8-Year-Old's Plushie Orbits Moon Aboard NASA's Artemis II
Get the Health newsletter
Daily health & science — research, biotech, public health, the studies worth knowing. Free.
- Lucas Ye, an 8-year-old from Mountain View, designed the plushie "Rise" to float in weightlessness and signal to astronauts that they have reached zero gravity aboard Artemis II.
- Lucas beat more than 2,600 other entrants in a global "moon mascot" competition run by NASA and crowdsourcing company Freelancer; Trisha Epp, Freelancer's director of innovation, said: "Your design is literally going to space, which is not a sentence most people get to say."
- Rise sports a baseball cap with a star-spangled visor and a crown resembling Earth's surface, with its name and design elements paying homage to the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing and the Earthrise photograph captured by Apollo 8's William Anders in 1968.
- Zero-gravity indicators have a long pedigree: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin brought a doll on his 1961 mission, and Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman took a toy giraffe on a 2014 expedition.
- Artemis II, launched Wednesday, is NASA's first crewed lunar mission in nearly 54 years and will not land on the surface; the crew includes Christina Koch, the first woman, and Victor Glover, the first person of color, to fly between Earth's orbit and the moon.
- If successful, Rise will travel over 250,000 miles round-trip over 10 days, and the mission's health-monitoring data will inform Artemis IV, currently scheduled to place humans on the moon in 2028.
- Donald Trump has made a crewed lunar landing by the end of his second term a stated priority.
Why it matters: Artemis II is the proving ground for NASA's return-to-the-moon program: the ~10-day, 250,000-mile mission will generate the crew-health and deep-space data that determine whether the 2028 Artemis IV landing stays on schedule, a deadline the Trump administration has flagged as a second-term priority. Lucas's win over 2,600 competitors — a public NASA-Freelancer contest — also shows the agency increasingly crowdsourcing its mission iconography from kids.
