On Monday night, a crew of four astronauts on NASA’s Orion spacecraft traveled around the moon for the first time in 50 years. The Artemis II mission is the latest stage of NASA’s attempt to return humans to the moon—and a made-for-TV demonstration of the space agency’s engineering prowess.
Awkwardly for Elon Musk, his rocket company played no part in the milestone, which may be why he was initially pretty quiet about NASA’s success amid his usual social media output of political provocations and AI-generated pictures of scantily clad women. Behind the scenes, though, Musk is engaged in a feat of financial engineering that is as improbable as any trip to the far side of the moon, if not more so.
