You're listening to NASA's Curious Universe.

I'm Jacob Pinter.

And I'm Patty Boyd.

And I'm Christian Elliott.

And we are all here today to celebrate Artemis II in a special bonus episode.

This mission had so many cool moments, and we've had more fascinating conversations that we just can't keep to

ourselves. So we're going to share them with you now. First things first, the astronauts of

Artemis 2 are home safe. NASA astronauts Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Cook,

and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hanson are readjusting to life on this planet.

NASA scientists are digging through observations and photos the crew collected as they flew

around the moon, and engineers are evaluating data from this test flight to make future

Artemis missions even better.

Now, we've got a lot of exciting NASA stories to share with you in the coming months.

But today, while we're all still riding this collective moon joy high, we wanted to take a look

back at Artemis 2.

We'll be catching up with some of the folks you've met along the way in this podcast series,

and we'll share some stories I am pretty sure you haven't heard anywhere else. But first... Patty, hi, we've got to start with you. Hi, Jacob. We've been sending each other lots of emails and texts and stuff. It's good to catch up in person, finally. It's awesome. Here we are on the other side of it. As the Artemis 2 astronauts flew around the moon, you were observing the science teams, and you were right there. You were in the back rooms, in mission control, in Houston, which I want to hear all about. Yeah. But before that, you watched Artemis II launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. So let's start there. Just take me back to that day. Okay. Tell me where you were.

What did you see?

For the April launch dates, there were six days in a row. They were going to try on the first, and then there was an opportunity on every one of the next days until the sixth. And at some point, I realized that overlaps with my kids' spring break. And so, like, okay, we'll go down to Florida. And I've been to several launches where it does eventually launch, but it's very unusual for a launch to go off on the first attempt.

Usually you're basically expecting to stick around for two, three, four days. So I had this

whole plan. I like, what I would do if it launched on the fourth? What would I do if it launched

on the fifth? I had literally zero plan for how my life was going to unfold if it actually launched within like 11 minutes of the first launch window opening.

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