December 10, 2022
— It can now be revealed that NASA’s Orion spacecraft, just a day away from returning to Earth, has carried secret messages to the moon.
What’s more, the hidden notes were in plain sight the whole time.
“We have some easter eggs in the cockpit view. So when you get that view, happy hunting folks!” said Mike Sarafin, NASA’s Artemis mission manager, on Dec. 18, the third day of the 25.5-day mission. Under “easter eggs,” he uses the term usually associated with software or movies to describe a hidden feature.
After that, NASA went silent on the subject. That is until today (December 10), when the agency revealed the locations and meanings behind hidden letters.
Spoiler alert: If you want more time to find the “eggs” yourself, stop reading here until you’re ready to check out what you’ve found.
“We have five Easter eggs,” Kelly Humphreys, head of news at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, confirmed in an email to collectSPACE. “The black and white bars between the windows, the red cardinal on the starboard side, the yellow sticker on the right of the hatch with ‘CBAGF’, the black and white bars next to the NASA mass simulator worm (bottom right), and the numbers seen on the forward bulkhead to the right of the docking tunnel.”
The NASA and Lockheed Martin team that designed and built the Orion spacecraft for the Artemis I mission came up with each of the coded notes. The Exploration Ground Systems team that prepared the craft for its launch first saw the Easter eggs while installing them.
“They deciphered all the puzzles and swore to secrecy,” Humphreys wrote.
Based on social media posts, the first of the “eggs” deciphered by the public is the first on Humphreys’ list, the black and white bands located between Orion’s windows. The bars are Morse code, a method of encoding letters as signals that is used with the telegraph and radio amateurs.
Read from bottom to top, “dashes” and “dots” spell “Charlie.” But who is Charlie? Was it a nod to Artemis I launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the first woman to lead NASA’s control center? Was it a reference to Apollo 16 rover Charlie Duke? Or maybe it was Charlie Brown, Snoopy’s owner in Charles Schultz’s Peanuts comic strip? (An astronaut Snoopy doll flew aboard Orion as a zero-gravity indicator on Artemis I.)
“As you can see, ‘CHARLIE’ can mean many things. For the Orion program, this is in memory of Charlie Lundquist, Orion’s deputy program manager, who died in 2020,” Humphreys said.
A similar tribute is represented by the bird on the right side of Orion’s cabin. The icon is for Mark Geyer, former Orion program manager and director of the Johnson Space Center — and St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan — who died in 2021.
The letters C, B, A, G, and F that appear on a yellow sticker to the right of Orion’s hatch are hidden musical-type notes. Each represents an opening note in the 1954 song “Fly Me to the Moon” written by Bart Howard. A decade later, the same song performed by Frank Sinatra became associated with the Apollo missions to the moon.
“I think a lot of us were humming that song as we watched Orion perform the translunar injection,” Humphreys said, adding that NASA’s Artemis I crew members and its international and industry partners recorded a video of themselves singing the same song before the start of the mission.
The black and white bands seen next to the NASA worm logo are binary for the number 18. The last mission to fly astronauts to the Moon was Apollo 17, hence the next number in the sequence. (Coincidentally, the Artemis I mission is scheduled to land on the same date, 50 years ago, that Apollo 17 landed on the moon.)
The last of the Easter eggs is the best hidden, according to Humphreys. The numbers on the front bulkhead to the right of the docking tunnel—1, 31, 32, 33, 34, 39, 41, 43, 46, 47, and 49—are the country calling codes for the nations involved in building the Orion spacecraft: United States and the member states of the European Space Agency (ESA), the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Norway and Germany.
Artemis I isn’t the first NASA mission to feature Easter eggs for the public to find. When the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity began orbiting the Red Planet in 2012, its wheels left behind a trail spelling out “JPL” in Morse code, a reference to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where the mission is managed. Similarly, JPL engineers designed the Perseverance Mars rover’s descent chute to display the lab’s motto “Dare Mighty Things” and its GPS coordinates in binary code.
The practice even dates back to the first time NASA went to the moon. Although not seen by the public until decades later, the MIT programmers who wrote the flight software for the Apollo 11 spacecraft included numerous Easter eggs in their source code from 1969. For example, the file name, which includes the machine’s instructions for igniting the engine is labeled “Burn Baby Burn,” while another file appears to ask the astronauts to “please turn the stupid thing” before going “to see the wizard.”
It remains to be seen whether Easter eggs will also become an Artemis program tradition, Humphreys said.
“Nothing is planned right now, but you never know if we’ll get great ideas for future manned flights,” he wrote.
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