we’ve got some recency bias here. The launch of Artemis II did go really, really well. Artemis I, that was an uncrewed mission of the Orion space capsule using the same rocket, SLS– a lot of issues with that launch. You might remember that there was hydrogen leaks. There was an issue with Artemis II when they did a fueling test. This was a practice run of launch day. There was that hydrogen leak as well. They were able to fix it during that test. But then they found another issue with the helium system that pressurizes all of those tanks.

But on launch day, April 1, it was the first attempt, and the countdown went extremely smooth. So if Artemis II does set the pace for smooth operations, then we are looking very good. The issues that we are going to be looking at and things that could slow this down is the development of those lunar landers. So the rocket looks good. We’re seeing the Orion space capsule– all indications are it’s looking pretty good. Now we just need those landers to be developed, which could be a bit of a challenge or a hang-up in this whole Artemis plan.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So let’s zoom out a little bit. I mentioned at the top that there’s been this change in the overall structure of this program. NASA’s scrapping plans for a space station that was supposed to be a staging point for a mission to land on the moon. Why the change?

BRENDAN BYRNE: So new NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, in just his first few weeks here, he mentioned that he wanted to see these Artemis flights happen far more frequently than they actually are. Artemis I, the last launch of this was in 2022. So you can see there’s a lot of time in between these launches. He said we need to increase the cadence. He changed the design of the rocket to make them a little less complicated to allow that to happen.

And then there was plans for a tiny lunar orbiting lab in space. And those plans have been scrapped in order to build a science base on the surface of the moon. Now, in order to do this, NASA is going to partner with commercial companies to just send this armada of payload and robotic missions to the moon to get that going. So essentially, he wants to go to the moon to stay.

The Gateway, which is what the orbiting space station is called, was very tiny. It was really only meant to transfer astronauts from the Orion space capsule to their lunar landers. Now, with a permanent science base, they’ll be able to keep astronauts there for four weeks at a time–

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Wow.

BRENDAN BYRNE: –essentially reproducing what they do in low Earth orbit on the International Space Station for science.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Is changing the plan kind of mid-course bad? How do you read that?

BRENDAN BYRNE: I mean, this plan has been changed mid-course so many times. Pretty much every president since the Apollo program has had a plan for the moon. Really, going to the moon takes a lot of money. It takes a lot of congressional buy-in. And we really haven’t seen that quite just yet. And really, Kathleen this is a change in course, this is disruptive, but it needed to happen. We were seeing Artemis was becoming kind of stale and not going where it needed to go. And now this is really giving it a big push. It seems to have congressional buy-in.

I spoke with the chairman of the Space and Aeronautics Committee in Congress, Mike Haridopolos. He was at the launch as well. And he loves this new direction and said that the success of Artemis II is going to develop whether or not Congress is going to move forward with this. So that’s a good sign.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: I mean, building a base on the moon is very flashy. That sounds very exciting. Do you think it’s realistic?

BRENDAN BYRNE: That’s a very good question. I think so. NASA and other international partners have accomplished really incredible things. If you would have asked me in 1995, is the International Space Station realistic? I may have been a bit skeptical there because that was a huge undertaking. And it did happen to get done. A moon base is going to be an absolutely incredibly difficult undertaking.

I spoke with one of the engineers who helped build the International Space Station, and he said just that. But he’s also optimistic that this will happen. We have the technology. We have the ability to do this. The moon has so many things that we really want to get, but the moon is also a witness plate to what has happened in our cosmic history.

And if we want to understand where we came from, where life came from, and whether or not we may be alone in the universe– we always seem to be looking outward at that question. But the moon holds critical clues to that. We just need to get there and find the science. So, yes, it is a very, very difficult task. Will it happen? I certainly hope so, and there’s a very good reason for it too.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Well, Brendan, thanks so much for filling us in.

BRENDAN BYRNE: Anytime. Thank you.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Brendan Byrne, host of the Are We There Yet? podcast and assistant news director for Central Florida Public Media in Orlando. After the break, turning to a simple but deep question– what if we didn’t have a moon? Stay with us.

[CONTEMPLATIVE MUSIC]

[THEME MUSIC]

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Recently, we got a call on the listener line that really made us think.

