Eight-year-old space lover’s plushie shoots for moon onboard Nasa rocket | Nasa
A weightlessness indicator designed by a San Francisco Bay Area second grader is aboard Artemis II, NASA’s first crewed lunar mission in more than 50 years. When the rocket entered space after Wednesday’s launch, the plush toy with the smiley face was designed to float in weightless conditions, signaling to astronauts that they had reached weightlessness.
Eight-year-old Lucas Ye of Mountain View is a space enthusiast and the mastermind behind the indicator.
“I love rockets, I love NASA, I love the solar system, I love studying space,” Lucas said in a video when he was selected for the global “lunar mascot” competition, chaired by NASA and Freelancer, a crowdsourcing company.
Lucas won over more than 2,600 other participants.
Trisha Epp, director of innovation at Freelancer, praised Lucas in a press release last week: “Your design literally goes into space, which is not a phrase most people can say. »
The Lucas plush sports a baseball cap with a starry visor and a crown resembling the green and blue surface of the Earth.
Parts of the design pay homage to the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, Lucas said in his video. Its name Rise also refers to the photograph Earthrise, taken by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders in 1968.
The eight-year-old aspires to work at NASA or become an astrophysicist, he told CBS News Bay Area.
Hours before the launch, Lucas was asked what he thought about having his design in the rocket. Stretching out his words, he replied: “Really, really, really, really, really, really, really surprised and very happy. »
His toy joins a long history of similar weight-indicating objects that are part of space missions. In 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man to go into space, carried a doll on his mission. More recently, on a 2014 expedition, NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, also commander of Artemis II, took a toy giraffe with him.
If Artemis II is successful, Rise will travel more than 250,000 miles to space and back in 10 days. On Thursday, the crew was preparing to leave Earth orbit.
This is the first time that NASA has sent humans to the Moon, even if they will not land on the lunar surface, in almost 54 years. The crew would also have to travel further from Earth than any human in history.
The expedition marks the first time a woman, Christina Koch, and a person of color, Victor Glover, have flown between Earth’s orbit and the moon.
The outcome of the trip, during which the astronauts’ health will be monitored, will inform Artemis IV, the planned 2028 mission to put humans back on the Moon. Donald Trump has made the moon landing a priority by the end of his second term.
