Mark Kelly

It makes me think about that a little bit, whether these folks are saving 2026 a little bit here with some positive news and something we can really rally around, a stark contrast.

to what we're dealing with in a lot of different areas of the world right now.

So I was there at the Johnson Space Center yesterday as they went around the moon.

I have to say, Jen, I was really jealous what these guys got to do.

I wish while I was at NASA for 15 years that one of my four space flights would have been around the moon or to Mars or something like that.

But I'm really proud of our country for being able to do

this thing.

No other country can do this right now.

What we did in this past week.

Well, let me start with Artemis I.

which was a few years ago where we flew the Orion capsule with nobody in it.

I think they may have had a mannequin sitting in one of the seats.

No humans on board and basically did this mission, right?

Go around the moon with Orion, which was a spacecraft, which is the capsule launched on a rocket called SLS and

which is a rather big and powerful 8.8 million pounds of thrust rocket to get this thing all the way to the moon and back.

And that launched a few years ago now, I think maybe, I don't know, three or four years ago.

And this is the second mission.

So this is the same mission done with all the life support systems you need on board, the extra redundancy in the spacecraft that you want for crew members.

So four crew members to go around the moon on what's called a free return trajectory, which is when they do their translunar injection burn, that's also their deorbit burn.

which normally, like on the space shuttle, you do in orbit around the Earth, but this thing comes back from the moon at 25,000 miles an hour, hits the atmosphere, not much you can do about it.