Over a half-century ago, NASA only spent three years landing astronauts on the moon before the nation lost interest in continuing the program.

That meant the U.S. space agency didn’t get to launch at least three more planned Apollo missions that would have explored new regions of the lunar surface. 

But NASA never forgot — demonstrated by a little artifact the agency tucked inside the Orion spacecraft: An American flag that would have flown on Apollo 18 in the early 1970s.

“The flag serves as a powerful emblem of America’s renewed commitment to human exploration of the moon,” NASA said, “while honoring the legacy of the Apollo pioneers who first blazed the trail.”

NASA’s Artemis II mission, which blasted off April 1, is a crowded flight, carrying four astronauts in a spacecraft the size of two minivans. While the crew — Commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — didn’t have to leave their carry-ons on the Cape Canaveral, Florida, launchpad, their “home” for the 10-day flight around the moon is certainly packed to the gills. Still, NASA had room to stow away a few precious mementos and other odds and ends for the journey. 

The “official flight kit,” established in federal law, allows NASA, commercial partners, and international entities to use these items later as awards, gifts, or museum exhibits. But for them to get those items onboard, each supplier has to ask NASA for written permission. 

The Artemis II flight kit is considerably smaller than the one that flew on the uncrewed Artemis I mission in 2022, which contained about 120 pounds of weird stuff. On this journey, the capsule was maxed out with systems and cargo to keep four adults alive. A toilet, compact rowing machine, food, and other life-support equipment, as well as the astronauts themselves, had to take priority.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

As usual, Artemis II’s kit includes a lot of flags, mission patches, and pins, most of which will go to employees and contractors who helped support the project. But here are some of the more unusual and symbolic items that made the cut:

Pieces of the Space Launch System

When a rocket is about to thrust you into space at 18,000 mph, the last thing you as an astronaut want to hear is that some of its parts are actually sitting right next to you inside the capsule. 

But don’t worry. These are shavings from the Space Launch System‘s core stage, likely little aluminum bits recovered from the welding and machining process. After the first eight minutes of the flight, the core stage shut down its engines and detached, breaking apart over the Pacific Ocean. 

At 212 feet tall, the core stage of the Space Launch System holds more than 733,000 gallons of fuel to feed four engines at its base.
Credit: NASA

Bags of dirt

Yes, mission planners made room for 10 bags of dirt — but not just any dirt. Special dirt. These bags contain soil collected from trees whose seeds flew on Artemis I. After that flight, they were planted on Earth. Now some of the soil that helped them grow is making the lunar trip, tracing a full circle from space to Earth and back again. 

On Apollo 14, NASA brought seeds to learn about the effects of deep space on plants. Unfortunately, the can containing them broke, with the seeds getting all mixed up. No longer viable for research, the seeds became part of a new program. Not wanting to waste them, NASA delivered the seeds to the U.S. Forest Services. When hundreds began sprouting, they earned the nickname of “moon trees.” 

NASA didn’t pack any tree seeds this time, but the Canadian Space Agency did, continuing the tradition. As a member of the Artemis II crew, Canadian astronaut Hansen is the first non-American on a deep space flight.

Other seeds, including a packet of zinnias and chili peppers, are also on board. 

The Wrights pioneered the first powered airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on Dec. 17, 1903.
Credit: The Estate of Orville Wright / Smithsonian

Wright Brothers’ fabric swatch

A one-inch square of fabric from the Wright brothers’ Flyer is inside Orion right now. The swatch is meant to commemorate the birth of flight. The scrap is on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, along with another little piece that previously flew on the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1985. After the spacecraft splashes down, the artifacts will return to the museum. 

As another nod to the history of flight, the kit holds a photo negative from Ranger 7, the 1964 probe that became the first U.S. mission to successfully touch the lunar surface.  

Lab-grown astronaut tissue samples

Separate from the flight kit, the mission is carrying a unique science experiment, known as A Virtual Astronaut Tissue Analog Response, or AVATAR. The test involves live tissue from each of the four astronauts on thumb-drive-size chips, stored in a temperature-controlled box. 

Before the launch, doctors drew blood from each crew member and grew cells from those samples to load on the chips. The samples mimic bone marrow, a crucial part of the immune system.  

After the mission, scientists will study how gene activity changes within individual cells, comparing flight samples with copies on Earth. The work aims to reveal how deep-space radiation and microgravity affect blood cell development. And it will also serve as a test case for whether these chips can predict health outcomes. In the future, the research may help NASA build personalized health kits for astronauts. 

Lucas Ye, 8, won a contest to design a zero-gravity indicator for the Artemis II moon mission.
Credit: Freelancer / NASA

A stuffie with a story

NASA didn’t assign Snoopy to this moon mission — the beagle flew previously on Artemis I — but another cuddly plush toy is filling in. Though not a part of the official flight kit, the round mascot, selected by the astronauts from more than 2,600 contest entries, has an important role. It’s what’s known as a zero-G indicator, letting mission control know when the spacecraft has reached microgravity.

