BRAVE MAG

HOUSTON (AP) — Never-before-glimpsed views of the moon’s far side. Check. Total solar eclipse gracing the lunar scene. Check. New distance record for humanity. Check.

WithNASA’s lunar comebacka galactic-sized smash thanks to Artemis II, the world is wondering: What’s next? And how do you top that?

“To people all around the world who look up and dream about what is possible, the long wait is over,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said as he introduced Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen atSaturday’s jubilant homecoming celebration.

Now that the first lunar travelers in more than a half-century are safely back in Houston with their families, NASA has Artemis III in its sights.

“The next mission’s right around the corner,” entry flight director Rick Henfling observed following the crew’s Pacific splashdown on Friday.

Ina mission recently added to the docketfor next year, Artemis III’s yet-to-be -named astronauts will practice docking their Orion capsule with a lunar lander or two in orbit around Earth. Elon Musk’s SpaceX andJeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are racing to have their company’s lander ready first.

Musk’s Starship and Bezos’ Blue Moon are vying for the all-important Artemis IV moon landing in 2028. Two astronauts will aim for the south polar region, the preferred location for Isaacman’s envisioned $20 billion to $30 billion moon base. Vast amounts of ice are almost certainly hidden in permanently shadowed craters there — ice that could provide water and rocket fuel.

The docking mechanism for Artemis III’s close-to-home trial run is already at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. The latest model Starship is close to launching on a test flight from South Texas, and a scaled-down version of Blue Moon will attempt a lunar landing later this year.

NASA promises to announce the Artemis III crew “soon.” Like 1969’s Apollo 9, Artemis III aims to reduce risk for the moon landings that follow.

Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart loved flying the lunar module in low-Earth orbit — “a test pilot’s dream.” But there’s no question, he noted, that “the real astronauts” at least in the public’s mind were the ones who walked on the moon.

Wiseman and his crew put their passion and feelings on full display as they flew around the moon and back, choking up over lost loved ones as well as those left behind on Earth.

During the their nearly 10-day journey, they tearfully requested that a fresh, bright lunar crater be namedafter Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll, who died of cancer in 2020. They also openly shared their love for one another and Planet Earth, an exquisite yet delicate oasis in the black void that they said needs better care.

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Artemis II included the first woman, the first person of color and the first non-U.S. citizen to fly to the moon.

“Wonderful communicators, almost poets,” Isaacman said from the recovery ship while awaiting their return.

Apollo’s manly, all-business moon crews of the 1960s and 1970s certainly did not do group hugs.

For those old enough to remember Apollo, Artemis — Apollo’s twin sister in Greek mythology — couldn’t come fast enough.

Author Andy Chaikin said he felt like Rip Van Winkle awakening from a nearly 54-year nap. His 1994 biography “A Man on the Moon” led to the HBO miniseries “From the Earth to the Moon.”

“It’s amazing how far we’ve come and how different this experience is from back then,” Chaikin said from Johnson Space Center late last week.

The hardest part, according to NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya, is becoming so close to the crews and their families and then blasting them to the moon. He anxiously monitored Friday’s reentry alongside the astronauts’ spouses and children.

“You know what’s at stake,” Kshatriya confided afterward. “It’s going to take risk to explore, but you have to make sure you find the right line between being paralyzed by it and being able to manage it.”

Calling it “mission complete” only after being reunited with his two daughters, Wiseman issued a rallying cry to the rows of blue-flight-suited astronauts at Saturday’s celebration.

“It is time to go and be ready,” he said, pointing at them, “because it takes courage. It takes determination, and you all are freaking going and we are going to be standing there supporting you every single step of the way in every possible way possible.”

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the season 1 finale ofDTF St. Louis.

NEED TO KNOW

• The DTF St. Louis finale reveals who is behind the death of David Harbour's lead character Floyd after a long investigation

• Creator Steven Conrad and stars Joy Sunday and Richard Jenkins, who play detectives in the series, open up to PEOPLE about the complex ending

• Conrad also shares the inspiration behind the miniseries, which sees Floyd struggle with intimacy and relationships, leaving him in "emotional desperation"

The season finale ofDTF St. Louisproves that nothing is truly what it seems.

After weeks of investigating the death ofDavid Harbour’s Floyd, the final episode of the HBO miniseries saw detectives Jodie Plumb (Joy Sunday) and Donoghue Homer (Richard Jenkins) realize that the case might have been much simpler than they imagined.

“You'll probably have to go back to the beginning to really understand the ending, honestly,” Sunday tells PEOPLE.

“Somebody said, ‘When you get a script like that, don't you want to jump to the end and find out what happens?’" Jenkins adds. “I said, ‘If in this script you jump to the end, you still won't know what happened unless you know the whole script beforehand.’”

