When Thayer Smith, a firefighter in Austin, Texas, received the call that a Tesla was on fire, he knew that he’d need to bring backup. 

It was in the early morning hours of August 12, 2021, and a driver had slammed a Model X into a traffic light on a quiet residential street in Austin before crashing into a gas pump at a nearby Shell station. The driver, a teenager who was later arrested for driving while intoxicated, managed to escape the car, but the Tesla burst into flames. As emergency responders battled the fire in the dark of night, bursts of sparks shot out of the totaled car, sending plumes of smoke up into the sky. It took tens of thousands of gallons of water, multiple fire engines, and more than 45 minutes to finally extinguish the blaze. 

“People have probably seen vehicles burning on the side of the road at one point or another,” Smith, the division chief at the Austin Fire Department, recalled. “Just imagine that magnified a couple times because of all the fuel load from the battery pack itself. The fact that it won’t go out immediately just makes it a little more spectacular to watch.” 

Like other Tesla fires, the fiery scene in Austin can be tied to the Model X’s high-voltage battery. In Austin, the electric vehicle ignited after a slide across the base of a traffic pole that the driver had knocked down caused the battery on the bottom of the car to rupture. At that point, the impact likely damaged one or several of the tiny cells that power the car’s battery, triggering a chain of chemical reactions that continued to light new flames. Though firefighters were able to put out the fire at the gas station, what remained of the car — little more than a burnt metal frame — reignited at a junkyard just a few hours later. 

The Austin crash led to a lot of headlines, but EV fires are relatively rare. Smith said his department has seen just a handful of EV fires. While the US government doesn’t track the number of EV fires, specifically, Tesla’s reported numbers are far lower than the rate for highway fires overall, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) told Vox. The overwhelming majority of car fires are caused by traditional internal combustion vehicles. (This makes sense, in part because these vehicles carry highly flammable liquids like gasoline in their tanks, and, as their name implies, their engines work by igniting that fuel.) 

Still, people have started associating EVs with dramatic fires for a few reasons. Videos of EV fires like the one in Austin tend to go viral, often attracting comments that condemn President Joe Biden and the electrification movement. At the same time, misleading posts about EVs spontaneously exploding, or starting fires that can’t be put out with water, have helped promote the narrative that electric vehicles are far less safe than conventional cars. The research doesn’t bear this out. Two recent Highway Loss Data Institute reports found that EVs posed no additional risk for non-crash fires, and the NFPA told Vox that from a fire safety perspective, EVs are no more dangerous than internal combustion cars. 

This narrative has another nefarious side effect: It stands to distract from a more complicated EV fire problem. Although they’re relatively rare, electric car fires present a new technical and safety challenge for fire departments. These fires burn at much higher temperatures and require a lot more water to fight than conventional car fires. There also isn’t an established consensus on the best firefighting strategies for EVs, experts told Vox. Instead, there’s a hodgepodge of guidance shared among fire departments, associations that advise firefighters, and automakers. As many as half of the 1.2 million firefighters in the US might not be currently trained to combat EV fires, according to the NFPA.

“The Fire Service has had 100 years to train and to understand how to deal with internal combustion engine fires,” remarked Andrew Klock of the NFPA, which offers EV classes for firefighters. “With electric vehicles, they don’t have as much training and knowledge. They really need to be trained.”

The stakes are incredibly high. If the White House has its way, electric vehicles will go mainstream over the coming decade. An executive order signed by President Biden calls for 50 percent of new car sales to be electric by 2030, and the administration is pouring billions into building EV infrastructure and battery factories across the country on the assumption that people will buy these cars. EV fires — and misinformation about them — could stand in the way of that goal. 

How an EV fire starts

An electric vehicle battery pack is made up of thousands of smaller lithium-ion cells. A single cell might look like a pouch or cylinder, and is filled with the chemical components that enable the battery to store energy: an anode, a cathode, and a liquid electrolyte. The cells are assembled into a battery pack that’s encased in extremely strong material, like titanium, and that battery pack is normally bolted to the vehicle’s undercarriage. The idea is to make the battery almost impossible to access and, ideally, to protect it during even the nastiest of collisions. 

