Happy Wednesday.
The current thing in tech and business is the Artemis II mission, which is scheduled to launch 4 astronauts today to perform a lunar flyby.
Today’s lineupApple Senior Vice President of Services & Health Eddy Cue at 12:00 PM
Gusto Economist Aaron Terrazas at 12:30 PM
Arena Physica Co-Founder & CEO Pratap Ranade at 1:00 PM
Yutori Co-Founder & Co-CEO Abhishek Das at 1:15 PM
Y Combinator President & CEO Garry Tan at 1:30 PM
CoreWeave Co-Founder & CDO Brannin McBee at 1:45 PM
Corazon Capital Co-Founder & Managing Director Sam Yagan at 1:55 PM
The Most Extensively Documented Spaceflight in History
Artemis II crewToday the NASA Artemis II mission will launch, sending the Orion spacecraft carrying a 4-astronaut crew on a high-energy free-return trajectory to get to the moon and back in about 10 days. Immediately after launch, Orion will enter a 24-hour highly elliptical orbit with an apogee of 44,000 miles above the surface of the Earth (for context, the ISS orbits at 220-280 miles in altitude). During this first day, the crew will test critical life support and communications systems before committing to the long haul to the moon and back.
After reaching its apogee, Orion will essentially fall back toward our planet; this will cause the craft to start picking up massive speed. As it approaches its perigee, or lowest point in its Earth orbit, the crew will conduct a systems review, wake up the main engine system, organize the cabin to make sure radiation-shielding bags and water supplies are positioned to act as a shelter in case a solar flare occurs, put on their survival suits, and strap in.
At the path’s perigee — 115 to 235 miles above the Earth’s surface — the crew will start its 6-minute, 5-second translunar injection burn, which will increase the craft’s speed by just under 1,000 mph, from roughly 23,500 mph to 24,500 mph and push Orion past escape velocity and send it out of Earth’s orbit.
Orion’s trajectory is shaped like a figure-eight:
After the burn, the crew will take four more days to reach the Moon. The craft just coasts there. The lunar flyby, where it will orbit the moon at a maximum altitude of 6,000 miles, and a minimum altitude of 60-70 miles from the surface, is expected to happen on Monday, April 6. It will probably end up being the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth due to the high altitude at which they’ll orbit the moon and the fact that the moon itself will be at its near-apogee of its Earth orbit — Apollo 13 did its lunar flyby 158 miles above the surface.
All this is obviously extremely cool. But I think I’m more excited about something else: the video gear they’re taking with them, which will result in the most visually documented space mission in human history.
NASA is essentially aiming for a Netflix-quality livestream of the flyby. It will feature 4K UHD video streams that beam back to Earth with a 3-second latency (and some additional latency from encoding and terrestrial distribution) using a frontier laser communication terminal that can transmit data at 260 Mbps. (The stream will probably be compressed to 1080p for the live video, but will be saved in 4K).
The craft has at least 28 dedicated cameras on board (externally mounted, and astronaut-handheld). Externally mounted cameras will be on the tip of each of Orion’s four X-shaped solar arrays, and they can rotate, which will allow them to take selfies of Orion with Earth or the Moon in the background. These specific cameras will be a heavily modified version of the GoPro HERO4 Black, which uses a 12-megapixel CMOS sensor and can shoot 4K at 30 FPS. NASA contracted Redwire Space to ruggedize the cameras to protect them from the vacuum, extreme temperatures, and intense radiation of deep space.
Some of the external cameras won’t even generate imagery for the public. The optical navigation camera, for example, is a high-res monochromatic sensor that feeds image data of the Earth and Moon against background stars to Orion’s central computer, which runs machine vision algos to calculate the craft’s exact position and velocity.
Inside Orion, astronauts will use tricked-out Nikon Z9s, handheld cameras that can shoot massive 8K video at 60 FPS. NASA actually entered into an agreement with Nikon to develop these for Artemis II. Astronauts on the ISS use unmodified Nikon Z9s, but because Artemis is going into deep space, the cameras needed to be ruggedized for the conditions out there and power-optimized for the huge data transfers the cameras will need to make to the ship, which can be incredibly power-intensive. Nikon even wrote a dedicated operating system for the cameras.
Unmodified GoPro HERO4 Black and Nikon Z9Finally, NASA partnered with National Geographic to essentially record the footage for a documentary during the mission.
The launch is expected no earlier than 6:24 pm ET today. NASA’s YouTube is already broadcasting a livestream; the ‘main program’ with commentary, etc. starts at 12:50 pm ET. Throughout the course of the mission, NASA will broadcast real-time coverage from Orion’s cameras as bandwidth allows — this will also be on the agency’s YouTube channel. There will also be several conversations with the crew during the mission.
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