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Sky Candy Special: To the Moon, Alice!

Charlie Martin | 6:01 PM on April 09, 2026
NASA

The Artemis II mission got a good bit of the space (heh heh) in last week's Sky Candy, and honestly, there was so much since then that I would have ended up completely dominating this week as well, so I got special permission to have a special edition for the end of the Artemis II mission. So, here's a special soundtrack.

If this makes you get teary-eyed, well, me too. Here's the whole soundtrack. 

Here's the starting line.

You may have heard about this kid's reaction. NASA bowdlerized it a bit, but you know what he said in place of "freaking."

The SLS is ready for its close-up.

It really doesn't look like the globe in geography class.

Now, this is an artist's rendition, but it was the best shot I found.

The Artemis II crew identified and named two new craters. Carroll Crater is named after the late wife of astronaut Reid Wiseman.

No human had ever before had this view of the far side of the Moon. You can expect a bunch of "well, akshully" replies because the Apollo Command Module pilots all went around the far side. But their average altitude was between 60 and 70 miles, while Artemis was between 4,000 and 6,000 miles.

Even closer. The Mare Orientale is the bullseye feature just below center on the right. 

Another first.

The Blue Marble.

Closer still.

For a little while, NASA turned off the exterior lights to enable getting this shot.

Now they're coming home. This is a fun visualization of the whole orbit.

Around 8 p.m. Eastern Time (00:00Z), Artemis II will be returning to Earth at around 25,000 miles per hour, setting a new record previously held by Apollo 10, although only by a few hundred miles per hour.  

It looks weird because it seems to make a sharp right west of Perth, Australia. That's actually an artifact of the Earth turning under the capsule as it approaches the Earth. I asked Grok to explain:

The sharp bend in the re-entry ground track west of Australia is not caused by the Orion spacecraft suddenly turning or maneuvering. Instead, it is a visual artifact created when plotting the capsule’s fast, nearly straight-line path through space onto a flat map of the rotating Earth.

Orion is returning from lunar distance on a free-return trajectory at roughly 25,000 mph (11 km/s). As it falls inward from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, Earth continues spinning west-to-east beneath it. Far from Earth, the spacecraft’s high altitude makes the ground appear to move one way relative to its path; closer in, that relative motion shifts dramatically. The result is a kink or apparent reversal on the map — often near the point where the spacecraft’s velocity vector crosses the boundary between regions where Earth’s rotation seems to carry the ground “forward,” “stationary,” or “backward” relative to the incoming capsule.

In reality, Orion follows a smooth hyperbolic trajectory with no sharp turns. The bend disappears in a true 3D globe view and is a common feature on maps of high-speed lunar returns, including those from the Apollo era. The actual flight path stays safely over ocean before atmospheric entry southeast of Hawaii and splashdown off California.

The thing is that this is a hard re-entry with a heat shield that wasn't completely satisfactory for Artemis I I'll quote a discussion from X. (The original is in Japanese, so click through for the whole thing with the new translation feature.)

NASA Administrator Isaacman, who approved this decision, admitted as much himself in January 2026: "Long-term, this isn't the right way. And there's no Plan B."

Reentry can't be redone.From the moment it enters orbit, it's a one-shot gamble on whether the shield holds or not.

Even if this succeeds, the fundamental design issues will carry over to Artemis III.

NASA has already decided to introduce a revised shield for Artemis III.

In other words, the four returning tonight are astronauts plunging into the atmosphere with the "pre-revision design."

Homer Hickam, author of Rocket Boys: A Memoir, among others, put it this way.

Hickam is quoting Heinlein's "Noisy" Rhysling.

We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.

Charlie Martin

Charlie Martin writes on science, health, culture, and technology for PJ Media. For media inquiries, please contact communications@pjmedia.com

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