The Brief

“Come on, kick back,” invites Quincy Brown, co-founder of the Blue Hollywood Street Sanctuary, a half-block-long stretch of sidewalk on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, where more than 4,400 unhoused people live.

Four years ago, Brown began serving barbecue here out of the back of his van. He propped up a handful of tents and canopies to shade visitors from the intense sun. Now there are folding chairs and tables where men and women play dominoes, chess and checkers, and enjoy snacks and bottled water donated by local organizations and community members who pass by.

Amid the visitors hanging out and catching up, some smoke crack cocaine, meth or marijuana, sitting on chairs in the sanctuary’s central area. The nonjudgmental environment for drug consumption is on-mission for the sanctuary. Brown, 50, was ordained as a pastor in 2005 and is known by most as Pastor Blue. He started the community space to save lives: whether through food, prayer or prevention of overdose deaths. Here, anyone can obtain free clean pipes and Naloxone (commonly known by its brand name, Narcan), a nasal spray medication with the ability to reverse overdoses. While injection drugs are less commonly used at the sanctuary, free clean needles are available.

“First and foremost, I want people to live,” says Pastor Blue. By creating a hygienic environment with lifesaving medicine at hand, he hopes to prevent overdose deaths, which over the last few years have risen sharply in Skid Row and across the country.

Pastor Blue’s sidewalk sanctuary meets a need served elsewhere by overdose prevention centers, which are common in European cities but rare in the United States. With overdose deaths rocketing upward, public health officials in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities have called for legalizing such centers, saying there’s now an abundance of evidence that they save lives. But the political will to heed that advice has not materialized.

At Blue Hollywood, anyone can obtain free clean pipes and naloxone (commonly known by the brand name Narcan), a nasal spray medication that can reverse overdoses. While injection drugs are less commonly used at the sanctuary, free clean needles are available.

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Barbara Davidson

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Darren Willett, director of Skid Row’s Center for Harm Reduction, operated by the nonprofit Homeless Health Care Los Angeles, said the lack of overdose prevention centers in Los Angeles is “infuriating.” If officials approved them, “we could do it tomorrow. And yet, here we are watching people die,” said Willett.

Pastor Blue estimates there have been 20 overdoses at Blue Hollywood Street Sanctuary over the last two years — yet not one fatality.

To achieve this, monitoring is crucial. The sanctuary operates with an “I’m gonna watch over you while you use, you watch over me” approach, Pastor Blue says. “I’m constantly walking through, so if somebody sleeps too long, we’re gonna get you up.”

Illicit fentanyl has been the greatest cause of overdose. By weight, the synthetic opioid is about 50 times stronger than heroin. Even small amounts can cause respiratory difficulty, and in some cases death. Fentanyl’s potency and low production cost have led to its increasing use as an additive to other drugs.

In 2021, 2,741 people in Los Angeles County died from an accidental drug overdose, according to the Department of Public Health — more than double the number of lives lost to overdose in 2016. Fentanyl was involved in 109 deaths in 2016 and 1,504 deaths in 2021.

As fentanyl-related deaths in Skid Row began to soar, the head of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health and other health officials called for the establishment of official consumption centers to prevent overdoses.

The L.A. County Department of Public Health released a report late last year on fentanyl overdoses that included a call for official prevention centers and other harm reduction measures, such as access to Naloxone and fentanyl test strips. At the same time, Barbara Ferrer and Gary Tsai, director of L.A. County Department of Public Health and director of Substance Abuse Prevention and Control, respectively, endorsed the centers, saying it was time for “bold action.”

“We do not tell people with diabetes that they can’t be eligible for treatment unless they comply with diet restrictions 100% of the time, or that people with heart disease can’t receive care unless they exercise,” Ferrer and Tsai wrote in a Daily News op-ed. “Overdose prevention centers … send a subtle but important message that we want to bring people who use drugs out from the corners of our communities and that they deserve unconditional and nonjudgmental services.”