Things don’t always go as planned. When an EV battery is defective or damaged — or just internally fails — one or more lithium-ion cells can short-circuit, heating up the battery. At that point, the tiny membranes that separate the cathode and the anode melt, exposing the highly flammable liquid electrolyte. Once a fire ignites, heat can spread to even more cells, triggering a phenomenon called thermal runaway, firefighters told Vox. When this happens, flames continue igniting throughout the battery, fueling a fire that can last for hours. 

The first moments of an EV fire might appear relatively calm, with only smoke emanating from underneath the vehicle. But as thermal runaway takes hold, bright orange flames can quickly engulf an entire car. And because EV batteries are packed with an incredible amount of stored energy, one of these fires can get as hot as nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Even when the fire appears to be over, latent heat may still be spreading within the cells of the battery, creating the risk that the vehicle could ignite several days later. One firefighter compared the challenge to a trick birthday candle that reignites after blowing it out. 

Because EV fires are different, EV firefighting presents new problems. Firefighters often try to suppress car fires by, essentially, suffocating them. They might use foam extinguishers filled with substances like carbon dioxide that can draw away oxygen, or use a fire blanket that’s designed to smother flames. But because EV fires aren’t fueled by oxygen from the air, this approach doesn’t work. Instead, firefighters have to use lots and lots of water to cool down the battery. This is particularly complex when EV fires occur far from a hydrant, or if a local fire department only has a limited number of engines. Saltwater, which is extremely efficient at conducting electricity, can make the situation even worse. 

Michael O’Brian, a firefighter in Michigan who serves on the stored-energy committee for the International Association of Fire Chiefs, suggested that sometimes the best strategy is to simply monitor the fire and let it burn. As with all car fires, he says his priority isn’t to salvage the vehicle. 

“Our fire service in general across the United States [and] in North America is understaffed and overtaxed,” O’Brian explained. “If you’re going to commit a unit to a vehicle fire for two hours, that’s complicating.” 

Some EV batteries can make this problem worse. In 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and General Motors announced an expanded recall of all the Chevy Bolts the car company had manufactured because tiny components inside some of the Bolt batteries’ cells were folded or torn. Chrysler issued a recall in 2022 after an internal investigation found that the vehicles had been involved in a dozen fires. Chrysler has yet to reveal the root cause of its battery issue and told Vox it’s still investigating. The company’s temporary solution was a software update that monitors when the car’s internal sensors determine that the battery might be at risk of igniting. 

Tesla’s vehicles have their own set of problems. Tesla cars have retractable exterior door handles that only extend electronically, and only when the car has power. An emergency response guide for the 2016 Model S says that if exterior door handles aren’t working, there’s a button on the inside of the vehicle that drivers can use to open the car manually. Yet some allege that this feature makes it more difficult for emergency responders dealing with a Tesla fire. A lawsuit filed by the family of Omar Awan, a Florida doctor who died in 2019 after his Model S crashed and burst into flames, said that a police officer who arrived on the scene couldn’t open the doors from the outside. 

Similarly, in a YouTube video that captured a recent Tesla battery fire in Vancouver, an owner recounts having to smash open the car’s windows because the electronics stopped working and the doors wouldn’t open. “I could feel it in my lungs, man,” he says on the recording. Tesla has also faced several other lawsuits alleging that its battery systems are dangerous. The company, which does not have a PR department, did not respond to a request for comment.

Experts Vox spoke to, including firefighters as well as fire safety officials, say that while Teslas are the most common electric cars on the road right now, EV firefighting goes far beyond any one carmaker. Perhaps the biggest challenge of all is that as EVs go mainstream, EV fires aren’t being studied as much as experts and government officials say they should be. “The unfortunate part is that we’re not really moving this as quickly as we should and updating it,” Lorie Moore-Merrell, the US fire administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), told Vox. 

The national fire incident tracking system currently used by FEMA was invented in 1976 and was last updated in 2002, so it doesn’t specifically track electric vehicle fires. While the agency does plan to update the system with a new cloud platform, FEMA said it will only start building the technology later this spring, and then it will transition from the legacy system sometime in the late fall. 

