Artemis I

And, you know, interestingly enough, I was... again, I had trouble patting myself on the back.

I'm my hardest critic, and I also don't do well with praise, but we had this big deal on the Artemis I heat shield leading into the Artemis II launch and mission, and I don't remember, your readers may not be this, but you may because you love spaceflight, but that launch got scrubbed for a leak, and then As the vehicles on the pad, they were interviewing astronauts, and they talked about how important that heat shield work was.

Well, that heat shield work was done in my shop under my supervision, and there was a silver Snoopy that was given out for that, and it was given to Terry Abel, a man that I've worked with for a long time, and he works for Lockheed Martin, and he absolutely deserves it.

that award.

Oh, you go to Christchurch, they're all living in space rockets.

Artemis 1, that's where it was before there was 2.

[laughs]

"Christian, my uncle is an artist, and he had a painting that he'd made himself.

Increasing demands on NASA's deep space network are expected to be met more easily now that NASA has added an antenna.

NASA says the dish, measuring 114 feet, or 34 meters, is critical to boosting the capacity of its already hard-working deep space communication system, particularly after the good work done during the Artemis I and Artemis II lunar missions.

Shortly after the antenna was put into service at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex on the 3rd of August, it began tracking NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

It is the fifth antenna being installed under the network's Aperture Enhancement Project, which will add one more in 2029.

Yep, I remember that.

And finally, on the space side, in November, Artemis 1.

So this was the first flight of the Orion spacecraft all up, although it didn't actually have a life support system on board, which is good because there's no people on it.

but it did fly out to the moon and do a bunch of maneuvers we would never try with humans.

The Space Launch System is flying for only the second time in its existence.

Its maiden flight, the uncrewed Artemis I mission, launched on November 16, 2022, after years of delays, budget overruns, and technical challenges that made it one of the most scrutinized rocket programs in NASA history.

That first flight was a success in many critical respects.

The SLS performed well through every phase of ascent.

The interim cryogenic propulsion stage, the upper stage responsible for sending Orion toward the moon, executed its translunar injection burn.

Orion reached the Moon, entered a distant retrograde orbit that carried it more than 40,000 miles beyond the lunar surface, spent 25 and a half days in space, and returned to Earth with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean on December 11th, 2022.

By most measures, Artemis I did what it was designed to do.

But that mission also revealed a problem that nobody had anticipated.

The same pad Apollo flew from.

The very same, and more recently, Artemis 1.

Side boosters peeled away about two and a half minutes in and flew themselves home to landing zones at Cape Canaveral.

Textbook boost back and landing on both.

So for that mission, it was very unique and an incredible opportunity.

We were one of five groups selected to send our samples on the Artemis I.

And the previous postdoc, he had this idea, and he left so I took over, but he had this idea of taking spores from Aspergillus niger, it's a filamentous fungi that's abundant everywhere all over the world.

It's even been isolated on the ISS.