Despite support from health experts and local officials, federal law bans overdose prevention centers due to the “crack house statute” — a 1986 law that prevents individuals and organizations from maintaining or opening places for the purpose of using a controlled substance. Only New York City, which has two prevention centers, has bucked that law so far, though Rhode Island, Colorado and New Mexico are taking steps to open them.

A nonprofit center operated in San Francisco for one year in 2022 as part of the mayor’s emergency plan to address the overdose crisis, though it has since closed. In recent months, other unsanctioned sites have popped up in the city to address the urgent issue of drug overdose. Like in Los Angeles, the future of prevention centers in San Francisco is uncertain.

Last summer, Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) authored a bill to open pilot overdose prevention centers in L.A., Oakland and San Francisco. But Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed it, saying that more planning was needed. He expressed concern the centers could open “a world of unintended consequences.”

Newsom was likely hoping to stave off “the largely GOP-driven narrative of California as a needle-infested, drug-overrun dystopia,” CalMatters stated on its website.

Men and women play dominoes and enjoy snacks and bottled water. Photo: Barbara Davidson.

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While Los Angeles has seen a groundswell of support for overdose prevention centers, with local leaders and community nonprofits calling for them to be legalized, none have opened.

So Blue Hollywood Street Sanctuary operates as a real-world example of the paradoxes brought about by the nation’s 52-year war on drugs. Worldwide, 16 countries have established more than 120 official overdose prevention centers where people can use drugs in a supervised environment, with staff ready to respond if they overdose. While such official centers are illegal in the U.S., Pastor Blue’s sidewalk setup serves as a one-man version of such a space.

On one summer evening, while people at Blue Hollywood were playing dominoes and hanging out, a resident who frequents the sanctuary accidentally overdosed. After smoking crack in a pipe, he began to have trouble breathing.

Pastor Blue called an ambulance, administered four doses of Narcan and performed CPR. Moments before paramedics arrived, “we revived him,” Pastor Blue said. “We had Narcan, thank god.”

Pastor Blue is fighting a problem that “does not seem to be going anywhere in the near future,” he said. “We have loved ones, we have friends, we have people that are suffering with different addictions. I’m here to meet people right where they are.”

Here on Skid Row, Blue Hollywood is an example of a community-created oasis, said Soma Snakeoil, director and co-founder of the Sidewalk Project, a harm reduction nonprofit in the neighborhood.

The sanctuary receives supplies such as clean needles, pipes and Narcan from local nonprofits like the Sidewalk Project, as well as chairs, tents, food and water from Los Angeles Mission and donors who drop by.

“For the most part, it’s a community,” says Pastor Blue, who resides near Skid Row. “I really want to preserve community, because there’s so many people who have been detached from their biological community.”

The sanctuary offers immediate support, whether it’s a tent for shelter or a freshly cooked lunch.

“By him putting this here, I think he saved a lot of people,” said Rico Solomon, a longtime sanctuary member. Born and raised in L.A.’s West Adams neighborhood, Solomon lived in a tent on Skid Row for four years before moving to an apartment in La Puente, 20 miles east of downtown. Even though it can mean three bus rides for more than an hour and a half, he returns to Blue Hollywood regularly.

A group bible class.

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Solomon says the community keeps him coming back. “It’s a bit of a commute, especially when I’m catching the bus. But I have my habits, you know. So I don’t take this stuff home with me,” he said of the drugs he consumes and the pipe he uses to smoke. “I come out here and do it. Then, when I get ready to go home, I leave it all here.”

Solomon said he’s seen four overdoses at the sanctuary and has called 911 himself to assist people experiencing an overdose, so they are able “to live to see another day.”

“People are dropping like flies around here,” said Anthony Willis, 60, who lives in an apartment in Skid Row. Born and raised in L.A., he is a father and grandfather.

Nearly a year ago, Willis accidentally overdosed. While looking to smoke crack cocaine, he borrowed a pipe. Before smoking the pipe, he asked if it contained fentanyl and was told no.