Firefighting in the electric era

Amid a barrage of news reports about the Model X fire in Austin last year, Tesla reached out to the city’s fire department. Michael McConnell, an emergency response technical lead at Tesla, first spoke with Smith, the division chief, on the phone and later sent him an email, which Vox obtained through a public records request, with advice on how the fire department might approach the same situation in the future.

“First of all, let’s debunk the myth of getting electrocuted. Lots of things have to go wrong in order for that to happen,” Smith said. “If the battery pack has not been compromised, then just leave it alone.”    

In the long, wide-ranging message, McConnell also explained what assistance Tesla could and could not provide. He offered online training sessions but could not arrange in-person training because, McConnell explained, he had “just too many requests.” A diagram for the Model X implied there was magnesium in a part of the car that did not, in fact, contain magnesium. There was no extrication video guide for the company’s Model Y car (extrication is the firefighter term for removing someone from a totaled vehicle). It would be difficult to get a training vehicle for the Austin firefighters to practice with, McConnell added, since Tesla is a “build to order manufacturer.” Most of Tesla’s scrap vehicles are recycled at the company’s Fremont plant, he said, though a car could become available if one of Tesla’s engineering or fleet vehicles crashed. 

McConnell’s long email reflects the current approach to fighting EV fires and the fact that fire departments across the country are still learning best practices. Even now, there isn’t consensus on the best approach. Some firefighters have considered using cranes to lift flaming EVs into giant tanks of water, although some automakers discourage submerging entire vehicles. Rosenbauer, a major fire engine and firefighting equipment manufacturer, has designed a new nozzle that pierces through the battery casing and squirts water directly onto the damaged cells, despite some official automaker guides that say firefighters shouldn’t try rupturing the battery. Another factor that needs to be considered, added Alfie Green, the chief of training at the Detroit Fire Department, is that there are new car models released every year, and there is particular guidance on how to disconnect different cars. 

While some standards have been released, others are still being developed, and fire departments are still catching up with National Transportation Safety Board recommendations. There’s also the matter of just getting the vast number of firefighters up to speed on EVs. O’Brian, the fire chief from Michigan, told Vox that the federal government needs to take a much more active role in funding research and helping buy EVs that fire departments can practice on. 

Another complication is that EV fires present different risks in different places. The New York City Fire Department (FDNY) hasn’t had to fight any electric car fires yet, but it is facing e-scooter and e-bike fires, which are on track to double compared to last year and disproportionately endanger delivery workers in the city. Batteries that lack safety certifications or are charged improperly are more likely to ignite, explains John Esposito, the FDNY’s chief of operations. In November, 43 people were injured in a Manhattan building fire that the department ultimately linked to a battery-powered micromobility device — possibly a scooter — that had been kept inside an apartment.

Small towns face unique hurdles. In Irmo, South Carolina, which is home to fewer than 12,000 people, there’s concern about getting the right equipment to deal with EV fires. While there haven’t been any high-voltage battery fires yet, Sloane Valentino, the assistant chief of Irmo’s fire department, told Vox he’s not sure whether the town has enough engines to fight a Tesla fire while also responding to other fires in the area. 

“We don’t have the capacity to deal with 30,000 gallons worth of toxic runoff. Some of it’s going to turn to steam,” Valentino told Vox. “We’re kind of back to, ‘Let it burn.’ When you see the big, violent flames shooting out of the car, just kind of protect what you can — try to cool the roadway — but let the car burn.” 

Engineering a safer future

While internal combustion vehicles have been around for over a century, EVs are still relatively new, which means they could become even safer as more money and research pour into the technology. Remember the melting separator in the battery that creates thermal runaway? General Motors is studying how its battery separator could contribute to improved battery safety. The Department of Energy is working on technology that could incorporate flame retardants directly into the batteries’ design. Engineers are also investigating new battery chemistries, like less-flammable electrolytes. Though research is still early, solid-state batteries, which would replace a liquid electrolyte with a solid that’s far less likely to ignite, also show promise. 

“Batteries are hopefully going to be getting better over time,” said Michael Brooks, from the Center for Auto Safety. New regulation could push battery safety even further, he added.

