Jyunmi Hatcher

It's just physics.

Radio signals travel at the speed of light, which is fast enough to feel instantaneous on Earth.

But at lunar distances, the round-trip delay is already noticeable at roughly 2.5 seconds.

At Mars distances, that round-trip stretches between 8 and 40 minutes, depending on planetary alignment.

There's also the blackout problem.

When Orion swung around the far side of the moon on Monday, the moon itself blocked all radio communications between the spacecraft and Earth for approximately 41 minutes.

During that window, the crew and the spacecraft were entirely on their own.

No commands from Houston, no telemetry going home and no real time troubleshooting.

The free return trajectory Artemis II is flying, it's the same orbital architecture that brought Apollo 13 crew back home in 1970, provides a built-in safety net.

Even if the main engine had failed, the moon's gravity would have swung the capsule back towards Earth.

But the navigation, the systems monitoring, and the response to anything unexpected during that 41 minutes were entirely the responsibility of the spacecraft itself.

That's a constraint that Apollo never had to fully solve.

Apollo missions stayed in nearly continuous contact with Houston and relied on ground-based computation for most critical calculations.

The onboard Apollo guidance computer was a remarkable piece of engineering for its time, but its computing power is roughly comparable to a basic pocket calculator today.

Everything more complex than that was handled by mainframes in Houston with humans in the loop.

As NASA's missions pushed farther and stayed out longer, the model stops working.

And Artemis II is the first crewed mission designed from the ground up around that reality.

Orion's flight computers are built by Honeywell under the contract to Lockheed Martin, which is the prime contractor for the spacecraft.

According to a Honeywell press release issued the day of the launch, the company supplies 14 different product types for the Artemis crewed missions, including the vehicle management computer that serves as Orion's central computing platform.

the inertial measurement system, the GPS receiver, the displays and hand controllers in the cabin, and the avionics software that ties it all together.