Having worked at Defector for four years, and having read my colleagues for longer than that, I can now keep time by the peaks of our editorial calendar. Drew locking in for Why Your Team Sucks announces that autumn is en route, and it implies that Maitreyi will soon batten down the hatches for the WNBA playoffs. The arrival of each tennis Grand Slam tells me to clear my schedule to make room for two weeks of Giri going off.
But for as much and as movingly as we write about it, I never know when Space Stuff is gonna happen. Instead, a handful of times each year, I'm greeted by some stupefying photo atop the homepage. The corresponding blog often winds up being the best thing I read that day.
Barry writes a solid majority of our space blogs, and I love the reverent and authoritative but conversational tone he manages. Some of the blogs’ appeal is surely rooted in escapism from the daily horrors on Earth. But Barry’s work helpfully reframes those horrors: On a cosmic scale, the awful things happening today amount to less than a rounding error, and together we are capable of so much more.
Barry’s run of posts on Artemis II has been typically excellent. Right now, we’re in squeaky bum time–the craft is due to splash down around 8:07 p.m. ET tonight off the coast of San Diego. NASA’s coverage will start here in about an hour. In the meantime, you can catch up on what’s happening and what it all means:
