Artemis 2 Slingshots Past Moon Monday, 50 Years After Apollo
Get the Health newsletter
Daily health & science — research, biotech, public health, the studies worth knowing. Free.
- Artemis 2 astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Jeremy Hansen are on day three of their flyby, scheduled to slingshot around the moon Monday using lunar gravity before heading home — a crewed lunar mission but no landing, the first since Apollo 17 in 1972.
- Johnson Space Center houses every NASA mission control room in one building, including the historic Apollo control room, the ISS flight control room, and the White Flight Control Room where flight directors Judd Frieling and Rick Henfling oversee Artemis 2.
- Stan Love, a seasoned former astronaut, serves as CAPCOM for Artemis 2, handling all direct communication with the crew, while NASA spokesperson Kylie Clem noted flight controllers train for years before earning a front-room role.
- Orion Program Manager Howard Hu said the spacecraft leapfrogs Apollo in computing power, sensor accuracy, and rendezvous-and-docking precision, while carrying four astronauts instead of three thanks to more compact equipment.
- Orion kept Apollo's cone-shaped teardrop design because, as Hu put it, "physics doesn't change" — the shape remains the most aerodynamically efficient for reentry, a design choice that bridges 50 years of engineering.
- The same building received both Neil Armstrong's "The Eagle has landed" on July 20, 1969 and Jim Lovell's anxious "Ah, Houston, we've had a problem" on April 13, 1970, the latter triggered by an oxygen-tank explosion that forced an Apollo 13 abort.
Why it matters: Artemis 2 marks the first crewed lunar flyby in 53 years, and the mission's success sets the technical baseline for Artemis 3, which aims to actually land astronauts on the moon. The reuse of Apollo-era building infrastructure — and Hu's explicit acknowledgment that "we learned a lot from them" — frames the program as a continuity exercise as much as a technological leap, with four crew members (not three) representing the first expansion of a lunar crew in half a century.
