It is the best of times, and it is (far from, actually,) the worst of time for NASA, with two big astronaut launches converging toward the same week, as a rare Arctic cold front pushes mission schedules into a logistical whirlwind.
It's a tale of NASA's highest-profile mission in more than half a century — the Artemis 2 astronaut flight around the moon — brushing up against the launch of SpaceX's Crew-12 mission to the International Space Station (ISS). That liftoff has been accelerated up the calendar to replace the Crew-11 astronauts, who were forced back to Earth early due to an undisclosed medical issue with one of the astronauts.