The pipe turned out to be laced with it. “I panicked,” Willis said. “I couldn’t breathe.” Emergency services arrived, though he was able to regain his breathing on his own.

Consuming drugs less frequently is one of Willis’ goals. In the meantime, treating those who consume with dignity is imperative. “We’re all human,” he said. “Don’t judge people.”

According to Willett, the Center for Harm Reduction director, a nonjudgmental approach is key.

“There’s a lot of things you can do to help people improve [their] health without stopping using drugs,” he said. Too often, he said, organizations approach the problem by focusing on abstinence. “For many people, that’s a deal breaker,” he added.

Using a harm reduction — as opposed to an abstinence — approach allows the center to engage with 95% of clients who use drugs, Willett said.

While the U.S. is now five decades deep into the war on drugs, the stigma and criminalization of drug use is a relatively new phenomenon. “In the late 1800s, you could buy cocaine and a syringe for $1.50 in the Sears catalog,” Willett said.

“There’s a direct lineage straight from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration and the war on drugs,” said Willett, adding that all were tools used by the system of white supremacy to maintain control over Black people. He points out that the supposed end of Jim Crow laws in the late 1960s coincided neatly with the start of the war on drugs in 1971, which resulted in a dramatic increase in prison populations. It has cost the U.S. roughly $1 trillion to police, arrest and incarcerate people for drug-related charges, and spiked rates of overdose and death.

Brown sweeps the street with one of the sanctuary's regulars.

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If you ask Willett, the war on drugs has neither met its stated goals nor alleviated the most pressing health issues: It hasn’t reduced overdose rates, soft tissue infection, infectious disease or violence related to drug trafficking. Instead, it has “devastated communities of color through reincarceration, ripping families apart for minor drug offenses and confiscating people’s homes for being associated with illicit drug trade.”

The problem isn’t drug use itself, Willett believes. It’s the way society punishes people for using drugs — targeting Black people, communities of color and low-income people in particular, despite similar rates of drug consumption and sales across racial and economic lines.

“We cannot continue doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result,” L.A. City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez said in an email, speaking to the history of criminalizing drug use and the rise in overdose deaths.

“It’s a reality that people are gonna use,” said Pastor Blue. “So on behalf of trying to keep an atmosphere where they’re at peace … safe consumption sites are very important.”

Countries with overdose prevention centers (the first opened in Switzerland in 1986) show significantly lower rates of overdose than those without. In 2020, 91,799 people died from overdose in the United States — about 58 times more than in Germany, where 1,581 people died from overdose (the U.S. population is only four times larger than Germany’s).

Jeannette Zanipatin, California director for the national advocacy group the Drug Policy Alliance, says these overdose prevention centers are not a substitute for treatment. The centers, which commonly connect clients to other services such as mental and physical health care, “keep individuals alive so that when they are ready to access treatment those linkages can be made for the individual,” Zanipatin said in an email.

In the U.S., critics from both parties have questioned their success. “Enabling those suffering from addiction to go to the brink of death is a dubious treatment,” wrote U.S. Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, a President Trump appointee, in a 2020 opinion in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

In 2018, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a state measure to open a pilot prevention center in San Francisco, saying, “Fundamentally I do not believe that enabling illegal drug use in government sponsored injection centers — with no corresponding requirement that the user undergo treatment — will reduce drug addiction.” Such sentiments linger today.

In 2022, the American Medical Association called for more funding for pilot prevention centers. And recently the National Institutes of Health announced it will fund a four-year study to investigate the impact of prevention centers on both individual clients and neighborhoods — as well as estimate potential costs and savings for local medical and criminal justice systems.

NIMBYism is also an obstacle to opening prevention centers, said Zanipatin, with some fearing a center would negatively impact their community. Yet “crime rates have been reduced, syringe litter is reduced, and open drug use is reduced in places where centers are co-located in communities,” she wrote in an email.