In the meantime, fire departments are working on adjusting to this new category of fire —  just another reminder that the rise of electric vehicles involves far more than simply replacing gas tanks with batteries. And firefighters will be the ones driving some of these new EVs. In May, the Los Angeles Fire Department debuted the first electric fire truck to hit the road in the US. The bright red engine is made by Rosenbauer, and it comes with a front touchscreen, a remote control tablet, two onboard batteries, and a backup diesel range extender. Other departments are now waiting for their own EV fire trucks to arrive. 

Meanwhile, back at the Austin Fire Department, Smith says he has encountered at least one EV fire since the Model X accident a year and a half ago. That one didn’t involve the battery, so it was like fighting any other car fire. But in the months following the 2021 crash, the fire department did go ahead and jury-rig a new firefighting nozzle to deal specifically with EV fires. The department hasn’t heard anything more from Tesla. 

Rebecca Heilweil is a reporter at Vox covering emerging technology, artificial intelligence, and the supply chain.

Before any flight takes off, pilots are supposed to read a Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) that outlines any potential safety problems they might encounter during their flight. Full of numerical codes and special acronyms, these critical digital messages include warnings about disruptions like bad weather conditions, traveling flocks of birds, and even nearby rocket launches. But as an outage that grounded thousands of flights across the US last week made clear, the NOTAM system is also fragile.

The root of the problem appears to be a computer operating system that the Federal Aviation Administration has used to relay NOTAMs for the past three decades. The FAA is still reviewing what went wrong, but it believes that “personnel” — reportedly two contractors who didn’t follow procedures — uploaded a damaged file to the computer system that sends NOTAMs to pilots. The agency initially tried to fix the issue without causing a major impact to flight schedules, but ended up ordering a hold on all flight takeoffs in the US that lasted over an hour — a scale of disruption not seen since the agency grounded all flights during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. 

This looks really bad for the FAA, which has struggled to keep up financially and technically as the number of people flying continues to surge. Scrutiny of the agency and the airlines it regulates has only grown over the past several years, especially amid an ongoing pilot shortage, surging fuel prices, rising tensions over working conditions, and increasingly problematic IT systems. Now, whether the FAA can provide the aviation industry with the right course correction depends on overcoming the growing politicization of, well, planes. 

 Unfortunately, the fate of the FAA lies with an increasingly chaotic Congress, which controls the agency’s funding. Earlier this month, one Republican House member proposed setting up an Office of Advanced Aviation to develop systems that are better suited to future aviation tech, and the Senate Commerce Committee now has plans to investigate how the NOTAM issue happened. The recent tumult has also drawn attention to the fact that the FAA doesn’t have a permanent administrator. President Joe Biden nominated Phillip Washington, the current CEO of the Denver International Airport, back in July, but the Senate still hasn’t scheduled a confirmation hearing. Meanwhile, the FAA’s current authorization bill, which provides the funding that the agency uses to do its work, will expire at the end of September unless Congress acts. The FAA’s current budget is less than it was in 2004, after accounting for inflation.

”This is hopefully a wake-up call to Congress to really give the funding that many of us have been calling for in the FAA to help modernize their system,” Georgia Tech engineering professor and aviation expert Laurie Garrow told Recode. “As our transportation system has grown — as we’ve gotten new threats, frankly, against our technologies — this is needed when we’re pushing the boundaries of what the system can do.” 

The FAA’s technical problems aren’t a surprise. Last year, the agency asked for nearly $30 million to fix the tech that supports the NOTAM system. There had already been complaints from within the aviation industry that NOTAMs have become obsolete, and that the messages are too long and overloaded with useless information. The manual backup system doesn’t seem all that great, either. After the NOTAM computer system went down last Wednesday, air traffic controllers reportedly had to share whatever information may have been relayed in the digital NOTAMs verbally. Functionally, this meant reverting to radio transmissions and phone calls — the technology that the FAA used before the agency got computers. 

There’s other evidence that the agency needs a serious tech overhaul. Hundreds of flights across the East Coast were canceled in August 2015 because of a technical glitch at an air traffic control center in Virginia. And last year, the rollout of 5G threatened to disrupt the entire airline industry after the FAA raised concerns that the new wireless service could interfere with the radio altimeters used by planes during landing. There is an effort to update the air traffic control system and the National Airspace System (NAS), but the transition has encountered hurdles and is still ongoing.

