Christopher H. Jansmann

Earthset captured through the Orion spacecraft window at 6:41 p.m. EDT, April 6, 2026, during the Artemis II crew’s flyby of the Moon. A muted blue Earth with bright white clouds sets behind the cratered lunar surface. The dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime. On Earth’s day side, swirling clouds are visible over the Australia and Oceania region. In the foreground, Ohm crater has terraced edges and a flat floor interrupted by central peaks. Central peaks form in complex craters when the lunar surface, liquefied on impact, splashes upwards during the crater’s formation.

Moon Joy

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by

Chris Jansmann
in

I often say that writing is my escape from the demands of my day job; writing my first novel, Blindsided, came about primarily because my family doctor hinted strongly that I needed something besides swimming and running to try and knock the edge off the accumulating stress that comes with working in IT. There’s no question that it has helped, for though it seems counterintuitive that the amount of work involved in putting together a contemporary mystery novel is both relaxing and fun, I actually find that to be the case. Wrestling with the various dilemmas I throw at my main characters can be truly cathartic, a way of being able to right the wrongs in a way that can feel fulfilling (even if real life isn’t quite as accommodating).

Despite my best efforts, though, the craziness of the world caught up with me a few weeks ago, and I wound up spending a day and a half in the hospital. The extremely short version of that story is: I’m perfectly fine. The slightly longer version is that I’m not handling the stress quite as well as I thought I was… and maybe, just maybe, am worrying about things that are well beyond my locus of control.

Oops.

I took an additional day to recover from the battery of tests they performed on me while I was a guest at the hospital, and during that time, I thought a bit about how easily I’d allowed work to slowly begin to overwhelm me and how I might try to reduce some of the mental angst that goes along with it. Alongside that was a mandate to reduce my coffee intake; in a sign that art does often flow from reality, there’s a reason Sean always has a mug in his hand. While I know there’s no true comparison between coffee and cigarettes, I think I finally can appreciate how difficult it was for smokers to kick the habit. Thankfully, I need only reduce my intake, but still…

Another intentional shift was to give myself both the grace and the space to enjoy activities I often sideline when work creeps into my free time. That includes my N-scale layout, which had begun to languish despite having made some impressive progress on it over the Christmas holiday. Though I swear I wasn’t trying to make up for lost time, I managed to begin rolling newspaper for the mountains and re-wire two of the buildings my wife gave me years ago with adjustable warm white LEDs.

Two n-scale railroad buildings on a workbench, both have bright light spilling out of their windows.
A newly revamped passenger and freight stations with warm-white LEDs

Writing is in a weird spot, though, for while it’s something I love to do, I often place an inordinate amount of pressure on myself to meet arbitrary deadlines for content. Those appear to have contributed to my level of stress more than I realized; that made me rejigger my long-range plans just a bit, as well as adjust the quantity of writing I do each day I’m working on a new project. Some of that is also practical, for I’m also keen to prevent another wrist issue that would sideline me for far weeks. It’s still early days, but these small changes seem to have kept me at a good equilibrium since I returned home.

The experience also made me eager to dive into other stuff with unabashed joy. That included being completely glued to the live feed from NASA nearly from the moment the Artemis II mission blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. I’m a huge space geek, obviously, and have followed NASA for as long as I can remember; I watched the Space Shuttle Columbia launch in my elementary school auditorium, and sadly, witnessed the Challenger explosion in realtime years later. My parents experienced the original race to the moon, so getting to see the new version of that unfold over the course of ten days was absolutely incredible.

Watching the rocket blast off was amazing all by itself; virtually being in the cabin of that trusty little ship with the crew was simply insane. If you had told me twenty years ago that we’d get live, 4K streaming from the far side of the moon, I would have laughed you right out of the room. Now I’m addicted and can’t wait for Artemis III. I mean, look at these incredible photos:

Our planet draws closer to passing behind the Moon in this image captured by the Artemis II crew during their lunar flyby, about six minutes before Earthset. Earth is in a crescent phase, with sunlight coming from the right. The dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime. On Earth’s day side, swirling clouds are visible over muted blue in the Australia and Oceania region. The lines of small indentations on the Moon’s rugged surface are secondary crater chains. These structures are formed by material ejected during a violent primary impact.
The Edge of Two Worlds (Image Credit: NASA)
Captured by the Artemis II crew during their lunar flyby on April 6, 2026, this image shows the Moon fully eclipsing the Sun. From the crew’s perspective, the Moon appears large enough to completely block the Sun, creating nearly 54 minutes of totality and extending the view far beyond what is possible from Earth. We see a glowing halo around the dark lunar disk. The science community is investigating whether this effect is due to the corona, zodiacal light, or a combination of the two. Also visible are stars, typically too faint to see when imaging the Moon, but with the Moon in darkness stars are readily imaged. This unique vantage point provides both a striking visual and a valuable opportunity for astronauts to document their observations during humanity’s return to deep space. The faint glow of the nearside of the Moon is visible in this image, having been illuminated by light reflected off the Earth.
II In Eclipse (Image Credit: NASA)

Thanks to them, moon joy has become part of our modern lexicon. I know they didn’t go up there specifically for me, but their timing couldn’t have been better; just when I was looking for a way to put everything into the proper perspective, there it suddenly was, courtesy of NASA.

And I couldn’t be happier.

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