A study of one unofficial overdose prevention center in the U.S. found that in the five years since its opening, crime decreased in the surrounding area. A review of government-sponsored prevention centers in Vancouver, Canada, found no increases in drug-related crimes or public nuisance.

As part of Homeless Health Care Los Angeles in Skid Row, a trained overdose response team of staff and clients canvasses the neighborhood in golf carts seven days a week. They are armed with a broad range of tools, including Naloxone injections, concentrated oxygen, artificial breathing masks, pulse oximeters and automated external defibrillators.

Still, one crucial service is missing: providing a safe environment for clients to consume drugs on-site.

In 2016, Homeless Health Care Los Angeles formed a partnership with The Men’s Home in Copenhagen, which operates two overdose prevention centers, and has been sending staff to Denmark to learn from these centers ever since.

Yet no such center has arrived in Los Angeles.

The wood crates are lined up on folding tables in a church parking lot in San Fernando. Each crate is filled with russet potatoes, knobby purple and orange carrots, plump garlic, red apples and more. It's produce from the Santa Ynes Valley in Santa Barbara County that could easily be found in farmers' markets in upscale neighborhoods.

But here, it’s free.

“ I wanted to find a way to distribute food to people that was done with dignity,” said Lindsay Chambers, president of non-profit Together We Thrive

The crates, the quality of the produce, much of it organic, and other details intentionally blur the line between farmers' market and food bank. Before starting these, Chambers volunteered at eight food banks across the nation to a get a sense of how they work. When she saw how much people love farmers’ markets, she decided she'd make her new food bank look like one.

Together We Thrive buys produce to give away from small farms in Southern California.

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“Instead of just receiving a free handout, they're coming in person and they get to select. It looks like a regular farmers' market,” Chambers said.

She opened her first Together We Thrive food bank in Canoga Park in January 2025. The L.A. fires led her to start another in Pasadena. Then this one in San Fernando.

The concept is straightforward: the organization buys fruits and vegetables from California small farms. They bring them by electric trucks to the weekly giveaways staffed by paid staff and volunteers.

Lindsay Chambers, right, founded Together We Thrive to provide free produce at L.A. area food banks.

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Chambers said they serve about 300 people weekly at this San Fernando location, more in Pasadena. As the cost of living has squeezed many people, hundreds of food banks have sprouted across Southern California. This one has built a loyal following in part through their approach.

Very helpful

The San Fernando food bank sets up at Latin American Church of the Nazarene. People bring their own reusable bags or get a paper bag. The free food is welcomed by many.

“I have a 94 year-old father, and with finances the way they are, this is very, very helpful. Then I come for my other coworker for her elderly parents as well,” said Katherine Balarezo, a high school special education assistant who lives in nearby North Hollywood.

Katherine Balazero has visited the Together We Thrive food bank about 15 times.

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While other food banks offer pre-selected boxes or bags filled with dry food, or may require registration of some kind, that's not what happens here. People can just walk up and choose their own produce.

 ”It's not canned stuff. This is fresh vegetables so you can do a lot and the shelf life is longer,” Balarezo saying it's good for people like her who like to cook their own, healthy meals.

Patrons of various ages and backgrounds

On this day, at this location, people who came represented various races, ethnicities, and ages. Some said their pocketbooks are tight, others said they were doing OK.

“I'm currently a college student, so I'm trying to save as much cash as I can so I can pay for my books and my tuition every semester,” said Allam Reyes, who lives about five minutes away.

He’s going to juice the carrots and may cook the potatoes in the air fryer. He said this bag of produce would cost him about $20-$25 at the supermarket. His roommates may like what he makes.

“If I can share it, then I'll share it, but if not, I'm going to make it for myself,” Reyes said.

Allam Reyes visits the Together We Thrive food bank in San Fernando.

