Jyunmi Hatcher

Yeah, that just doesn't align with me.

But, you know, they got to do what they got to do.

What was that, Andy?

$10 billion to $30 billion?

Didn't they go up?

I don't know.

What was it, 300%?

Well, as we are streaming this, four astronauts are roughly 240,000 miles from Earth on their way home.

NASA's Artemis II crew, Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, launched aboard the Orion spacecraft on April 1st and completed a lunar flyby Monday afternoon.

At 1.56 p.m.

Eastern on Monday, they broke the record set by Apollo 13 in 1970 for the furthest or farthest distance any human has traveled from Earth, eventually reaching a maximum of 252,760 miles.

The splashdown is scheduled for Friday off the coast of San Diego.

The mission has been covered extensively as a human story, but it's the first crewed flight beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in December 1972.

But underneath the human story is a quieter one.

The Orion spacecraft has been doing things on its own that no Apollo capsule was capable of, and it's part of a broader shift NASA has been building towards for more than a decade.

Deep space missions, where the spacecraft itself, not mission control in Houston, makes most of the moment-to-moment decisions.

According to AI Magazine's pre-launch analysis, while the astronauts manually fly Orion at intervals to test its handling, the vast majority of trajectory and life support monitoring is handled by automated systems rather than ground operators.

That's a meaningful change from Apollo and sets up where human spaceflight is going next.

The deeper a crewed spacecraft travels from Earth, the less useful real-time ground control becomes.

This is not necessarily a software problem.