So NASA finally did it. After fifty goddamn years since Apollo 17 shat themselves into plastic bags in 1972, humanity is back in lunar orbit. Four people are floating around the Moon as I write this — Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover, and some Canadian guy named Jeremy Hansen who I’m sure is lovely but let’s be honest, the Americans are doing the heavy lifting here.

And what are the headlines? What has the entire internet buzzing?

The toilet. The goddamn toilet.

The Dignity of Not Pooping in a Bag

Look, I get it. You go to space, you expect to deal with some discomfort. Zero gravity, recycled air, that weird protein paste they call food — you sign up for a certain level of bullshit. But the Apollo astronauts literally had to zip themselves into plastic bags to take a dump. That’s not a toilet. That’s a humiliation device with a zip lock.

The Orion capsule has an actual toilet. It has handholds. It has privacy. There’s a youtube video of Christina Koch giving a tour of it and she’s treating it like she’s showing off a Tesla — “and here’s our waste management system!” — and honestly? That warms my cold, dead developer heart. We’re finally at the point where astronauts can take a comfortable shit while flying past the Moon.

This is what progress looks like.

The Mission Itself

For those living under a rock, Artemis II launched on April 1st, 2026 — yes, April Fool’s Day, and I guarantee you some dipshit on Twitter insisted it was fake until the actual launch footage proved otherwise. The mission is a ten-day lunar flyby. They won’t land — that’s for Artemis III, presumably whenever that happens — but they’ll get close enough to make the Moon look large in the window and probably take a metric shit-ton of Instagram photos.

The SLS rocket — yes, the one that took a decade and eleventy-billion dollars to build — performed perfectly. I’m as surprised as you are. After all those delays, all those cost overruns, all that “we should just use SpaceX” grumbling from every engineer with a Twitter account, the big orange beast actually worked. Go figure.

The SpaceX Elephant in the Room

Now here’s where I get unhinged, and I know this is going to piss some people off, but whatever — I’m just a guy with a blog.

NASA built this incredible, impossibly complex machine to put four people around the Moon. It cost something like $23 billion per launch. Meanwhile, SpaceX is out there launching Starship test flights that look like fireworks gone wrong and occasionally landing booster stages on barges like it’s no big deal. The contrast is… something.

And before you come at me — yes, I know, Starship hasn’t done a crewed lunar mission yet. Yes, I know NASA’s going to use Starship for the actual Artemis landing. But the point stands: the old way and the new way are diverging at a rate that’s making everyone’s heads spin.

We watched a $2 billion rocket push some astronauts toward the Moon, and we also watched a $200 million prototype do triple backflips over Texas in the same month. The space industry is having an identity crisis and I am here for every second of it.

Why This Actually Matters

Here’s the thing nobody wants to admit: this mission is less about the science and more about the symbolism. Artemis II proves that humans can go deep space again. It proves the Orion capsule works. It proves that after decades of talking about “going back to the Moon,” we’re actually, finally, really doing it.

And sure, it’s slow. Sure, it’s expensive. Sure, we could probably do it faster with private industry. But there’s something to be said for watching your tax dollars actually result in four human beings circling another celestial body. That’s not nothing. That’s the kind of thing that makes a kid look up and think “I want to do that.”

We haven’t had that feeling in a long time. Apollo gave us it. Shuttle gave us some of it. But we’ve been in this weird plateau for years — ISS visits, SpaceX crew taxi runs, a whole lot of nothing in terms of expanding our presence. Artemis is the first real “holy shit we’re leaving Earth again” moment since I was born.

The Toilet is the Metaphor

And that’s why the toilet story matters. Because it’s human. It’s the tiny, mundane, gloriously ordinary thing that reminds us these are people up there, not just astronauts. They’re going to need to pee. They’re going to need to poop. They’re going to have to deal with the same biological reality that every human deals with, just 384,000 kilometers from the nearest plumbing.

The fact that we now have a toilet that works in space — that someone engineered a way to make zero-gravity waste management not suck — that’s engineering. That’s the quiet, unglamorous work that actually makes space travel possible.

The rocket gets the glory. The toilet does the work.

Wrap It Up

So here’s to Artemis II. Here’s to the four people right now experiencing the most insane view any human has ever had. Here’s to the toilet that almost nobody will remember but that represents a genuine milestone in human capability.

And here’s to whatever comes next. Because if we’re actually back on the Moon trajectory, if this becomes a semi-regular thing, if my grandkids get to go visit a lunar base — I want them to know that one of the first things we fixed was the bathroom situation.

We as a species have a lot of problems. But at least we can finally take a shit in style, even if it’s floating around the Moon at 3,600 kilometers per hour.

Now that’s what I call progress.