In April 2026, four astronauts aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft launched on the Artemis II mission—the first crewed voyage to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. An estimated 25 million people watched the launch live on NASA+, YouTube, and Prime Video, and days later, millions more tuned in to see something no one had ever witnessed: 4K video of astronauts rounding the Moon, transmitted to Earth by laser.
You may have watched the launch, but what you didn’t see was everything behind it: the years of engineering work, the cloud-based computing that charted the flight path, and a network connection built in weeks between NASA and Australia to deliver 4K video to 25 million viewers.
Trajectory design for a crewed lunar mission isn’t a single calculation. The Orion flight sciences team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center runs tens of thousands of simulations across nominal and off-nominal scenarios, generating two to five terabytes of data for each potential launch window.
The computing platform behind those simulations runs in AWS GovCloud (US)—a secure, government-certified cloud environment required for handling Artemis flight data. In the first 48 hours after launch, the system calculated flight path adjustments in near real-time, processing thousands of compute hours to retarget and optimize the trajectory as conditions changed.
Nasa chose AWS for the terrestrial leg of the connection. The team linked Mount Stromlo to a network node in Australia and routed the signal across a global backbone to White Sands, New Mexico—covering roughly 15,000 kilometers in milliseconds. AWS, NASA, and ANU partnered and stood up the connection in a matter of weeks, for the cost of a laptop.
The 4K footage traveled by laser from Orion as it passed the Moon all the way to Australia, crossed the AWS backbone to NASA, was encoded through AWS Elemental, and reached viewers on their phones and televisions—an end-to-end chain spanning over a quarter million miles.
A moonshot, built on invisible infrastructure. Four humans circled the Moon for the first time in over fifty years, and for a few hours, the world remembered what we’re capable of when we work together.
