March 12, 2024, 18:24
Good evening from Earth, Imagination 1 crew!

I’m looking forward to your daily report. This desert evening, temperatures will dip to 44F (6.7C) and the moon will set for us at 8:21 pm. Here if and when you need me, as always!

Looking up from Earth,
Mikayla Mace Kelley, CapCom

March 12, 2024, 18:25

Pressure: 1.5 inches water across the board
Lung height: 68 inches with blower at 25.45 Hz
CO2: All below 2500
Water tank level: 45 gallons
Hydroponics at 14:00: 6.6 pH, 2.0 EC

Note: We have recycled condensate for the first time! It’s in the bucket in the TM waiting to be added to the main water tank.

Ivy has spread her sewing and tapestry in the TM, turning it into the theater of all sewing possibilities. Julie’s aphorism stamp is printing. Liz has been lunging in the lung, preparing possible moves for tomorrow’s EVA. Chris’s Esquire article is already over word count. He continues to take instant photos of the mission. Julie has been singing “sacred heart” hymns in the lung. They echo beautifully, like Gregorian chants.

All systems are nominal. We did more housekeeping. Vac, food scraps and so on, keeping the hab our cozy desert-sun/lunar home. As ever, we feel the most on the Moon after dark, when images are projected on the TM west wall. During the day, we feel connected to all the SAM systems keeping us well. We are treading lightly, to invoke the poet Gray Snyder.

We opened up a package from a German antiques dealer, revealing two pipe connectors built by the slave laborers who assembled the V2, the world’s first modern rocket and basis for the Saturn V. We do so to honor the victims of the V2, both the concentration camp slaves and the civilians killed by the missile. We cannot forget those origins of the technology that allows us to explore space, this time in peace and with justice and vibrant hope. Ivy will include them on her Imagination 1 mission tapestry.

Speaking of hope, this morning Chris found the cress leaves have unfurled in not only the lunar regolith simulant but also in the ground fines of the actual lunar meteorite NWA 10822, which, while having some terrestrial materials given its tenure on Earth, is largely composed of hydrophobic lunar feldspathic basalt. A tiny bit of the Earth but mostly Moon: And the cress seeds for this project have grown! (So far as I know this is the first time plants have been grown in lunar meteorite powder, but I could be wrong.) Regardless, it is very moving to see the green world in the gray Moondust.

Huge thanks to Anna-Lisa Paul and Rob Fehrl at the University of Florida, whose team was the first to grow plants in Apollo regolith samples. They provided the Imagination 1 plant-growth project with materials, enthusiasm and guidance.

Late in the day, we assisted Liz in the blue pressure suit. She danced in the lung. Turning this over to Julie now so all crew voices are heard in these reports over the next three nights. –Commander Christopher Cokinos

Greetings from the Moon! We finally felt settled in today. By 11 a.m. we were each at work on our creative projects. Ivy’s scissors and Chris’s keyboard chimed in the TM, and occasional hints of movement drifted up the Lung, where Liz was dancing on moonlight. We were so focused that we ate lunch late, true sign that we were invested in our work! Yesterday and Sunday, I wrote little to nothing, but the experience of simply being here–crawling through the lung tunnel, monitoring the hydroponics, cooking with dehydrated ingredients–came through in a poem draft. I was thinking about Howard Nemerov’s poem Witnessing the Launch of the Shuttle Atlantis which starts, “So much of life in the world is waiting.” So much of life is simply living the slow moments–doing chores, going to sleep, getting dressed for the day–and that’s true wherever one is, even on the Moon. In the mundane details, we’re alive.

Signing off from Shackleton Base –Julie