13 Minutes Presents: Artemis II

This series from the BBC space podcast 13 Minutes stays with a single flight: NASA's Artemis II, the first crewed mission around the Moon in more than 50 years. It works as a daily log. Astronaut Tim Peake and space scientist Maggie Aderin open each numbered episode with the flight day it is approaching, so episode eight arrives on the way to flight day six and episode twelve on the way to flight day ten. Recorded audio from the flight often sets the scene. In one clip, controllers ask the crew whether anyone has been touching the smoke detector, then tell them to carry on taking photos. In another, the crew thank the engineers behind the flywheel exercise machine after their last gym sessions. The most moving is a message from Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke, who recalls landing in 1972 in a lunar module also named Orion and tells the crew that a photo of his family lies on the surface below them. Space journalist Kristin Fisher is a regular voice, at one point reporting from New York City on what she happily declares Lunar Flyby Day. BBC News Science Editor Rebecca Morelle joins for an episode that Maggie Aderin and Kristin Fisher present without Tim Peake. The explanations are the real draw. The show spells out what it means for the crew to be inside the Moon's sphere of influence, where lunar gravity outweighs Earth's, and why a micrometeoroid hitting the lunar surface produces a brief impact flash. An exchange with a member of the science team captures the excitement around those flashes, one of the mission's highest-priority science objectives. Splashdown gets practical treatment: weather can move the landing zone, and wave height has to be under six feet. The series also looks well beyond this one capsule. It covers NASA pausing, and perhaps cancelling, the Gateway station meant to orbit the Moon in favour of a base on the surface. It also notes how much simpler Apollo's single-stack launches were than an Artemis plan that may need Starship refuelled several times. China's programme comes up too, from Chang'e 8's tests of lunar soil as a building material to a goal of taikonauts on the Moon around 2030 and a Long March 12A rocket with a reusable first stage. History runs underneath all of it. One example is the observation that Gemini veterans commanded all but one of the Apollo missions, made while weighing how quickly an Artemis III crew must be named for a flight expected in 2027. The tone is warm and curious, open about the emotion of the moment, with room for small jokes about rowing machines and lucky splashdown outfits. It is a BBC Audio Science production for the BBC World Service, with theme music by Hans Zimmer and Christian Lundberg. For a first listen, 'Artemis II: 8. Final approach' carries the Charlie Duke message, and 'Artemis II: 13. Splashdown' includes talk of the next crew now that this one is home.