The technical issues go beyond just one federal agency. Hours after the NOTAM outage in the US, Canada’s air traffic management service encountered the same problem. And last month, a failure exacerbated by aging software that Southwest Airlines relies on to schedule workers led to the cancellation of thousands of flights, leaving passengers without flight crews and flight crews without passengers. It wasn’t the first time the airline has dealt with tech issues.

As Congress mulls its next move with the FAA, debate over where to lay the blame is heating up on both sides of the aisle. Republicans are busy criticizing Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, a potential 2025 presidential candidate. But the Revolving Door Project, a research group that investigates corporate influence on the executive branch, has suggested that issues at the FAA may stem from the Trump administration — although it also noted that Buttigieg was responsible for “the personnel decisions about who was overseeing the situation.” In response to the fiasco, Buttigieg has said that there should be “enough safeguards built into the system” that a single person’s error or mistake can’t have such an enormous impact on US aviation. 

“It’s been partisan at least since the 1950s,” Janet Bednarek, a history professor at the University of Dayton, told Recode. “Arguments over what is the responsibility of the government? What is the responsibility of the airlines who use this system or the private pilots who use the system? The politics have been there since early on, and then you throw those into a highly partisan political environment like we have today.” 

 It’s not clear where the battle over the FAA’s future will go next. While Democrats have used the fiasco to double down on their support for Biden’s nominee, Phillip Washington, Republicans are still raising objections. Their latest criticism is an emerging argument that Washington, a retired Army command sergeant major, doesn’t technically qualify as a civilian. The law apparently requires that the FAA administrator be a civilian or receive a “military waiver” from Congress.  

Of course, there’s also a reasonable explanation why NOTAM updates haven’t happened organically. The technology has been tested by time, and pilots know their way around this system on its best days and on its worst. They can’t say the same of something they haven’t used yet. 

 “You know what can go wrong with the system that you have,” explained Bednarek. “You don’t know what can go wrong with the new system.” 

This story was first published in the Recode newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

Critics have long dismissed electric vehicles as overly expensive, inconvenient, and unrealistic. But 2022 didn’t hear them. This year has seen record sales for EVs, and there is now billions in new federal funding designed to incentivize companies to make electric cars and to encourage customers to buy them. As a result, EVs are feeling less and less like a niche product for techies and environmentalists and much more like the kind of cars everyday people could drive. The electric era, it seems, is finally here. 

The numbers bear this out. Tesla is manufacturing hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles each quarter, and new competitors like Rivian and Lucid are scaling up their businesses, too. The big Detroit automakers have also doubled down on the EV transition. Ford says its electric vehicle sales are up more than 100 percent compared to this time last year, and GM is planning 10 new EV models for 2023. Overall, an unprecedented number of electric vehicles were sold in the third quarter of this year, according to Cox Automotive, which tracks auto industry data. Demand for electric vehicles still appears greater than supply, and the firm expects that more than 1 million EVs will be sold in the United States in 2023. 

Of course, the coming electric era creates new challenges that will only become more apparent next year. Some consumers are still anxious that electric cars won’t drive them as far as they want to go and that there still isn’t enough charging availability. The grid also needs major upgrades to prepare for an influx of electric cars. Meanwhile, manufacturing EVs requires rare materials that are often processed in just one country — China — and raises critical environmental questions. 

But the EV transition is well on its way. According to the Electrification Coalition, more than 3.2 million EVs have been sold in the US since 2011, and that means a good number of people are already driving them, either as workers, as owners, or on a rental basis. Decades-old factories in the area surrounding Detroit are being retrofitted to build these new cars. Charging stations are showing up in office parking lots, national parks, Starbucks locations, and even gas stations. These were just some of the key milestones the US hit this year in the massive effort to mainstream electric vehicles. 

 EV is no longer synonymous with Tesla

Tesla jump-started the electric car industry, and, depending on the quarter, it’s still the largest EV manufacturer in the world. Yet the company’s grip on the electric car market seems to be loosening as demand for the vehicles grows overall. Tesla represented 79 percent of EV registrations in 2020 but dropped to just 65 percent of the new EVs registered in the US this year, according to S&P Global Mobility.  

