NASA is a 2026 Gizmodo Science Fair winner for the Orion spacecraft’s stellar performance during the Artemis 2 mission, the first to send humans back to the Moon since the Apollo era.

Can Orion’s life support systems keep astronauts alive for 10 days with no safety net, and can NASA’s redesigned reentry trajectory protect the crew during their return?

On April 1, NASA’s Space Launch System rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, propelling the Orion spacecraft to orbit. The capsule carried the most precious cargo any spacecraft can harbor: human lives—the first astronauts charged with returning to the Moon in over 50 years.

This mission, Artemis 2, was Orion’s first crewed test flight. The stakes couldn’t have been higher.

Orion had never flown with full life support and human-rated systems, and the capsule needed to keep its crew—NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen—alive for 10 days as it journeyed around the Moon and back again.

Judd Frieling, a NASA flight director who worked on both Artemis 1 and 2, was watching closely to make sure these systems performed as expected. Aside from some issues with the toilet and a couple other minor anomalies, everything worked as it should, but Frieling told Gizmodo that Orion had plenty of backup equipment on board in case something broke or malfunctioned. The contingency urinals certainly came in handy.

Over the course of the flight, Orion successfully performed all of its deep-space operations, life support checks, and its manual proximity operations demonstration, but there would be one last test before its mission came to an end.

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