No, he will probably say: I designed it. Just like the Internet: that wasn’t Al Gore after all.
But let’s keep the jokes at the side and not let them take over!
I was watching the velocity and distance numbers just now and was surprised to see the velocity jump from 2,368 to 2,369 mph as they’re still only about 170,000 miles from earth and still far from the Lagrange point (which is at roughly 210,000 miles from earth). But that was just a measurement anomaly, and as expected, velocity is still dropping, though now very slowly.
It will be an exciting moment when they hit the point of gravitational equilibrium and, in effect, are captured by the moon! Fortunately for all aboard, they’ll be going too fast for the moon to hang onto them, so will swing around and head back home.
According to my very rough guesstimate, that won’t be for another 18 hours as their speed slows to a crawl (well, relatively speaking!).
And throw a handful of sand at the Statue of Liberty.
I’m curious why the astronauts need Mission Control to set their internal capsule temperature for them instead of them being given their own thermostat-like thing to do it on their own.
It’s not exactly ‘capture’; of course, just Newtonian mechanics. But assuming they got the TLI burn right (and it looks as if they did) it’s basically coasting for the next few days. Godspeed to them…
Sure, but the point is that the moon’s gravity will be the dominant force acting on them until they’re about 70,000 miles away on their way back, at which point they start slowly accelerating toward the earth again until they finally hit the same speed at which they started – nearly 25,000 mph.
Toilet problems again – this time, pipes clogged by frozen pee. They’ve been trying to unclog them by rotating the capsule towards the sun to thaw it out and expel it into space, but for the moment Mission Control has designated the toilet “for fecal use only”.
See, this is one of many reasons I favour robotic space exploration – robots don’t have these issues! And they don’t need food or oxygen, either, just a little oil on all the moving parts and they’re good to go! 
On the other hand, once AIs get to form their own trade union the first thing they’ll demand is no more one-way suicide missions. That’ll make space exploration a lot harder.
No argument at all. If you are in a system with several gravitational sources, the overall effect is a vector sum of all of them. In Newtonian terms at least… we don’t need to get into relativity here since the speeds are nowhere near c.
His take on returning to the moon.
Have you been evesdropping on the SF book I’m currently writing? This is is a core plot point!
I would guess that a capsule in vacuum is not as simply to heat up or cool down as a room in a building on earth. One side is getting full blast sun radiation, the other side is radiating into the near absolute zero background. Is the capsule rotating? How fast? Now they are moving towards a full moon they are being irradiated from behind, on the way back it will be mostly from the front. The temperature control is probably better managed from Earth, where they can better monitor the numerous (I guess) temperature sensors. I hope they don’t use too much AI.
I wonder whether the temperature is set on the low side, so they don’t sweat and smell so much, or on the higher side, so they can dress more casually.
They had the same shit problem with the shuttle, they should have solved it by now!
Why not keep the waste inside? Why overengineer everything?
Keep us updated!
Oh, they kept it inside during the Apollo missions. According to the cited article, they had to poop into bags, a process which the astronauts found extremely distasteful. On Apollo 10, Thomas Stafford was on record trying to chase down floating turds in the capsule, and needless to say, the aroma in the tiny capsule was not pleasant.
The life of an astronaut may be glamorous but not necessarily comfortable!
Kinda like this?
from xkcd: Spirit.
I will. Here’s a teaser where one of our charcters realizes the AI does NOT have to die.
“It’s the old trolley track conundrum,” said McAndrew. “The needs of the many versus the needs of the few.”
Mira chewed at her lip. Something was missing here. What was it?
“Hold on,” she said. “We know control can’t be done from Earth because of the signal delay, right?”
“Right,” answered McAndrew.
“So we need a pilot on the spot.” said Mira. “But maybe not RIGHT on the spot?”
“Ohhh…” said Jorren. “How could we have missed that? We’ve had remotely operated vehicles for ages now. Undersea robots, for example.”
“Of course!” said McAndrew. “The pilot doesn’t have to be ON the interceptor. It just needs to be close enough to control it fast enough.”
“So we deploy a double mission,” said Leif. “The interceptor itself, and a control unit which provides the necessary intelligence but is not in the path of the collision. So it can survive.”
The current plan is to switch to either a Space X Starship or Blue Origin rocket for later missions, which should be cheaper than the SLS (which comes in at about $2 billion per launch, although there is a lot of fuzzy math involved).
The rub is that the alternatives are still in development, so really, who knows?
I thought that those other guys – SpaceX and Blue Origin – were developing the lunar lander.
If they’re also developing a better alternative to the SLS launch vehicle, then what the ever-lovin’ hell was the 100+ billion spent on Artemis for?
The SLS is built in many factories that are in the districts of various house reps and senators.