The Right Stuff, Right Now

Thanks for tuning back into the BeX Files! Quick, clean up your messes and put on your Friday finest, because the Artemis II astronauts are returning to Earth tonight.

Assuming all goes to plan, the Artemis II Orion capsule will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere, deploy its parachutes, and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, California, around 8pm ET. While returning to Earth from space is always a dangerous maneuver, nerves are particularly frayed this time due to concerns about Orion’s heat shield. 

Artemis II’s last test: Will its heat shield work?

Excess charring on Artemis I’s heat shield had NASA racing to understand what went wrong—and to ensure the technology was still safe for the current crew’s high-speed reentry.

Science

For a full rundown of this issue, I recommend this NatGeo article by Swapna Krishna, whose coverage of the whole mission has been fantastic. And keep your fingers crossed for the incoming crew members, who have made this whole mission look easy despite a malfunctioning toilet, a reliance on Microsoft Outlook, a hunt for some missing skin lotion, and, you know, being in space, one of the most challenging environments imaginable.

Artemis II and the Space Goslings

Thanks for tuning into the BeX Files! We are t-minus one week for a possible return to the Moon, so strap in for launch. After years of stops and starts, NASA’s Artemis II mission may actually blast off from Earth in mere days, with the earliest launch window currently

The BeX FilesBecky Ferreira

I mentioned in the last file that I’m wary of over-investment in human space exploration, mostly because our spacefaring robots are already rock stars at learning about, well, extraterrestrial rocks and stars—plus they don’t need to schlep a bunch of cumbersome and expensive life support systems along for the ride. 

That said, it has still been surreal and thrilling to follow an actual human Moon mission in my lifetime, with a charismatic crew and jaw-dropping photos, regardless of how the future of the Artemis program pans out.

I was also grateful to have an opportunity to reflect on the highs and lows of the Apollo era last week while visiting family in Lawrence Country, Indiana.

The county has branded itself the “home of astronauts” because it is the birthplace of three spacefarers: Charles D. Walker, a Space Shuttle veteran of the 1980s, Kenneth D. Bowersox, who flew the shuttle multiple times in the 1990s and served on an International Space Station expedition, and Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, one of the Mercury Seven, who was likely to have been the first human to walk on the Moon were it not for his death in 1967 in the Apollo 1 disaster.

On the day of the Artemis II launch, I visited the Lawrence County Museum, which has devoted many exhibits to its homegrown spacemen. Fortunately, both Walker and Bowersox are alive and well, and have continued their service to space exploration since their retirements from NASA Astronaut Corps. 

Grissom is still mourned decades later, both as a local hero and a historic figure who earned global admiration. It was fascinating to take in all the museum’s displays about his storied life and the widespread grief over the loss of the Apollo 1 crew, including fellow pilots Ed White and Roger Chaffee, due to a cabin fire.

I’ve also had the opportunity to visit the Gus Grissom Memorial Museum at Spring Mill National Park, and I would recommend anyone in the area check out these two museums. In addition to paying tribute to the remarkable Grissom, the epitome of the “Right Stuff,” these small institutions are a reminder of the immense value of community record-keeping and local storytelling to keep the memories of our best and bravest alive.

These repositories of knowledge, typically kept afloat by volunteer work and donations, are such hidden gems, and I hope to feature more of them in this newsletter in the future (send recommendations to thebxfiles@gmail.com).

April 3 marked the centennial of Grissom’s birth; he was born on that day in 1926 to a railroad signalman and a homemaker in the small town of Mitchell, Indiana. How fitting that this milestone coincided with the flight of Artemis II, which was two days into its journey to fly around the Moon on the centennial. 

The next giant leaps of human spaceflight remain up in the air, but we might want to take a lesson from Grissom, who never let futuristic dreams distract him from the here-and-now. “I was more interested in what was going on right now than in the centuries to come,” he said in his posthumously published autobiography.

With that focus on the present in mind, let’s send good vibes and a warm welcome home to the returning Artemis II crew, who have inspired so many of us back on Earth. We can argue about what it all means later (as a space crank, I look forward to it!). But we are once again witnessing the right stuff, right now, and it's worth savoring the moment for a day.

Before closing the file for today, I wanted to share a fun new podcast episode about First Contact with Simon Bown of the Alien UFO Podcast, as well as another recent interview about aliens I did with Josh Milton of Metro UK.

There’s a chance aliens are hitching a ride on the moons of rogue planets

‘Do all aliens really need sunlight?’

MetroJosh Milton

It sure is a beautiful universe out there, but there’s truly no place like home. See you at the cosmic rest stop next week.