One big reason for the decline is that Tesla has mostly focused on luxury cars. It now faces competition from more affordable vehicles made by traditional automakers. Today, there are 68 EV models available in the US, but 62 more are upcoming, according to the Electrification Coalition. For that reason, it may not be so surprising that Cox estimates that Tesla will hold just 20 percent of the EV market by 2025.  

Cars aren’t the only vehicles going electric

In May, Ford started shipping its new F-150 Lightning, an electric version of the country’s best-selling pickup truck. GM has ramped up production on its electric Hummer, which first started deliveries at the tail end of last year, and even got the car featured in the new Call of Duty. Rivian, the first company to produce an EV pickup in the US, has now made thousands of vehicles, and Tesla is at some point expected to release its Blade Runner-esque Cybertruck. These trucks are all evidence that our vision of what an EV can be, and what an EV can look like, is changing rapidly. 

Some of the most important new electric vehicles aren’t as splashy. The government is spending billions of dollars to electrify school buses and mail trucks across the country, which could have a real impact on the environment. Delivery fleets can now transition to electric vehicles and cut down on their emissions. Even the huge trucks that drive hundreds of miles a day to move goods across the country are slowly going electric. Daimler unveiled its electric eActros LongHaul heavy-duty truck this year, and Tesla started delivering its first Semi trucks to PepsiCo just a few weeks ago. 

Detroit pivoted to EVs 

Electric vehicles were the star of the show at the first Detroit Auto Show since the Covid-19 pandemic began. With President Joe Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in attendance, the event was meant to highlight how traditional automakers were retrofitting factories, and some of the countries’ most popular car models, for the electric era. But as the government offers these companies billions in loans and tons of promotion, a fight for the future of cars and trucks is also brewing.  

These century-old automakers are racing to hire tech workers who can program the algorithms that operate their increasingly electric — and computerized — cars. These companies are also placing some of their new facilities in states that are less friendly to organized labor than the Motor City. At the same time, some workers are pushing back on this vision. Earlier this month, employees at a new battery factory established by General Motors and LG Energy voted to join the United Auto Workers. 

Russia invaded Ukraine

In February, Russia launched an attack on Ukraine, beginning a war that has left thousands of people dead and displaced millions of others. The conflict has also created an energy crisis. Governments are now even more aware of their dependence on Russian gas, and some are speeding up the transition to renewable energy. At the same time, some consumers turned to electric vehicles as a way to escape rising fuel prices. Even Secretary Buttigieg pitched the idea.  

A nationwide EV charging network emerges

There are already tens of thousands of public EV chargers throughout the US, according to the Energy Department’s Alternative Fuels Data Center. And more chargers are popping up every month. The number of Tesla Superchargers has grown more than 30 percent since last year, according to the company’s third-quarter investor report. Electrify America, another charging network, says that the number of times people have charged EVs at their stations has already exceeded the nearly 1.5 million charging sessions they saw in 2021. 

But we still need more chargers. To prepare, the Biden administration spent 2022 developing its plans for a nationwide network of chargers. The White House is allocating $5 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to the states to help build chargers across 53,000 miles of highway, and has set aside another $2.5 billion to install chargers in underserved areas. The idea is to eradicate any concerns that someone might end up stranded in a place with nowhere to plug in. 

 The government gets serious

In addition to the nationwide charging network, the Infrastructure Law allocates billions to bolster the electric grid and increase the country’s battery manufacturing capacity. Two new legislative packages signed this year add to this investment: the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which is one of the biggest climate investments ever, and the CHIPS Act, which will fund new American chip manufacturing, including the kind of chips that are critical to making electric vehicles. 

The government used 2022 to set new deadlines for electrification, too. The IRA revamped tax incentives meant to encourage consumers and businesses to buy EVs, but also pushed companies to speed up on plans to build electric cars and batteries in the US (the Commerce Department recently delayed aspects of the program until March). At the same time, California announced this year that it would ban sales of new gas-powered cars by 2035, and Oregon made the same commitment on Tuesday. So even though EVs might still seem a bit far off, time is ticking. 

This story was first published in the Recode newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

Editor’s note, December 11: On Sunday afternoon, NASA’s Orion spacecraft safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. The vehicle returned to Earth after a nearly month-long trip to the moon and back, completing a critical test for the space agency.