HOLLIS: This is Hollis from Tucson, Arizona. It is my opinion that if the Earth lost its moon for some reason or other, it would soon be as barren as Mars. Thank you for all your education.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Thank you, Hollis. What would happen if the moon disappeared? It’s a great question. And here to help us with that is Rebecca Boyle. She’s a science journalist and author of the book Our Moon– How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are. Rebecca, thank you so much for being here.

REBECCA BOYLE: Thanks for having me.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: I am dying to hear your thoughts on Hollis’s question, but I think we need to tackle this maybe in two parts here. So maybe first, let’s start in an alternate dimension where let’s say the Earth never had a moon. What would be different?

REBECCA BOYLE: Basically everything. So I don’t even really where to begin. It would be Hollis is right, man.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Why is that?

REBECCA BOYLE: There are so many things the moon does to this planet that we take for granted. The primary one we all know is the tide. And that just is the way that the moon is pulling on Earth and we’re pulling back on the moon as the moon’s moving away from us and our rotation speed is slowing down. And if those things were not happening, Earth would spin a lot faster. And that means that the wind speeds that go around Earth, jetstream, would be super fast. So it would be really horrible, windy all the time.

And you wouldn’t have this crucial mixing of the oceans that happens all over the Earth, which makes nutrients rise to the surface, might have dragged the first life forms from the seafloor up to encounter the sun for the first time and invent photosynthesis. So if we never had a moon, I don’t know that we would be here.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: OK. Interesting. So let’s assume that we did have a moon, and then it was suddenly eliminated. What do you think would happen if we already had life on Earth, and then suddenly, the moon was gone?

REBECCA BOYLE: I think it would be very confusing, to start, for every form of life. We have, in our cells, these circadian clocks. And we’ve known about these for a long time. And it means that our bodies synchronize to the day and night cycle, which is primarily driven by the sun, sunlight. But we also have a circalunar clock. And this has been shown to exist in marine animals. It’s been shown to exist in plants. Life forms on Earth know the moon is there, and they respond to it, whether it’s through its light or through its gravity or both.

And so I think it would just be really messy and confusing initially. And then after a while, depending on how long of timescales you want to think about, it would be pretty horrific, actually. The tilt of Earth would change pretty dramatically. So we all know we have seasons because Earth’s spin axis is tilted 23 and 1/2 degrees with respect to how we orbit the sun. And if we didn’t have the moon, over thousands of years or hundreds of thousands of years, Earth would wobble like a top that’s about to fall over.

And so it’d be really erratic. So we’d have huge changes in our climate. So it would be pretty ugly, I think, for a while. And it would be sad. There would be no other illumination at night other than ones that we provide. And I think that would be sad.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So over time, it would be pretty devastating, it sounds like.

REBECCA BOYLE: Over time, it would be pretty devastating. And I actually do think we would notice it pretty soon. There are biological rhythms that would shift pretty quickly that may be less obvious to a person looking at their phone on the subway at night or something. But pretty soon, you’re going to start to feel it. And I think we don’t really know how horrible it would be how quickly.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: What would the impact be of gravitational force suddenly stopping? What would that be like? Do we know?

REBECCA BOYLE: We don’t really know. There would be some sort of rebound effect because– I guess if you made the moon go poof. And by the way, it didn’t poof in such a way that pieces of it started falling onto Earth in a hard rain, to borrow a phrase from the novel Seveneves where this happens. If the moon just was whisked away someplace–

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Sure. Choose your own adventure.

REBECCA BOYLE: Yeah. Then I think there would still be some sort of reflex rebounding effect that would happen in Earth’s crust. I would think that there would be earthquakes. I would think there would be– I don’t know if a tsunami is the right word for the force of water that would move around very suddenly, but there would be this sudden change in tidal patterns that would be really disruptive.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So Hollis is right? Earth would potentially be as barren as Mars if we lost our moon?

REBECCA BOYLE: I definitely think if we’d never had one, it would be a sad, barren, dry, lonely planet. I think if it went away, that would eventually still happen, but it might take a little while.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Rebecca Boyle is a science journalist and author of the book Our Moon– How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are. Thank you, Rebecca.

REBECCA BOYLE: Thanks for having me.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: And if you’re like Hollis and you have a big question that you need the answer to, give us a ring. 877-4-SCIFRI. That’s 877-4-SCIFRI. This episode was produced by Charles Bergquist. And if this podcast has you over the moon, please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Kathleen Davis. Thanks for listening.

[THEME MUSIC]

Copyright © 2026 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday’s programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/