How? It floats.

A second grader from California, Lucas Ye, designed the little stuffie, who looks like the moon wearing an Earth cap. It represents the famous Earthrise image taken during Apollo 8, when humans first saw the planet hovering above the moon’s horizon. Zipped inside is an SD card of names from people rooting for the mission’s success.

Right now, it doesn’t look as though there’s a way to buy Rise, as NASA apparently hasn’t licensed it. But there may be some pent-up demand for the cutie: The official Kennedy Space Center gift shop has temporarily stopped selling most Artemis-related merchandise due to “an unprecedented surge” in orders. 

“We sincerely appreciate your excitement and support,” the shop said in a notice on its website, “and kindly ask for your patience as fulfillment times may be longer than usual.”

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 22 seconds ago

Now that Starfleet Academy has been canceled, its fans have been fondly reminiscing about what they see as the show’s better qualities. Arguably, the best thing about the show was its colorful characters, whose diversity reflected the ideals of Star Trek as a whole. However, some critics felt the show went a little too far with Jay-Den, the gay, pacifist Klingon. Accordingly, this became another culture war flashpoint, with SFA superfans claiming that anyone who dislikes Jay-Den’s portrayal is just a bigot who never really understood what this franchise was about. 

The truth is, there was a problem with this character’s portrayal, but not in the way the show’s biggest fans or its biggest haters could have guessed. You see, there’s nothing wrong with Starfleet Academy prominently featuring the first gay Klingon in Star Trek history. But the writers went about Jay-Den’s characterization in such a way that the show’s most progressive character accidentally became the most offensive. 

The Accidental Caricature

Ironically enough, one of the reasons that Jay-Den became the most offensive character on Starfleet Academy is that the writers kept putting hats on top of hats to make him a uniquely progressive character. You see, he’s not just a gay Klingon, but he’s also an aspiring nurse who is a complete pacifist. Oh, and his parents are polyamorous (today was a good day for monogamy to die). 

When I first heard that the new Star Trek show would feature a gay Klingon character, I assumed it would be a more traditional, Worf-like Klingon who is simply into dudes rather than gals. Making the character an aspiring medical officer was a confusing choice, but it still made a kind of sense; after all, a warrior culture like the Klingons must have battlefield medics. But then the writers made Jay-Den a Klingon pacifist (completely unheard of in previous lore), put him in a skirt, and did the shocked Pikachu face at the fact that old-school Trek fans disliked him.

Hello, Nurse!

Starfleet Academy made Jay-Den completely different from other Klingons in every way except his face. This is, understandably, offensive to Star Trek fans who expected him to act like a Klingon rather than simply look like one. But it’s also arguably offensive to those expecting a truly progressive character because Jay-Den ended up being weirdly half-baked as a person. He was ultimately nothing more than a set of half-assed progressive signifiers that transformed him into a caricature that leaned on offensive stereotypes.

I would bet my last bar of gold-pressed latinum that the Starfleet Academy writers thought they had struck gold by making Jay-Den the 32nd-century equivalent of a nurse. However, what they failed to consider is that, to 21st-century viewers, the “gay nurse” is actually a very offensive stereotype. It’s rooted in patriarchal, old-school homophobia and assumes that caretaking is a feminine activity. Writers often perpetuate the stereotype by making nurses gay, effectively confirming the homophobic assumption that male nurses can’t be “real” (i.e., heterosexual) men.

In retrospect, I can’t help but think that making a member of Star Trek’s most famous warrior race into a gay pacifist was a decision to play things safe. A hugely muscled, highly aggressive, bloodthirsty warrior who just happened to be gay is the kind of thing that makes people very, very nervous. By making Jay-Den gay and a pacifist and a nurse, Paramount effectively reassured sponsors, execs, and traditional fans (groups comprised mostly of older, white men) that the strong Black character couldn’t hurt them.

The Diversity Is The Character (And Why That’s A Bad Thing)

As I said before, Starfleet Academy is, by certain metrics, the most progressive Star Trek show ever made. Unfortunately, the writers made a pretty crucial mistake with Jay-Den: they made his sexuality and other progressive aspects very nearly the sum total of his character.

To see what I mean, look back at Stamets and Culber, the two most prominent gay characters in Trek before Jay-Den came along. Outside of their (frankly, very cute) scenes together as a couple, you might barely know they were gay because the show largely focused on their responsibilities: one was a doctor, one was an engineer. They were defined by their competence and characterization, and not by sexuality.

Jay-Den, outside of the one episode that focused on his character (the one that sent 99% of Klingons to Hell while giving him the “my parents didn’t understand me” stock gay story), wasn’t really developed as a character. Most of what we got from him was stupid romantic drama (“ooh, will he end up with the bad boy alpha or the adorkable beta?”) or more progressive signifiers (“look, he’s wearing the skirt again!”).

Such a portrayal arguably nullifies the whole point of representing minority groups because Jay-Den doesn’t get to be a real character; he gets to be a collection of stereotypes that make the audience feel good about how progressive they are.

