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.