58 tortillas, five hot sauces and one toilet: life aboard spacecraft Orion
They're sipping smoothies, snapping phone pics, dealing with crashed email and fixing broken toilets: astronauts, they're just like us.
The four crew members zipping through space toward the moon are carrying out a mission unlike any before it, but they're also still muddling on through life's mundanities—all while they float around together in a square footage equivalent to two minivans.
Mission specialist Christina Koch, the first woman to venture into deep space, said preparing for the 10-day journey was akin to planning for a camping trip.
"It represents togetherness and something a little out of the ordinary," she said in a video released by NASA.
Orion wares include 58 tortillas, 43 cups of coffee, barbecued beef brisket and five types of hot sauce.
And one toilet... which had a problem.
It's the first time astronauts venturing into deep space have had a real toilet onboard: the Apollo missions of the 1960s and '70s provided crew members with waste collection bags that were ultimately left on the lunar surface.
Much to the astronauts' relief, Koch remedied the issue with the toilet aboard Orion—"I'm proud to call myself the space plumber," she said during a Q&A session late Thursday with US media.
While the astronauts' lunar mission demands extreme precision, there's plenty of room for childlike levity onboard the Artemis 2 capsule.
This handout picture provided by NASA shows a view of Earth taken by Artemis 2 commander Reid Wiseman from one of the Orion spacecraft's four main windows after completing the translunar injection burn.
The four crewmembers zipping across space en route to the Moon are carrying out a mission unlike any before it, but they're also still muddling on through the mundanities of life.