Quick one today because I've had this NASA livestream running in a second monitor since about 10:30 this morning and I need to write about it before I lose the thread.
Orion did its return powered flyby burn today, which is a boring name for something genuinely wild: the capsule swung within about 79 miles of the lunar surface, used the Moon's gravity like a slingshot, and is now on its way back to Earth for a splashdown off Baja California next weekend. Eighty miles up. That's closer to the surface than I am to the next state over. And this whole mission has been going on since November 16th and I'd bet most people I talk to on a given day couldn't tell you Artemis I is even in the sky right now.
I get why. Everyone's been passing around screenshots from that new OpenAI chatbot thing all week instead, the one that writes essays and apologizes a lot. Not going to spend this post on it, partly because I think every tech blog on the internet is doing that exact post right now and partly because I'd rather talk about the spacecraft nobody's talking about.
Here's the detail that got me, and it's such a specifically 2022 detail: Orion is carrying Amazon's Alexa on this flight. Not a joke. It's part of a tech demo called Callisto, done with Amazon and Cisco, where the capsule's got a version of Alexa onboard along with Webex video conferencing hardware, basically testing whether astronauts on future missions could just talk to their spacecraft the way you'd talk to an Echo Dot on your kitchen counter. We put a smart speaker in a capsule and flew it around the Moon. I don't know why that delights me as much as it does but it really does.
There's also a mannequin in the commander's seat named Commander Moonikin Campos, wearing a real flight suit rigged with sensors, and NASA let the public vote on the name, and it's a tribute to an Apollo 13 engineer named Arturo Campos who helped get that crew home. There's a Snoopy plush floating around the cabin as the zero-gravity indicator, tumbling on camera every time the capsule reorients, which is a small detail but it's the kind of thing that makes an unmanned test flight feel less like a spreadsheet and more like an actual event happening to an actual object in actual space.
I've been half-watching NASA TV since I was a kid staying up for shuttle launches on a TV with rabbit ears, and I'll admit the production quality on these streams now is honestly pretty good, way better than the old mission control feeds. But I still had a hard time finding good real-time discussion of it online today, and I think that's partly a Twitter problem. That whole platform's been in a weird holding pattern the last couple weeks with the ownership chaos and the layoffs, and the space-nerd corners of it that used to light up during a flyby felt noticeably quieter this afternoon. Not blaming any one thing for that, could just be a Monday, could be the chatbot sucking up all the oxygen. Probably both.
Anyway. Splashdown's supposed to be around December 11th, Pacific Ocean, USS Portland doing the recovery, and if this all goes well it clears the way for Artemis II to actually put people on a lunar flyby a couple years out, then Artemis III landing after that. Worth remembering too that we're not far off from the anniversary of Apollo 8's earthrise photo, the one taken Christmas Eve 1968 that arguably kicked off the whole modern environmental movement because it showed everyone what a fragile little marble we're all standing on. Different mission, different decade, similar feeling if you let yourself sit with it for a second: something we built is out there right now, closer to another world than to home, taking pictures of us from a place nobody's cousin has ever stood.
I'm going to go check the stream again. It's probably just a black screen and a mission clock at this point but I like having it on anyway.