Our video producer Chris Smith almost watched the Artemis II launch in person. He drove to Kennedy Space Center with all his fancy gear, along the way got stuck in the snow twice—in Texas, of all places—and then NASA scrubbed the launch and rolled the rocket back for repairs. So Chris drove back to California and watched it happen without him. That’s space exploration for you.

Artist rendering of Artemis II launch: The small top conical section is the Orion spacecraft containing the four astronauts. Source: NASA

But Artemis II was just a test flight around the moon with no landing. Artemis III is the main event—and it will be the most complicated space mission NASA has ever attempted. Chris documents the whole story in Episode 4 of The Quality Digest Roadshow, “Lasers and the Moon.” I want to tell you what he found, because it gets to the heart of why metrology, the science of measurement, exists.

The problem: Docking. A lot of it.

Here’s the thing most people don’t appreciate about going to the moon: The hardest part isn’t getting there. It’s docking.

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