A zero-gravity indicator designed by a San Francisco Bay Area second-grader is onboard Artemis II, Nasa’s first crewed lunar mission in over 50 years. As the rocket entered space following Wednesday’s launch, the smiley-faced plush toy was designed to float under the zero-gravity conditions, indicating to the astronauts they have achieved weightlessness.
Eight-year-old Lucas Ye, from Mountain View, is an avid space enthusiast and the mastermind behind the indicator.
“I like rockets, I like Nasa, I like the solar system, I like studying about space,” Lucas said in a video when he made the shortlist for the global “moon mascot” competition, presided over by Nasa and Freelancer, a crowdsourcing company.
Lucas won over 2,600 other entrants.
Trisha Epp, director of innovation at Freelancer, congratulated Lucas in a news release last week: “Your design is literally going to space, which is not a sentence most people get to say.”
Lucas’s plush toy sports a baseball cap with a star-spangled visor and a crown resembling Earth’s green- and blue-hued surface.
Parts of the design pay homage to the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, Lucas said in his video. Its name Rise is also a reference to the Earthrise photograph, captured by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders in 1968.
The eight-year-old aspires to work at Nasa or be an astrophysicist, he told CBS News Bay Area.
Hours before the launch, Lucas was asked how he felt about his design being 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 zero-gravity indicator objects being a part of space missions. In 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space, brought 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 trek over 250,000 miles into space and back over 10 days. As of Thursday, the crew was preparing to leave Earth’s orbit.
The mission is the first time Nasa has sent humans to the moon, though they will not land on the lunar surface, in nearly 54 years. The crew is also expected to travel farther from Earth than any humans in history.
The expedition marks the first time a woman, Christina Koch, and a person of color, Victor Glover, have flown between the Earth’s orbit and the moon.
The outcome of the journey, during which astronauts’ health will be monitored, will inform Artemis IV, the 2028 scheduled mission to place humans back on the moon. Donald Trump has made a lunar landing by the end of his second term a priority.
