Integrity about to complete a journey spanning 694,481 miles from its launch from the Kennedy Space Center back on April 1st and a trip around the moon.

For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Kendra Pure Lewis, in for Rachel Feltman.

For a weekly science news roundup, you're listening to a special space episode.

Splashdown confirmed at 7.7 p.m. Central Time, 5.7 p.m. Pacific time. From the pages of Jules Verne to a modern-day mission to the moon, a new chapter of the exploration of our celestial neighbor is complete. Integrity's astronauts, back on Earth. A perfect bullseye splashdown for integrity and its four astronauts.

That's the crew of the historic Artemis II missions splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego last Friday.

Although the mission is over, NASA's moon ambitions are far from finished.

But why? Here to tackle that question is a group of Siam staffers, Lee Billings, Claire Cameron, Emma Gomez, and Joe Howlett. Hi, everyone.

Excited to talk. Happy to be here. I'm thrilled. Thanks, Kendra. Okay, so just so we know, can you rank from a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being very interested and one being you'd rather watch paint dry.

I'm going to own it. I think I'm probably the biggest space hater at the table. I'm going to

give it a solid three. I like a good night sky, but that's about all I'm interested in. I like

my space fictional. How interested are you in space, especially space travel? I'm Emma Gomez. I'm a newsletter editor at Siam.

Oof, I feel like optimistically, like being generous, probably a five.

I feel like there are some things that are so incredibly cool about space.

I love the new JWST visuals and the new Earthrise photo.

I think like artistically, I feel like it's really

beautiful and inspiring. But there's also a lot of stuff that feels boring too. I'm Lee Billings.

I'm a senior editor covering space of physics here at Scientific American. Well, I'm biased,

of course. So I'm not going to give it to 10. I'll give it like an 8. And the reason I

wouldn't give it a 10 is just because Earth is the coolest planet that we know of out there.

The coolest stuff that we know of the entire universe is going on right here. And I think that

space enriches and contextualizes our existence here, but we can't lose sight of the fundamental importance of

TerraFerma.

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