By Jonathan Hampton 
For the first time in half a century, a crewed spacecraft was racing toward the Moon—and something was already going wrong. Voices tightened over the radio. Engineers scrambled. One vital system had quietly failed, threatening to turn a triumphant 10-day mission into a slow, humiliating ordeal. It wasn’t the engines. It wasn’t life support.
In the glow of launch, Artemis II looked flawless: a blazing ascent, a perfect trajectory, four astronauts carrying the hopes of millions. Then, hours into the journey, a small but deeply human crisis emerged. The toilet, a crucial system on a 10-day mission, malfunctioned. In microgravity,