After several delays and some minor hurricane damage, NASA successfully launched the Artemis 1 mission and jump-started its program to return to the moon. Despite some issues with a fuel leak, NASA was able to fix the problem in time, allowing the new Space Launch System rocket to take off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Wednesday, November 16. While the Artemis I mission won’t land on the lunar surface, the trip itself will be the farthest a vehicle designed for human astronauts has ever traveled into space. The mission completed a lunar flyby early Monday morning.

There aren’t any humans on NASA’s big trip, but there are three astronauts: Helga, Zohar, and Moonikin Campos. They’re high-tech manikins — that’s the term for human models used in scientific research — filled with sensors that will test how the human body responds to space travel. Helga and Zohar are designed to measure the effects of radiation on women’s bodies in space, and Moonikin Campos will sit in the commander’s seat to track just how bumpy a voyage to the moon might be for future human crew members. While these manikins might not look particularly impressive on their own, they will play a critical role in NASA’s ambitions to build a new pathway to the moon and, eventually, send astronauts to Mars. They’re also just one of several science experiments aboard the mission meant to better our understanding of space travel.  

Liftoff was originally scheduled for August 29, but NASA postponed the launch after engineers encountered several issues, including a nearby thunderstorm and problems with chilling one of the rocket’s engines. The launch was delayed again in September because of a fuel leak problem, but finally launched on November 16 at 1:47 am Eastern time.

When Orion completed its first lunar flyby earlier this morning, it captured several images of the moon along the way. Eventually, the spacecraft will return to Earth, completing a 1.3 million-mile journey that will last 42 days.

“This is a good demonstration that the rocket works the way it’s supposed to,” Wendy Whitman Cobb, a professor at the US Air Force’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, told Recode in August. “It will give NASA a little bit more confidence for crewed missions coming up in the next couple of years.”

Artemis is the next generation of moon missions. It’s part of NASA’s broader ambitions for lunar exploration, which include astronaut treks across the moon’s surface, a lunar human habitat, and a new space station called Gateway. Artemis I also sets the groundwork for the next two missions in the Artemis program: Artemis 2 is scheduled to send humans on a similar trip around the moon in 2024, and Artemis 3 will make history by landing the first woman and the first person of color on the lunar surface sometime in 2025, at the earliest. All of the research happening on Artemis I — including Helga, Zohar, and Moonikin Campos — is meant to prepare for those later missions. 

All aboard Artemis 1

NASA’s ride to the moon, the SLS, was designed to carry an extremely heavy payload. The rocket is just a few meters taller than the Statue of Liberty, and it can generate 8.8 million pounds of thrust. Like other launch systems, the SLS is designed with several different stages, each of which plays a role in overcoming Earth’s gravity, breaking through the atmosphere, and reaching outer space. To make that happen, the SLS includes twin solid rocket boosters, as well as a 212-foot tall core stage filled with more than 700,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. It’s the largest core stage NASA has ever made.

While technically new, the SLS is based on older technology. Several of its components, including its main engines, are either from or based on systems used by the NASA Space Shuttle program, which ended in 2011. And while other space launches have started using reusable, or at least partially reusable, rocket boosters, the SLS will only fly once. This differentiates SLS from Starship, the super-heavy launch vehicle that SpaceX is designing for moon missions. SpaceX, which beat out Blue Origin for a $2.9 billion contract to build NASA’s lunar landing system, expects Starship’s first orbital test flight to take place sometime in the next four months. Congress’s decision to fund SLS is an ongoing sore spot within the space industry because the project went billions over budget and was delayed several times, and because private companies are now developing less expensive alternatives.  

“Congress has put up with the over-budget, behind schedule, because SLS has kept the money and jobs flowing to key congressional districts,” explains Whitman Cobb.

There is broad-based support for Orion, which NASA designed specifically for Artemis missions, as well as potential trips to nearby asteroids or Mars. The spacecraft was built by Lockheed Martin and, from the outside, it looks like a giant turkey baster with wing-like panels coming out from its side. Orion is home to the Artemis crew module, which is where astronauts traversing to and from the moon will eventually spend their time. Once the spacecraft is vetted for human astronauts, the crew module is expected to offer various space travel amenities, including sleeping bags, an assortment of new NASA-recipe space food bars, and a revamped space toilet that’s designed for zero gravity and people of all genders.

