Hi, listeners, Benjamin here. It's the Friday show, and we're going to be doing another

Artemis II special. And joining me is Alex Wittsey, who covers all things space for nature.

Alex, hi. Hi. So last time you and I spoke was just over a week ago, just after the successful launch of the Artemis 2 rocket.

They hadn't quite yet entered their Earth orbit before jetting off to the moon.

Now, we didn't say it at the time because I guess we didn't want to jinx it.

But shortly after, you were about to leap on a plane and head somewhere pretty special. Tell us,

where did you go? I went to Mission Control in Houston, the Houston we have a problem,

mission control place. So remarkably, Artemis II has been doing very well since we spoke. Of course,

we're not done with the mission yet. But I went to mission control in Houston, and I had some pretty rare access to the scientists

on the team as they were working it. So all of this was around the lunar flyby. So about six

days into the mission, the astronauts flew around the backside of the moon. And that was kind of the

main science event for Artemis II. And tell us what it's like there, because I guess for a lot of people, their frame of reference will be videos from the 60s and what have you, of a lot of folks with sort of boom mics on and looking up at a big screen. Is it still like that, Alex? It is like that. The crowd is a lot more diverse, so it's not just, you know, white dudes with skinny ties. So we've got, you know, much broader diversity of engineers and scientists in the room.

I was able to go to the... it's not just, you know, white dudes with skinny ties. So we've got, you know, much broader

diversity of engineers and scientists in the room. I was able to go to the overlook to that actual

mission control room that you think about in all the movies, in all the footage from the Apollo

days. And it looks very much like it did then. There is one addition in the mission control room,

which is really important for us at nature,

along all the sort of flight directors and all the other teams that are feeding in information,

there's a desk for science. So the very first time in the main mission control room,

there is a placard that says science and there is a science officer. It sounds very Star Trek-y,

but there is a science officer sitting there in mission control.

I must confess, when you told me this that this was kind of the first time, I was kind of shocked.

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