The four astronauts landed safely off the coast of San Diego.

Inside mission control, each desk, or console, is labeled with a neon blue sign and its officers handle a subsystem on the spacecraft carrying the Artemis II crew. This station is the nucleus of the operation. It’s where the flight director makes real-time decisions for mission execution, and where troubleshooting occurs.

The Artemis II mission around the moon will be a brilliant last hurrah for several space shuttle engines and booster rocket parts that first flew as far back as 1982.

This is how the four astronauts sleep, use the bathroom and work out while on their 10-day mission to the moon and back.

When Apollo 17 astronauts returned from the moon in 1972, they visited NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton to thank staff for their contributions to the mission, saying “we stood on the shoulders of giants as we shot for the stars.