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Chambers, the founder of this food bank says this multiplying effect, that the food given away here to one person goes on to serve more, is one of the things that drives the organization to keep on giving. Together We Thrive plans to open a similar food bank in Charlotte, North Carolina.

A self-proclaimed pet psychic is in L.A. for a national tour of pop-up readings, with a few sold-out days of connecting with pets in Pasadena and Highland Park this week.

Tucked away at the back of Doggee Club pet shop on Raymond Avenue, pet psychic Cynthia Okimoto was posted up at a table. There was no crystal ball, just a small sign that read: "Pet Psychic Readings: $35."

Dogs, cats... and snakes too 

Jason Mendieta and Cristina Becerra sat for a reading with their small poodle, Bishon.

“He says he’s a social guy, he’s popular and he’s hoping to have more followers on Instagram. Does he have an Instagram account?” Okimoto said in a very matter-of-fact way.

“He doesn’t. He has almost no social media presence,” Becerra replied.

“Well that’s gotta change soon,” Okimoto said.

It was on a spiritual retreat in Siberia where Okimoto said she was told by some high priestesses that she had the gift of animal communication.

Flash forward years later and she’s traveled across the United States and even to Japan and Korea to help people connect with their pets. After Los Angeles, her tour includes stops in Vegas and Houston, before wrapping back to Orange County and San Diego.

Brenda Teng, owner of the Doggee Club, said she took her time to get to know Okimoto before inviting her for this psychic pop-up. She even did a reading with her own dog.

“She’s so amazing and the things that she can be so specific about your dog is spot on,” Teng said. “Then I was like, no brainer, let’s bring you in, it would be such a gift for our community.”

Okimoto said she’s not here to convince anyone or sell products. Some of her own friends don’t believe in what she's doing and she said that’s OK with her.

And to people who say this is just snake oil: she reads reptiles too.

“I did connect with a snake that had run away,” Okimoto recalled. “And I knew that it was in the person’s home hiding under the mattress, because I could see that there was a rip in the mattress lining and I could see what the roommate’s bedroom looked like. And I’m like, ‘I know he’s in there. I just don’t know how to get him to come out...' I don’t talk to too many snakes. So that was surprising."

Levity aside, Becerra and Mendieta seemed genuinely pleased with Bishon the poodle’s reading. They had suspected he always wanted to be a show dog. With Okimoto’s help, now they feel like they know for sure.

“It’s always nice to hear that I’ve shed some light on a pet’s health and happiness,” Okimoto said.

It was the end of an era for a sign of the times.

On a rainy March day in 1999, a 70-foot billboard perched at the doorstep of the Sunset Strip was taken down and trucked away. That spot on Sunset Boulevard and Marmont Lane had long been the home of the rough-hewn, lasso-toting Marlboro Man — so much a fixture it became part of the glitz and glam of L.A.

"It was such an iconic ad — such a tall billboard with this very handsome image up there," said John Heilman, current and then-mayor of West Hollywood. "Right there by the Chateau Marmont and near a lot of music venues that we have up on Sunset."

Billboards along the Sunset Strip, including one for Marlboro, in December 1985.

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That's how I came to know about these larger-than-life Marlboro billboards, going to the Roxy and the Whiskey to see shows, and to the Sunset Tower Records for music in the 1990s. I didn't know it at the time, the image apparently changed every couple of years, but the vibe was so consistent it felt like one, long seamless spell.

 "When you came in on Sunset, that is what you saw," said Neil Ford, head of sales for central U.S. and the West Coast at Big Happy, a digital and mobile ad agency based in Chicago. "It really captured what out-of-home [advertisement] was at that moment, what it meant."

The Marlboro billboard on Sunset Boulevard.

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Ford said the campaign was groundbreaking — advertising at its most effective.

"You think about that image of the Marlboro Man. It was a different size, it had presence and it captured your attention," Ford said.

It was a gamechanger for Philip Morris. Sales for Marlboro hit $5 million in 1955, a more than 3,000%  increase a year after its debut.

