By all accounts Artemis II was a roaring success. The four astronauts — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen — are now recalling their experiences, reuniting with their families and trying to believe what has happened to them.
Any such voyage has thousands of critical points when correct actions have to be taken at precisely the right time and when the craft must respond perfectly.
Failure to achieve these, through human or instrumental error, can have far-reaching, potentially disastrous, consequences.
We see a rocket shoot into the sky atop a blazing trail of gases. We see images of the astronauts in the capsule and views of space and celestial bodies outside. We see the astronauts get out of a still-steaming craft bouncing around the waves.
We forget astronauts are trained pilots actually flying the ship and not just strapped in for the ride, and we have next to no idea about the highly complex mathematics and physics which goes into ensuring the capsule is travelling on the correct trajectory, at the right speed and in the appropriate orientation.
Heck, the brains behind the trip said it would land in the Pacific at seven minutes past the hour and it did.
The crew were testing everything to ensure the next mission can go further and be even less likely to experience any unforeseen incidents.
That applies to all kinds of vital equipment across the mission, from the toilet to the drogue parachutes.
Life will never seem the same again for the astronauts. They have been privileged, perhaps even burdened in some ways, with seeing what billions of us will never see, and having their minds bent by the enormity of space and time.
As brilliantly as they describe it to flabbergasted audiences on Earth, it is but a dull rerun of what they actually experienced.
The sight of the Integrity capsule speeding through the sky before being arrested by parachutes, the splash as it scalloped out the cobalt waves, were truly heart-in-the-mouth moments.
The success of Artemis II was leapt on, naturally, by United States President Donald Trump, who earlier made an awfully uncomfortable phone call to the astronauts as they circled the Moon, telling them he had effectively saved Nasa.
The truth as always is something far different. Mr Trump’s administration has slashed billions from Nasa’s budget in recent years, and just two days after the launch proposed another 23% cut in its funding this year.
The success of the mission will hopefully cause a rethink on that. Nasa plans to launch Artemis III, another crewed test mission, in 2027, and then aim for a moon landing in 2028.
It would be a shame to ground the stratospheric excitement of technological advancement and pride of achievement that Artemis II has inspired due to the earthly mundanity of budgets.
Vaianu’s response
While the Artemis II mission was keeping much of the world on edge, many New Zealanders were more concerned with something else in the skies — Cyclone Vaianu.
Predicted, incredibly, more than a week ago to hit large parts of the North Island’s north and east last Sunday, the former tropical cyclone was a life-threatening system.
Fortunately, there was plenty of time to prepare for the worst of the severe gales and torrential rain.
When it made landfall near the Coromandel Peninsula, it made a late change to its track, heading about 30km east of expected and mostly avoiding the metropolitan centres of Auckland and Tauranga, while still walloping parts of the Bay of Plenty and the east coast.
Apart from the ridiculous utterings of Wairoa Mayor Craig Little that declaring states of emergency ahead of time was ‘‘woke’’, the overall response to the cyclone was excellent, and residents and all those involved in emergency management deserve much credit.
