Rockets and spaceships are cool, but the humanity of Artemis II resonated most

Christina Koch, Jeremy Hansen, Victor Glover, and Reid Wiseman (left to right) are joined by their mission mascot, a plushie toy named "Rise," inside the Orion spacecraft. Credit: NASA

HOUSTON—Their mission is complete. The four people who flew beyond the Moon on NASA’s Artemis II mission are back home in Houston with their families. But the lessons from Artemis II are just beginning to be told.

There are tangible, objective takeaways from the nine-day mission. How did NASA’s Space Launch System rocket perform? Nearly perfectly. Was the Orion spacecraft up to the job of flying to the Moon and back? Absolutely. Will engineers need to make any changes before the next Artemis mission? Yes, and that’s not terribly surprising for a program that, 20 years in, has just flown a crew to space for the first time.

Ars has covered the technical lessons from Artemis II ...