I'm John Batchelor. I welcome my good colleague of many years, Bob Zimmerman.

He keeps the website behind the black,

watching Orion. This is Artemis II on the outward voyage. Bob, a very good evening to you. As I

understand it, everything has gone according to the best plans so far, and there's no reason for

doubt. So I come to a puzzlement when I discovered, because I read late to these matters,

that they're not going into lunar orbit.

They're swinging around the moon and coming back almost as if they're on a boomerang,

out to the moon and back without any risk of that trans earth burn

as I recall was great tension in the Apollo program when they had to fire the engines precisely

in order to leave lunar orbit and come back to Earth correctly. They're not going to have to worry

about that. Is that correct, Bob? That is absolutely correct. This plan, this mission is always

designed as when they fired the engines to leave Earth orbit, that engine burn is literally

their de-orbit burn, but they're not going straight down. They're taking an extremely long,

roundabout

mission out beyond the moon, use the moon's gravity to swing around and come back to the orbit,

come back to Earth. Yes, they were never going to go into Earth or into lunar orbit in this

mission. Now, you are the author of Genesis, the story of Apollo 8, which was a great victory in

the Cold War, Christmastime, 1968.

That mission was extremely risky.

With technology that we've left far behind, they didn't have the brain of my iPhone.

But they did go into lunar orbit.

They did send us pictures very close to Earth, to the moon, and they sent us that famous

...