Artemis and Other General Space Exploration

Live, from the Moon, it’s Artemis I! The web cam that’s literally out of this world!

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Unfortunately the focus is on the craft, so we can’t see the Gizmoplex.

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I got to witness Artemis going into orbit from my front yard. This was a still of the video I took, doesn’t do it justice how incredibly bright it was, or how long the flame trail was.

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SPLASHDOWN!

Tune in again two years or so(!)[1] from now for the launch of Artemis II.


  1. Yes, two years! This ain’t your (grand)father’s Apollo program. You can blame a decision made eight years ago to plug a $100 million hole in the budget that had unforeseen consequences ↩︎

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They’re going to eventually bring the Orion capsule onboard the ship, right? It splashed down almost three hours ago!

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They have to test it for moonenites.

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Actually, it a just a big conspiracy. That’s not the Orion capsule at all. It’s the top of a huge alien spaceship that is actually resting on the ocean floor and is just barely poking up above the waves. You see, NASA knew that was going to happen so they made this huge hoax of launching the Artemis and having the Orion capsule splash down in the ocean all so that they could pretend the top of the spaceship was the Orion capsule.

Convinced?

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Apparently they are dealing with 5-foot swells(?), so they are taking their time.

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I can see it now: “I was seasick in a spaceship, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt”.

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Almost there…

Al… most… theeeeeeere…

There is something to be said for SpaceX’s approach of using a crane to lift the capsule out of the water and onto the ship.

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You really have to stop saying stuff like this. Someone out there will actually believe it! LOL!

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Houston, we have touchdown. Only six hours after splashdown!

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I did think of that while I was typing it. :smiley:

(There was someone on Club MST3K who was a NASA conspiracy theorist.)

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Sure, nobody’s going to have missed spotting a major navigational hazard just sixty miles south of Isla Guadalupe…

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That’s what they want you to think.

David Tennant Reaction GIF

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It went and came and there wasn’t any hurrah about it. Normally this sort of thing would be be big news.

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Artemis I Orion Spacecraft Returns to Kennedy Space Center

Dec 30, 2022 at 3:18 PM

After its 1.4-million-mile mission beyond the Moon and back, the Orion spacecraft for the Artemis I mission arrived back at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Dec. 30. The capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Dec. 11 and was transported by truck across the country from Naval Base San Diego in California to Kennedy’s Multi Payload Processing Facility in Florida.

I find it ironic that the capsule’s trip from California to Florida — a trip of some 2,500 miles — took almost twice as long as its round trip to the Moon and back[1] — a trip of over 500,000 miles.


  1. Not counting the time spent loitering in distant retrograde orbit around the Moon ↩︎

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Customs, man.

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I finally tracked down Lockheed Martin’s videos of the “Send a message to Callisto” that was part of an experiment with a self-contained version of Amazon’s Alexa running on an iPad. There were the usual “Hello!”, “I think I can see my house from here!”, cheerleading, and congratulatory messages, but there were a few funny ones in there as well:

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