Joel Achenbach

Well, thank you for having me.

This was a huge win.

I mean, it has just been so exciting.

The astronauts have been amazing.

NASA needed a win.

I mean, NASA has had a rough time in various ways, including this.

how long it's taken to get back to the moon.

You've got to keep in mind, the idea of going back to the moon surfaced after the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster.

And President Bush, George W. Bush, said, we're going to go back to the moon.

That was 2004.

So that's, you know, 22 years ago.

And it's been a start and stop process, many delays everywhere.

You know, I'll be honest.

I often wondered, is this really ever going to happen?

Are we really going to send astronauts back to the vicinity of the moon?

Well, it just proves that NASA can still do these amazing things.

It can send people to the moon and bring them back safely.

You can make an argument that this mission didn't prove that much.

NASA doesn't have a lander for its Artemis program to actually land people on the moon.

And so that's probably going to take a while before they get their contractor, SpaceX or Blue Origin, to produce a lander.