On this mission, the primary passengers are a collection of science experiments. One test involves the NASA manikins Zohar and Helga, which are made of 38 slices of plastic that are meant to imitate human tissue, as well as more than 5,600 sensors and 34 radiation detectors. There’s a high level of radiation in space, which is a source of ongoing concern that future astronauts could face heightened cancer risk, especially as space trips become longer and more ambitious. Both of these manikins were designed with breasts and uteri because women tend to be more sensitive to radiation. Zohar will also wear a specialized protective vest called AstroRad, which engineers are evaluating as a potential way to protect astronauts from radiation, including during solar flares. Helga won’t receive a vest, and will allow NASA to study how much the AstroRad actually helped. 

Orion is also carrying an experiment that’s meant to test how yeast responds to radiation. Researchers plan to store freeze-dried yeast underneath one of the Orion crew seats, and then expose the yeast to fluid over the course of three days in space. Once Orion lands back on Earth, scientists will analyze the yeast’s DNA to study how it fared. The experiment could yield insight into how humans might stay healthy in space during future trips. 

A version of Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant is hitching a ride, too. NASA is testing Callisto, a combination of customized hardware and software that Amazon, Cisco, and Lockheed Martin designed to communicate with astronauts. The test will enable mission control to send audio and video messages to a tablet aboard the Orion capsule, where a version of Alexa will receive the message and share a response. While the tech might sound a little like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the engineers say the system is meant to provide assistance and companionship. 

“Callisto is a standalone payload onboard the Orion spacecraft, and it does not have any control over flight control or other mission-critical systems,” said Justin Nikolaus, a lead Alexa experience designer at Amazon, in August.

Other aspects of Artemis I’s payload are more sentimental. A plush doll version of the Shaun the Sheep character from the Wallace and Gromit franchise will travel on Orion. So will a Snoopy doll outfitted in an astronaut costume, along with a pen nib that Charles M. Schultz used to draw the Peanuts series, wrapped in a comic strip. Mementos from the Apollo 11 mission, which landed the first humans on the lunar surface in the 1960s, are also going, including a tiny sample of moon dust and a piece of an engine.

Beyond the moon

Some of Artemis I’s most important research projects won’t be returning to Earth anytime soon. The mission includes plans to launch 10 miniature satellites, called CubeSats, into the moon’s orbit. These satellites will collect data that NASA, along with private companies, could eventually use to navigate on and around the moon. 

One satellite, LunIR, will study the safety of the lunar surface with infrared imaging, producing information that could influence where astronauts will eventually travel. One satellite, called the Lunar Ice Cube, will attempt to detect lunar sources of water, which NASA could eventually use as a resource. Another satellite, NEA Scout, will head to a small, nearby asteroid, a side trip that could inform future crewed missions to other asteroids. The satellites will be launched by another component, called the Orion Stage Adapter, only after the spacecraft is a safe distance away.

These satellites are a reminder that NASA is interested in far more than just visiting the moon. The Artemis program is laying the groundwork for an unprecedented level of activity on the lunar surface, including a human base camp, a series of nuclear reactors, and a mineral mining operation. NASA has expressly said that it wants to develop a lunar economy, and the space agency has also established the Artemis Accords, a set of principles for exploring the moon that more than 20 countries have now joined. 

Eventually, NASA plans to turn the moon into a pit stop on a much more ambitious journey: a human mission to Mars. Right now, it seems like that could happen sometime in the late 2030s. But while many of these plans are still far out, it’s clear that the Artemis program is far more than a repeat of the Apollo program. 

“Apollo was a political act in the context of the Cold War to demonstrate US national power to the world. It was explicitly a race with the Soviet Union to be first to the moon. Once we were first to the moon, the reason for continuing went away,” explains John Logsdon, the founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. “Artemis is intended as the first program in a long-term program of human exploration.”

Update, November 21, 12:50 pm ET: This story was originally published on August 27 and has been updated with NASA’s successful launch of the Artemis 1 mission on November 16 and Orion’s lunar flyby on November 21.