NASA Launches Four Humans Toward Moon at Speed of 882 Usain Bolts

NASA's Artemis II mission this week carried four astronauts — Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen — toward the Moon aboard a Space Launch System rocket weighing approximately 14.4 million Big Macs at liftoff. The 322-foot rocket accelerated the Orion capsule to a top speed of 24,500 miles per hour: the equivalent of 882 Usain Bolts running simultaneously in the same direction, or one Usain Bolt who has made some very different life choices.

The crew will travel approximately 239,000 miles to the Moon's vicinity — a distance our analysts have rendered as 2.6 billion iPhone 16s laid end-to-end, which Apple's warranty department has declined to address. The mission marks humanity's first crewed journey beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972, a gap of 54 years our conversion team has expressed as 1.7 billion TikTok videos, most of which were not about going to the moon.

Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen is the first Canadian to travel beyond Earth's orbit, a fact Canada acknowledged with a press release that did not mention hockey. The 10-day mission will conclude with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean — equivalent to 57,600 TikTok videos, 28,800 Super Bowl commercials, or one very long meeting that could have been an email. NASA has not specified which metric the crew is using to measure morale.