NASA pays tribute with messages hidden Inside Artemis I Orion Spacecraft

On the eve of the splashdown of the Artemis I mission, NASA revealed five hidden messages included inside the capsule which pay tribute to people and programs that made it possible.

A cardinal above the window to the right of Orion’s pilot seat is a tribute to Mark Geyer, director of the Johnson Space Center and a big St. Louis Cardinals fan. Geyer was the first program manager for the Orion program guiding it through Exploration Flight Test-1 in 2014. Geyer died in 2021.

Above the Callisto console, a Siri or Alexa for astronauts using voice-activated technology to control the spacecraft, you'll find “Charlie”. in Morse code. This honors Charlie Lundquist who played an instrumental role in Orion’s development as Deputy Program Manager. Charlie died in 2020.

Directly in front of the pilot's seat and below Callisto, is printed a series of numbers you might recognized if you've made a telephone call to Europe. These are the country codes of each country that partnered in developing and building Orion, in numerical order of course, including United States (1), The Netherlands (31), Belgium (32), France (33), Spain (34), Italy (39), Switzerland (41), Denmark (45), Sweden (46), Norway (47), and Germany (49).

A graphic representation of 10010, binary code for the number 18 is located on the top of the pilot’s seat, to the right of the NASA worm logo. This is to honor NASA’s history of travel to the Moon with the Apollo Program and to celebrate a human spacecraft’s return to the Moon after Apollo 17 for the Artemis Generation.

On the starboard or right side of the spacecraft, next to the pilot seat and below one of the windows, are the letters "CBAGF", the opening notes to the song "Fly Me to the Moon”. Lines indicate the length each note is held. Frank Sinatra's 1964 version was associated with the Apollo missions to the Moon.