In other words, it attracted more smokers.

 "It was obvious that the image of the rugged Marlboro Man encouraged generations of men to smoke," said Paul Koretz, a former West Hollywood council member who was at the sign on that March day to celebrate its fall.

The total pivot

Hypermasculinity aside, Marlboro was originally marketed to women as a luxury brand peddling a mild flavor when it was introduced in the 1920s.

The pivot came three decades later, when the company was looking for a way to sell men on filtered cigarettes, long considered effeminate and less flavorful.

Enter Chicago ad man Leo Burnett, who engineered what many consider one of the greatest brand reinventions of all time by creating a new series of mascots — not just butch cowboys, but tough-as-nail sailors, hunters, businessmen, sportsmen, writers.

At the end, the cowboy won out, becoming the brand's reigning Marlboro Man.

" They brought this masculine symbol — image, visual — and really re-created what Marlboro as a brand meant," Ford said. "And it just was one image, there was very little copy. It had the logo on it. It was its own creation at the time."

The campaign propelled Marlboro to the top of the domestic industry by the 1970s, even as the toll on public health from the use of tobacco products racked up.

The Centers for Disease Control estimates that some 480,000 people in the U.S. die every year from cigarette smoking, including exposure to second-hand smoke. At least four actors who portrayed Marlboro Man died from smoking-related diseases.

In 1971, the U.S. banned cigarette advertising on television and radio. Brands then shifted to other mediums, in particular billboards.

The Sunset Strip

A street view looking west from the northern side of Sunset Boulevard near Chateau Marmont at night. In the background is the billboard for Marlboro.

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The 1.7-mile stretch of Sunset Strip in West Hollywood has never been a stranger to grabby billboards. In fact, it was where the medium became art.

"It's always been known for very creative advertising," Heilman, West Hollywood’s mayor, said.

Its golden era was arguably the 1970s, when giant, hand-painted rock ‘n’ roll signs lined the Strip, a veritable checklist of who’s who in the music world.

Various billboards on the Sunset Strip and Horn Avenue during a full moon in June 1980.

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The phenomenon started in 1967, with Elektra Records taking out a billboard to promote the debut album of a little-known local band called The Doors.

Two years later, The Beatles’ "Abbey Road" appeared, followed by Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen.

The era came to a close in the 1980s with the advent of MTV, which changed the playbook of music marketing, says photographer Robert Landau in his book, Rock 'n' Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip.

"Other types of billboards focusing on the entertainment industry were very popular," Heilman said. "A lot of the new movie releases, new album releases, new product releases."

And the Marlboro Man stood amid this hit parade in one of the most commanding spots on The Strip since at least the late 1970s.

"As I recall, at one point they actually had steam coming out of it to simulate smoke," said Heilman, who has lived in West Hollywood for more than four decades.

Night view of large billboards along Sunset Strip circa 1980.

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Los Angeles Photographers Photo Collection / LAPL

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Billboard ads along Sunset Strip in November 1985.

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Los Angeles Herald Examiner Photo Collection / LAPL

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The billboard predates the incorporation of West Hollywood as a city in 1984. Helping to lead the cityhood efforts was Koretz, who went on to become a City Council member for West Hollywood before serving on the state Assembly and the Los Angeles City Council.

"I actually lived near the Sunset Strip, so I thought about it every time I drove by," he said of the Marlboro Man ad. "It was one of the most effective symbols of tobacco marketing."

Both his parents, Koretz said, were heavy lifelong smokers who died from the addiction.  As a lawmaker, Koretz led a number of anti-smoking efforts, including a smoking ban in restaurants in West Hollywood — as well as a near total ban on tobacco advertising in the city.

Large billboard of the Marlboro Man, located on the Sunset Strip at Marmont Lane in West Hollywood, circa 1985.

