Four humans flew around the moon. Here’s the technology that got them there.

April 7, 2026

By Kim Komando

Yesterday, four humans flew 252,757 miles from Earth, swinging around the lunar far side in a spacecraft the size of a minibus. They broke a record that had stood since 1970 when Apollo 13 limped past the moon, trying to get its crew home alive.

The Artemis II voyagers woke up to Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club.” (NASA cut it before the chorus. Commander Reid Wiseman was not pleased. I respect that.)

For 40 minutes during the flyby, the Orion spacecraft was completely behind the moon. No radio contact. No telemetry. 

Mission Control in Houston had to sit there and wait. The computers were on their own.

🖥️ Not your grandfather’s guidance computer

Apollo 11 flew to the moon on 4 kilobytes of memory. The guidance computer that landed Neil Armstrong on the lunar surface had less power than your phone’s calculator.

Orion’s computers process data 20,000 times faster and carry 128,000 times more memory. But there’s a number that matters more than the speed. It’s the five.

Orion runs five independent flight computers simultaneously. They’re derived from the Boeing 787’s flight management system, the same hardware keeping your cross-country trip on course, but rebuilt from scratch for deep space. The reason? Radiation.

The Van Allen belts, two massive zones of high-intensity radiation surrounding Earth, would fry a standard laptop in minutes. These computers are hardened against it.

And if one takes a radiation hit and starts producing bad data? The other four outvote it instantly. No astronaut intervention required.

☀️ Powered by sunlight

Apollo ran on fuel cells. Orion runs on sunshine.

Four X-shaped solar wings span over 60 feet tip to tip. They generate 11.2 kilowatts of power. Enough to run two average American homes at the same time. Quarter million miles from Earth. I find that unreasonably impressive.

Inside, the cockpit looks nothing like Apollo’s walls of switches. Fully digital glass displays. 

A $23 million toilet took six years to develop and, on day three, smelled like an old electric heater someone turned on for the first time in years. (Mission Control cleared the astronauts to keep using it. Brave call.)

They had 58 tortillas up there. BBQ brisket. Five varieties of hot sauce. The Apollo guys ate toothpaste tubes of food. Progress is real.

The Artemis flight splashes down tomorrow off the coast of San Diego. Ten days. Half a million miles total. Pilot Victor Glover said it best: “That we can do this right now means we could do so much more.” Yeah. It does.

Why did the astronaut bring a keyboard to the moon? In case they needed to hit the space bar. I’ll be here all mission. Only one more day left though. ICYMI, here’s the link to photos and videos from the mission on NASA’s site.

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