Yesterday, news blasts announced the triumph that four humans have now traveled farther from Earth than ever, passing the previous record set by the crew of Apollo 13 on April 15, 1970.
Perhaps a little bit of context is in order.
First, why was Apollo 13 special? Was its record distance somehow related to the emergency they experienced, or did a young and clairvoyant Ron Howard request they go the extra distance in anticipation of making a movie about the mission someday?
Well, the moon isn’t a “place” in the sense to which we Earthlings are habituated. If traveling from Atlanta to Los Angeles, the (great circle) distance is fixed. Any trip between the two will end up the same distance from the start. The moon, on the other hand, gets around. Its maximum distance from Earth is 14% farther than its minimum. Of the nine lunar flights in the Apollo program, Apollo 13 snagged the record simply because the moon happened to be far away at the time (at apogee; Apollo 10 and 15 were comparably far). In fact, the moon only ever gets about 0.5% farther than it was at the time of Apollo 13—and not on every orbit.
At the time the record was surpassed yesterday, the distance between Earth and Moon (centers) was a whole 0.086% farther than it was at the time of the Apollo 13 record. By analogy, Atlanta to L.A. is about 3,110 km, while 0.085% farther amounts to another 2.5 km. So this is like saying that while Apollo 13 traveled from downtown Atlanta to downtown L.A., the mission yesterday decided to poke out another two minutes of drive-time to visit a taco truck. Meanwhile, the moon never gets even as far as the beach at Santa Monica (23 km farther), although sometimes is as close as the California–Arizona border. It was pretty close to maxed out, and thus the records.
Not only does the moon change its distance by a large fraction during its 27.55 day orbit, but not all apogees are the same distance, as the sun produces a serious several-thousand-kilometer perturbation on the moon’s orbit. Actually, it is more fair to say that the Earth imposes a serious perturbation on the fundamentally-solar orbit of the moon: at the moon’s position, solar gravity is roughly twice as strong as Earth’s gravity, so that the lunar orbit curves and weaves in such a way that it is never convex toward the sun. In any case, some apogees are farther than others, by about 2,400 km (0.5%, or 15 km in our analogy: just shy of Santa Monica)—as the wavy top of the plot below illustrates.
Anyway, all the ballyhoo about this distance record isn’t a matter of an exceptional crew or advances in technology, but simply about where the moon happens to be for this mission—perhaps timed for precisely this reason as a grasping ploy to throw some superlative bone to the people. Break out the big font! Nice try. I hope my ho-hum reaction isn’t too disappointing.
It’s not hard to imagine that some people reason as follows: we just beat the Apollo-era record for distance, which means we’re that much closer to the next step: Mars. Currently, Mars is more than 800 times the Earth-Moon distance. If we compare the Earth–Mars distance to a 100 meter race course, Apollo 13 made it about a hands’ breadth from the start line. Yesterday’s effort added the thickness of a human hair. So, yeah: that would seem to put Mars within closer reach! Morons.
One other aspect of the insanity is the arbitrary insistence on reporting distance from the surface of Earth, rather than its center. I suppose it serves to make the record all the more superficial. The 1970 record was put at 400,171 km, but the moon at the time was 404,418 km from Earth: center-to-center. Subtracting Earth radius (6,378 km) and adding the moon’s (1,737 km) plus a few hundred kilometers above/beyond the moon to accommodate the orbit makes for 400,171.
Anyway, it’s all a bunch of silliness starved of context. It’s bad enough that the entire enterprise is delusional and misguided. They have to go and make something that’s already stupid silly to boot.
Views: 1937
I always think, too, whether for Moon travel or simply satellites, about the extreme damage every single launch does to the living biosphere and the atmosphere here on Earth. Destroying the only place we can ever possible call "home" for stupid and silly. Par for the course, I suppose.
Right! On average, every hour in space counts for about 2,000 hours of global-average-citizen environmental impact (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969722063215), so 10 days and four humans racks up two-million hours of damage: as much harm as three whole lifetimes of ordinary people—all in a rush. Go, team!
Another widely touted stunt on the Artemis pass behind the moon is seeing features "never before seen by human eyes". Is this true? Apollo missions also flew around the back of the moon with a line of sight view to the same features as Artemis II; we can guess that those astronauts looked out the window now and then. The only difference appears to be that on the Apollo missions, more of the back side was actually dark because of the lunar phase. (Landings were timed so that the part seen from earth was more fully illuminated, that is, near full moon.) So my question is, how dark is the side away from earth at full moon? If you look down on it from above with human eyes, how totally black is it— what do you see? It's illuminated by some diffuse light in the solar system like zodiacal glow reflected from interplanetary material, as well as starlight. Is that enough to see anything?
Interesting to ponder (and perhaps a calculation is in order)! The back side has no "earthshine" to help illuminate it in the absence of sunlight. The albedo is also something like 0.1, so it's ten times darker than the average sky. Another challenge is any lights in the capsule reflect off windows and generally make good dark adaptation difficult. I'm guessing zero detail is discernible on the back side when it's dark. Even if it can be very dimly perceived, making out a single feature like a crater seems like it would be hard-to-impossible.
Google reports: The average surface brightness of the night sky from space, resulting from the integration of all starlight (excluding zodiacal light and airglow), is relatively low. The total integrated starlight produces a luminosity of approximately 4e-4 cd/m^2, which is sufficient for scotopic (night) vision. This corresponds to a surface brightness value typically falling in the range of 21.6 to 22.7 magnitudes per square arcsecond.
A candela is a lumen per steradian, so a 2-pi sky puts down 2.5e-3 lumens per meter squared (2.5 milli-lux). That's very dim: 400 times darker than outdoors at full moon.
https://phys.org/news/2026-04-artemis-astronauts-moon-surface-eyes.html
"The human eye is basically the best camera that could ever or will ever
exist," Kelsey Young, the lead scientist for the Artemis 2 mission, told AFP.
This silliness was repeated by numerous news sources. In truth, we have cameras that have more resolution, are more sensitive and can record more of the spectrum than human eyes.
One place the eye wins is dynamic range (a logarithmic device, essentially—while cameras are touted for linearity). But yes: in basically every other regard, they fall short.
A very long time ago I read of a silly argument between an engineer and a biologist. The engineer argued that any modern camera was vastly better than a human eye. The other fella said "Maybe so, but can you make one out of jello and water?"
Each human (at least those staying on Earth) travels 2.6 million km every day. The distance to the moon and back is trivial, by comparison.
Sir, in the true spirit of extreme curmudgeonry, I concur that all things and efforts are futile… including this blog.
Thank you sir 🫡🫡🫡
Artemis 2 closest to the Moon 6545km
Apollo 13 closest to the Moon 254km on free return
Apollo 8+ orbits: 110km
0,.086% of 410,00 ~ 352km
Looks to me the reason that Artemis 2 "record" is empty is because the metric for these missions is meant to be "who got closest to the Moon".
Apollo 13 "succeeded" here because it failed. My guess would be the "farthest from home" meme was born out of the desperation narratives during the televised survival.
Artemis 2 might not even have had the (ICPS) delta-v to get any closer to the Moon – or the mission designers chose to go for the empty record deliberately.
There is an abundance of options to be stupid.