NASA astronaut Christina Koch was sure she had scheduled a video conference with her team, but when she turned on her computer, she realized that there was no active link for an online meeting.

She then wrote to her manager to ask him what was wrong. The response he received was: “We want to see you in person.”

Koch had to get into the car and drive across town to the Johnson Space Center, the home of NASA astronauts.

Koch was assigned NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first mission to the Moon since the Apollo missions some 50 years ago.

However, she did not know how she would go to the Moon until she arrived at the Johnson Space Center.

According to the Washington Post, none of the astronauts knew they were selected for the mission.

The Artemis II mission was to be the largest crewed mission in half a century and NASA’s great “return” to the Moon.

On the other hand, Victor Glover was also late, as he was having lunch with some of his staff, and Reid Wiseman, who was also supposed to be the mission commander, was going to not go at all.

Wiseman was on the other side of town and had to see a doctor. He thought the meeting would discuss a problematic Russian spacecraft that had leaked. He had no idea what was really waiting for him.

“I don’t think I can do it,” he recalls telling his boss, Joe Akaba, the mission’s lead astronaut. However, Akaba tried to tell him, without revealing the essence of the matter, that in reality things were not as he thought.

“You must come here,” she wrote back.

The astronaut learned – via video call – from a doctor’s office he visited that he was going to the moon, as he never made it to the Johnson Space Center.

Finally, in the first belated meeting of most of the astronauts, lead astronaut Joe Akaba began his speech by emphasizing the importance of being on time.

“People who show up on time love it,” he told them. Nobody responded to his comment.

Source: Washington Post.