Historic NASA announcement signals greater diversity in lunar mission crews

BY SARAH GRINNELL ’26 STAFF WRITER

On April 3, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration made history in Houston, Texas, when it announced the four astronauts who will take part in its latest mission, Artemis II. Among the ranks will be the first woman and first Black astronaut to ever embark on a lunar expedition, TIME reported.

According to the BBC, the Artemis II mission marks NASA’s first moon-related journey in 50 years.

As detailed by Time, the crew will fly around the far side of the Moon, the farthest any astronauts have ever traveled in space. The infamous Apollo 13 crew currently holds the record, with a distance of 401,056 km (249,205 mi.) traveled from Earth, Time reported.

According to Time, the mission, preceded by the uncrewed Artemis I, will be a 10-day journey. Artemis I embarked last year for a total of 25 days around the moon to test NASA’s all-new Moon rocket, the Space Launch System, and its crew capsule, the Orion, BBC described. After Artemis II completes its run in this spacecraft, Time says that it will ultimately be followed by a subsequent crew, Artemis III, that will land on the Moon.

The mission, which has been in the making since the last manned mission to the Moon in December 1972 with Apollo 17, has an approximate launch date in Nov. 2024, Time reported. It aims to recreate the 1968 mission of Apollo 8, the first manned expedition to the Moon, the BBC explained. According to NASA, the ultimate goal of the entire Artemis program is to explore and study the Moon anew, this time with more advanced technology, such as the SLS. Per NASA, the crew of Artemis III will eventually “search for the Moon’s water and use it,” study the Moon and test new tools which NASA will eventually use to send astronauts to Mars and revolutionize how humans can work and potentially live on the planet.

As Victor Glover, one of the Artemis II crew, told the crowd at a ceremony in Houston, Artemis “is the next step on the journey that gets humanity to Mars,” the BBC reported. ination had passed, WHYY-FM reported.

The historic crew has already created waves even before takeoff. According to the BBC, the crew includes astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman and Jeremy Hansen. The astronauts creating the most buzz, however, are Koch and Glover, the first female and Black astronauts to go on a lunar mission, respectively.

Koch — an electrical engineer — currently holds the record for most continuous days spent in space by a woman at a total of 328 days aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the BBC detailed. Alongside fellow NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, the BBC reported that she took part in the first all-female spacewalk in October 2019. According to Time, she has participated in half a dozen spacewalks so far in her career.

Per the BBC, Glover is a former U.S. Navy test pilot who joined NASA in 2013 and first took flight into space in 2020. He then spent 138 days aboard the ISS and participated in a total of 4 spacewalks. He was also the “first African American to stay on the space station for an extended period of six months,” the BBC reported, and he will now make history as the first Black person to travel to the Moon.

During this period of uncertainty over the safety of half of Philadelphia’s tap water, the city was not able to divert safe water to these residents, WHYY-FM explained.

In city infrastructure, redundancy is the ability to supply safe water in times of crisis via backup systems to all residents of an urban area. It is difficult for most areas to obtain 100 percent redundancy, mainly due to infrastructure problems, especially in Philadelphia.

According to Charles Haas, a professor of environmental engineering at Drexel University, supplying water to all of Philadelphia’s residents from the plants currently in use on the Schuylkill River would require hundreds of millions of dollars to expand the plants or create new plants entirely, as the ones in place do not have the infrastructure to be able to supply water to more people in case of emergencies, or generally.

Despite how difficult it is to plan and carry out full redundancy, according to Philadelphia’s water revitalization plan, the city is planning to improve its water infrastructure over the next 25 years.

This plan lays out goals and key projects dedicated to improving the quality of water for Philadelphian citizens.

About 400 total projects are in line according to this plan, with the first one scheduled to start in 2026, constructing a connection between the two plants on the Schuylkill River, costing about 2.5 billion dollars.

Trinseo put out a press release on March 26, explaining that Altuglas LLC employees are working with local, state and federal agencies on stopping the spill and cleaning it up. There was no information in this release on how or if the company is working to prevent these spills in the future.

Introduction to In Vitro Fertilization

BY ELIZABETH MAZZARELLI ’26 STAFF WRITER

According to the BBC, Wiseman, also a U.S. Navy pilot, has crewed one previous space mission to the ISS, in 2015. He will be the commander of the mission, with Glover as his pilot. Koch will be a supporting “mission specialist” alongside Hansen, a former fighter pilot for the Royal Canadian Air Force who will make his first space journey with Artemis II, the BBC reported.

Hansen’s inclusion in the crew also marks a significant landmark, as the BBC points out that he will be the first Canadian on a lunar mission. This reflects what NASA administrator Bill Nelson calls in a Time article NASA’s commitment to “[explore] the cosmos with international partners.”

Given that all the previous missions to the Moon were crewed by white men, NASA’s decision to man Artemis II with a historically diverse crew mirrors what BBC described as its “promise to bring greater diversity to its exploration efforts.”

As put by Nelson, Artemis “is humanity’s crew.” With the “Artemis Generation,” NASA hopes to “[usher] in a new era of exploration for a new generation of star sailors and dreamers,” BBC reported. With the first female, Black and Canadian astronauts to embark on the final frontier, these horizons have certainly been expanded.

The Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine elected to award the 2010 prize to Robert G. Edwards, Ph. D. In conjunction with Patrick Steptoe M. D., Edwards developed the process of human in vitro fertilization. The Nobel Committee estimates that infertility, a condition in which abnormalities occurring in both the male and female reproductive systems cause difficulty with conception, impacts upwards of one-tenth of the global population. Edwards and Steptoe recognized this reality roughly half a century ago and set about discovering the practice that, in 1978, allowed the duo to successfully make human life from a Petri dish, implant said embryo in a uterus, and guide their patient through a nine-month gestation period that culminated in the birth of the first test tube baby: Louise Brown.

Penn Medicine distills the process into five prominent stages.

Superovulation describes the period during which the prospective parent receives drugs like Follicle Stimulating Hormone to stimulate egg production beyond the monthly quota of one.

Roughly thirty-six hours before having one’s eggs harvested, yet another dose of hormones is delivered in the form of an injection intended to increase the maturation rate of the eggs. Then, follicular aspiration is performed. This outpatient surgery involves the insertion of a needle through the vagina to collect the ripened eggs from the ovaries, according to Penn Medicine.

Next, the other half of the genetic material — the sperm sample — is collected. According to Penn Medicine, in order to then filter out the unhealthy sperm, the sample is subjected to a rigorous wash and spin cycle from which only the best emerge.

Insemination, or the joining of the sperm and egg samples, can occur via intracytoplasmic sperm injection, when the sperm is introduced into the egg, per Penn Medicine. The newly formed embryos are monitored throughout the initial stages of development until they become blastocysts within three to five days.

Soon after egg collection, more hormones are given to the prospective parent in hopes of making the uterus more amenable to implantation, when the blastocyst or blastocysts are reintroduced through the vagina, according to Penn Medicine. As the number of embryos increases, so too does the chance of implantation. Two weeks after the procedure, its success can be determined with a pregnancy test.