I think I am not the only one this week to wonder about mileage. (Because of Artemis, of course, not gas prices.)

Evidently measuring statute miles in feet and inches is deficient. I suppose that’s why we ended up with terms like “a country mile” and “as the crow flies.” If you’re navigating huge expanses, like an ocean, you need something more exact. Can’t put a tape measure on the ocean.

At any rate, after rational people decided the earth was not flat, they covered the globe with grid lines of latitude and longitude. And I’m quoting here, because this is math: ”A Nautical Mile is the distance you cover when you travel along a longitude, within a slice of latitude that’s one-sixtieth of a degree (1/60).”

It’s longer than a statute land mile, but close enough they can both still use the word “mile”.

So the moon is about 200,000 nautical miles (nm) away. Mars is 30 million nm away. Pluto (I still count you Pluto) is 231 billion nm away.

Or, in light terminology, Mars is 19 light-minutes away, Pluto is almost 5 light-hours away.

Seems like we need a meansurement between nautical miles and light-years. And so there is, astronomical units, which I copied freely from NASA, because there are no NASA copyrights because U.S. taxes paid for it.

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I give that to fellow members of the globe to make up for the way I have utterly disregarded kilometers in this post.

So instead of having a fraction of latitude and longitude be the standard, the distance from the Earth to the Sun is the standard. That seems very earth-centric. We’ll probably meet people orbiting Alpha Centauri and find the use kilometers too.

Astronauts are back and safe. I can stand down. I can’t tell you how much I’ve been on edge these past ten days. Gary didn’t help this morning when he shared the heat shield worries.

Anyway, good work NASA, you waited until April this time.

Excellent work on the animated graphics in particular.

Early on while the solar panels adjusted, the panels in the graphic sloooowly adjusted as well. Nice work.

Evidently the toilet was never fixed, so points off for that. Then again, Buzz Aldrin famously never pooped during his week on Apollo 11.

As for myself, I am as exhausted as if I had personally willed it to space and back.

So this is the previous …

This is the progress …

And this is the goal.

It is a shame that the president has chosen the same day and time for his public speech on the current war in Iran. Is he competing with the moon for attention?

I bet the astronauts are pretty excited. It really is a shame the toilet has been working only on and off. I would find that a huge inconvenience if I knew millions of people would have eyes on me.

I find this quote odd: “They also may be the first humans to see some parts of the moon’s far side with the unaided eye.” May be? Really? That statement came from NASA. I mean, all the Apollo 13 astronauts and all the command module pilots all saw some parts of the far side surface with their eyes, right? I suppose they were too close to see the poles. This group will be further away. Or maybe there have been secret Soviet missions and there’s some skeletal cosmonaut corpse down there.

[SPOILERS GALORE!] [NYT CROSSWORD SPOILERS! ENDING OF JANE EYRE SPOILERS!]

The New York Times crossword had a clue sometime this past week, something like “Literary heroine’s name that describes her appearance and the end of the book.”

Other letters left no choice other than Jane Eyre.

“Huh. Okay, Jane, Plain Jane, kind of a stretch but … the end of the book? Eyre? Air? Because she hears his voice in the air?” And then, “Oooohhhh, ‘heir’. That’s amazing.”

Was it deliberate? Opinions are mixed. But at least it must be a subliminal pun.

When I think of Capcom (the Capsule Communicator, the guy who communicates with the space capsule), I think of this hard-smoking coffee-drinking guy, Gene Kranz.

I can’t tell you how nice it was to watch the burn that pointed the Artemis astronauts to the moon, and to notice that the majority of the people on the screen were women.

I loved watching the expressions on these ladies faces during the process.

It’s nice to see an honest celebration instead of the mad flag-waving scene after Apollo 11 landed.

And I know this is petty but it’s also nice that the man in the top right looks a little left out.