Josh Imhof | features editor

As a kid, Connor McDonagh spent his days building spaceships and race cars out of Legos. At night, he would read textbooks about the solar system and look at the stars.

When he was 9, he got his first telescope.

“I remember looking into it. I remember looking at the moon,” he said. “It’s one of my fondest memories.”

Now, the Duquesne University environmental science student has watched from the ground as the Artemis II spacecraft makes its historic journey to the moon and back.

The 10-day voyage, which began on April 1, is the first crewed lunar mission since Apollo 17 landed on the moon in 1972.

McDonagh said it is surreal to be alive during a time like this.

“It’s a reminder of what we can do as a species if we put our minds together,” he said.

The mission has already provided space enthusiasts with a mountain of achievements. On Monday, the Artemis crew traveled 252,756 miles from Earth, the furthest point any human has been. The four-person team is also the first to see the dark side of the moon with the naked eye.

Photos of the Earth and moon taken by the astronauts have been transmitted back to Houston and published online.

Sophia Lopez-Linares Perez, a sophomore mechanical engineering major, first became interested in NASA when she moved from Spain to live in Michigan with some family members. She remembers learning of the Perseverance Rover after it launched in 2020.

Despite her interest, people in her class did not think she would be able to accomplish her new goals.

“I just remember a guy in my class saying ‘You could never be enough,’” Lopez-Linares Perez said.

Six years later, she, McDonagh and a team of students presented their project on a truss system they created at the Undergraduate Research Symposium on Wednesday. The system is modeled after the Japanese construction technique, Kigumi, which connects pieces of wood without glue, nails or screws.

The group’s creation is one of the first of its kind and intended to make it easier for astronauts to assemble anything from rovers to buildings on the lunar surface.

“It was exciting after having the structure to come up with different ideas,” Lopez-Linares Perez said. “I remember sitting in my dorm one day thinking ‘What could we do with these trusses?’”

As NASA gets closer to sending humans back to the moon’s surface and one day to Mars, the students believe their system would be helpful in the creation of lunar bases, which would act as a pit stop for future travelers.

Not everyone is focused on practical applications, though.

Simonetta Frittelli, associate professor of physics at Duquesne, is excited to see her theories come true.

“Since the ’60s, they have been calculating the trajectories that take advantage of the gravitational pull of both the Earth and the moon,” Frittelli said. “It’s so interesting that the things that I teach in my astrophysics class are basic to this specific mission.”

In her astrophysics class, Frittelli has taught students about techniques that the Artemis II crew has utilized to complete their mission, such as the “figure-8” pattern the spacecraft is following.

After taking two laps around the Earth, the ship catapulted itself toward the moon using the Earth’s gravity. The moon’s gravitational pull then “catches” it, pulls it around itself and then hurls it back toward Earth, creating the “figure-8.” The ship is expected to reach a top speed of around 25,000 miles per hour.

Frittelli said staying on course is a delicate operation.

“The launch and the re-entry are probably the riskiest parts of the operation,” Frittelli said. “But people don’t think about the fact that if they lose their trajectory they have to get back to it. That’s also very risky.”

She said that she is amazed by the achievement of sending people to the Moon and believes there are benefits that come from it, but that she would also like to see more development on environmental solutions at the same time.

“I don’t want to dampen the enthusiasm, but I’m a little skeptical because of all the other things that we should be doing that we’re not doing,” Frittelli said. “We need to seriously do something about the environment.”

Nia Nicholson, senior physics major and a student of Frittelli, said that she is interested in the mission but is also curious about the various experiments taking place during the journey.

A Virtual Astronaut Tissue Analog Response (AVATAR) investigation will look at the effects of radiation and micro gravity on organ cells, which NASA said will help it better understand the effects of space travel on people. It will also improve their understanding of aging and radiation for people on the ground.

“It’s so multidisciplinary,” Nicholson said.

Both physicists said despite their interest, they are happy staying on the ground.

“I can’t imagine,” Frittelli said. “I could not be an astronaut.”

Josh Imhof can be reached at imhofj@duq.edu