On April 10, the Orion capsule carrying Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen splashed down in the Pacific, completing the first crewed lunar mission in more than 50 years. The images they sent back — Earth rising over the lunar far side, the craters and green-brown hues of terrain no human eye had seen up close since Apollo — confirmed what NASA needed to know: The system works, the crew survived and Artemis is real.

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Michelle Buckner is a former NASA Information System Security Officer and a writer covering AI governance, enterprise security, aerospace and the economics of agentic AI.