To Explore New Worlds Of Strange

Despite being canceled, Starfleet Academy has a second season already filmed. At this point, one of my biggest hopes for Jay-Den is that he gets better character development in Season 2. But with Jay-Den actor Karim Diané’s recent Instagram declaration that “season 2 is gay AF” and that it will be “season 1 … turned all the way up,” I’m not exactly holding my breath. 

Which is a shame because, once more for the cheap seats, there’s nothing wrong with having a gay Klingon. But the Starfleet Academy writers turned Jay-Den into a caricature rather than a character, one whose substance was buried under layers of cheap skirts and cheaper tropes.

He’s a non-threatening cipher that progressive fans can embrace to showcase their love for diversity. He’s touted as a brave new character, but Jay-Den actually reflects the cowardice of the writers. After all, if they were really ready to give us a gay Klingon, they wouldn’t have taken away everything that makes him a Klingon!

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 1 hour ago

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a show filled with amazing characters, and fans love to debate which one is the best. Many prefer Buffy, the natural leader who uses her abilities as a Slayer to put vamps and other supernatural baddies in their place. Others prefer Willow, the geeky girl next door who eventually embraces her own magical mojo. Other fan-favorites include Spike (the bad boy with slick hair and a slicker accent), Anya (the former demon who loves nothing more than sex and money), and Faith (the sexy Slayer who goes from being Buffy’s frenemy to being her worst nightmare).

Few fans name Cordelia, and for good reason: while she grew as a character once she joined the Angel spinoff, she spends the vast majority of Buffy as a mean girl who does nothing more than disparage the other characters we know and love. After a while, it’s easy to start asking yourself a very blunt question: “why is Cordelia even in this show?” However, the answer is deceptively simple. She’s here as a constant reminder of how much Buffy (who was basically Cordelia before becoming a Slayer) has grown as a character. 

The Softer Side Of Sneers

In those first three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cordelia is seemingly the opposite of Buffy in every way. Buffy is defined by her duty to protect others, and she often misses out on the best parts of her high school days because she is busy fighting vampires. Cordelia, meanwhile, is a spoiled little rich girl who constantly berates Buffy for being so different than pretty much everyone else in Sunnydale High School.

While she gets some fun, sarcastic lines here and there, Cordelia can often feel like a superfluous character. However, she serves a more basic function in Buffy the Vampire Slayer by being an ongoing foil for Buffy. Like all good foils, Cordelia is everything that Buffy isn’t: she’s weak instead of strong, cruel instead of kind, and cowardly instead of brave. Nonetheless, Buffy is sometimes envious of Cordelia, like when she wishes she could be more like the resident mean girl because she thinks that’s the kind of woman Angel liked when he was still a mortal.

The Yin To Buffy’s Yang

Of course, Cordelia is a foil with a very specific purpose: she’s here to highlight how much Buffy has grown as a character since becoming the Slayer. Before Buffy moved to Sunnydale and fully embraced her destiny of fighting vampires, she was a vapid valley girl in Los Angeles. She just wanted to buy cute clothes and enjoy being popular, and she was so good at this that she was eventually elected Fiesta Queen. All of this is supremely shallow, of course. But to Buffy, this was the normal life she had to sacrifice in order to become the Slayer.

The constant presence of Cordelia highlights the significance of Buffy’s sacrifice. Until her family went broke and she had to move to Los Angeles, Cordelia enjoyed all the privileges of being Sunnydale’s most popular girl. All the women want to be her, and all the men want to be with her. She gets what she wants wherever she goes, and she generally gets to rule the school with the indifference of an imperious queen.

She’s A Killer Queen

In short, she has the life that Buffy desperately wants to have. When we see Cordelia sneeringly enjoying the fruits of her popularity, it’s easier to appreciate how Buffy sets her own needs aside for the sake of others. After a while, Buffy grows into her new life, and aside from occasional relapses (like her desperate bid to get elected homecoming queen), she never seriously tries to become a vapid Valley girl again. When we look at Cordelia, we see everything that Buffy is not, which only helps us to appreciate the Slayer’s growth that much more.

Buffy fans might hate Cordelia for being endlessly cruel to their favorite characters. But she is a constant reminder that Buffy, had she never become the Slayer, would be just as bad, if not worse. Greatness was thrust upon Buffy, and she rose to the occasion so well that she ended up saving the entire world, time and time again. Without Cordelia, the fandom might (like so many Sunnydale residents) very well take Buffy’s sacrifices for granted. Thanks to Cordelia, though, we got to spend three years appreciating how Buffy left her childhood behind to save everyone’s life but her own.

If you still really hate Cordelia, though, you should start rewatching Angel. By the end of that show, you’ll realize that nobody hated Sunnydale’s snarkiest Scooby more than Joss Whedon, who proved himself the meanest girl of them all by ruining her character (and, allegedly, Cordelia actor Charisma Carpenter), one insane plot point at a time.