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That ban was passed in the final months of 1998, just before a settlement agreement between the nation's biggest tobacco companies, including Philip Morris, and dozens of state attorneys general. The $206 billion deal settled lawsuits filed by the states to recoup health care costs for smoking-related illnesses. It also banned youth marketing, as well as outdoor advertising.

As a result, Los Angeles's most famous Marlboro Man stepped down on March 10, 1999 — about a month before the official removal deadline.

That day, Koretz held a news conference to send the sign off. He said not everyone was happy to see the landmark go. But the ban, among a slew of other anti-smoking policies, have made an impact.

Last year, the American Cancer Society reported cigarette smoking among U.S. adults dropped from  42% in 1965 to 11% in 2023.

" It was always controversial. There are always people that didn't like it," Koretz said of the billboard ban. "This is largely a success story."

Shortly after, a new billboard went up in the place of the Marlboro Man on Sunset.

It was still a cowboy, looking eerily similar to its fallen predecessor, but with a limp cigarette hanging from his mouth.

Instead of Marlboro, it read, "Impotent."

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen were ensconced in the Orion space capsule when they dropped into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego at 8:07 p.m. Friday. The USS John P. Murtha is stationed near the splashdown zone to help recover the crew.

The USS John P. Murtha is stationed near the splashdown zone and will help recover the crew. A team will head out to the floating capsule and install an inflatable raft just below Orion's side hatch. The crew will be examined by a flight surgeon, then helped out of the capsule. From the transport ship, they will hitch a ride back to Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Risk of reentry

There's always risk when returning from space. Glover said that he has been thinking about this portion of the mission since he was selected for it back in 2023, and he's been looking forward to it ever since.

"We have to get back," he said from the Orion capsule Wednesday. "There's so much data that you've seen already, but all the good stuff is coming back with us. There's so many more pictures, so many more stories, and, gosh, I haven't even begun to process what we've been through."

To get back, the capsule must hit the atmosphere at a precise angle.

"Let's not beat around the bush," said Jeff Radigan, Artemis II's lead flight director. "We have to hit that angle correctly. Otherwise, we're not going to have a successful reentry."

All eyes will be on the heat shield — this is the piece of hardware beneath the capsule that protects the crew from the extreme temperatures during reentry. NASA tested it out on Artemis I, the previous, uncrewed mission, and found that the heat shield wasn't performing as designed.

NASA mission planners and the Artemis II team worked on a way to mitigate that risk. Instead of "skipping" through the atmosphere like Artemis I, this mission would hit the atmosphere steeper and faster, limiting the time the spacecraft spends in those fiery, energetic moments of reentry.

"It's 13 minutes of things that have to go right," said Radigan. "I have a whole checklist in my head that we're going through of all the things that have to happen."

Mission success

The Artemis II mission is a key flight test for Orion, and thus far, mission managers have been pleased with the results. The spacecraft has taken humans farther from Earth than they've ever been, breaking a record set by Apollo 13 astronauts in 1970.

The crew tested the manual control of the spacecraft, which will be needed for future missions that will dock with a lunar landing system. The mission tested the spacecraft's life support systems and ability to keep four astronauts comfortable within the confined space.

Artemis II returned humans to the moon for the first time since the Apollo program over 50 years ago. And while some astronauts back then did see the far side of the moon, the Artemis II crew was able to observe it from a vantage point never before seen by humans. Their images and geological notes will help better determine what the moon is made of and where it came from.

While some of the astronauts' observations may help scientists understand the distant past, others will help mission managers better plan for the future. Case in point: The crew tested out the very first toilet to go to the moon, and it quickly ran into issues during flight. Multiple times during the trip, the crew had to use manual urinals instead. The issue, NASA said, was not with the toilet itself, but the system that dumps the urine overboard when it gets full.

The Orion capsule will return to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida after the mission, where engineers will examine the spacecraft after its flight, including a closer look at the spacecraft's plumbing. The team will be picking apart the spacecraft to see how it performed — and make any necessary changes ahead of the next mission, Artemis III, set to launch next year.