A central theme of the season was Floyd’s struggling sex life with his wife, Carol (Linda Cardellini), due in part to his Peyronie’s disease, a condition where the penis develops a curvature that causes erectile dysfunction. It was later revealed that Carol was having an affair with Floyd’s best friend, Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman), which led Clark to become the prime suspect in the case.

While the toxicology report showed that Floyd died from an apparent poisoning, detectives suspected Clark was responsible, but that theory began to fall apart when they discovered that Floyd not only knew about the affair, but was accepting of it.

“The writing is just sublime,” Jenkins notes. “I hadn't read anything like that in a long time, so it was an easy yes for me. And it never disappointed in the playing of it, it never disappointed. You almost felt you weren't worthy of it at times. It was that good.”

In the finale, viewers learned that Clark, who had given Floyd — per his request — his prescription for a stimulant drug called Amphezyne in an effort to improve his sex life, was with Floyd in the poolhouse the night of his death. After Floyd admitted that he had mixed some of the drug into his canned drink — which proved to be what killed him — the two stripped down to their underwear and danced together.

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However, when Floyd began to show his romantic interest, Clark confessed that he didn’t share those same feelings.

“I love a show where you can go, ‘Okay, things are going to go poorly for these people who expect things to go well,’” the show’s creator Steven Conrad tells PEOPLE of the concept behind the series.

Meanwhile, Carol’s son, Richard (Arlan Ruf), was watching from the window after finding out that his stepfather was on the dating site called DTF St. Louis, meant for married people seeking outside hookups.

“When I started to conceive this idea, it was 2018, 2019,” Conrad reveals. “These hookup apps were probably at their height of popularity and their promise of, ‘Well, you have a commitment, you'll meet someone else with a commitment, and no one will ever know. You'll share a secret night and then you'll both go home to your partners and everything will go back to normal.’ That idea that there could be excitement without consequences.”

When Clark left, Richard confronted Floyd, who he later watched make a “rock and roll” hand gesture before chugging the rest of his drink. Little did Richard know, the symbol Floyd made actually meant “I love you” in American Sign Language.

The revelation that Floyd’s demise was ultimately at his own hands was a reflection of what Conrad says happens when people “feel emotional desperation and then make bad decisions.”

He adds that Harbour portrayed “a person who was susceptible to this bad idea five years ago, but wouldn't have done it 30 pounds ago, wouldn't have done it one friendship earlier, wouldn't have done it but in a phase of life now where he seems to need some volt of electricity to resuscitate him.”

DTF St. Louisis available to stream on HBO Max.

If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health challenges, emotional distress, substance use problems, or just needs to talk, call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org 24/7.

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On Monday, Pope Leo XIV’s is setting off on a long Africa trip, the first of his papacy to bear a clear personal stamp.

Between April 13-23, the pope will travel to four countries, crisscrossing a continent pivotal to the 21st-century church he leads. Christian-Muslim relations will be high on his agenda.

It’s a trip that comes as the first American pope is increasinglyspeaking outagainst the current conflict in the Middle East, saying God can’t be used to justify war, while Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, frames the US war effort as divinely supported. Leo’s decision to visit Algeria, a Muslim-majority nation, and tackle inter-faith relations also points to him becoming a diplomatic counterweight to the Trump administration and its military intervention in Iran.

Trumpcriticized the popein a post on Truth Social overnight ahead of Leo’s trip, describing the pontiff as “terrible for Foreign Policy” and saying that “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.” Leo later responded aboard his plane Monday, saying, “The things I say are not meant as attacks on anyone,” but added, “I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel.”

Africa is a continent where the Catholic Church is growing, and where the church frequently plays an influential role in civil society through education and healthcare and helping to mediate in conflicts. According to Vatican statistics, Catholics on the continent now make up around 20% of believers worldwide.

Leo XIV, who spent years as a missionary in the global south, knows Africa well. And as pope, he has appointed priests from Nigeria to senior positions in the Vatican.

His itinerary includes Algeria, Cameroon, Angola and Equatorial Guinea and will see him take 18 flights, including two by helicopter, and cover 11,185 miles, or around 18,000 kilometers. That schedule is likely to be tough even for a pope who, at 70, is relatively young and known to take regular exercise.

While the countries he is visiting are diverse, the itinerary and his plans while there point to a consistent theme of Leo as bridge builder and reconciler.

“Pope Leo’s visit to Africa will offer him the unique opportunity to listen to African Catholics and learn first-hand about the realities of their daily life,” said the Reverend Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator, a Jesuit priest from Nigeria who led his religious order’s community across Africa between 2017-2023 and is now based at Santa Clara University in Berkeley, California.

Algeria welcoming ‘one of its own sons’

Leo will begin his marathon Africa visit in Algeria, becoming the first pope to set foot in the country. Mistrust of western culture and Christianity is still high in Algeria, much of it associated with the past French colonial presence, and the country is home to only a tiny Catholic population of around 8,000. Christians there frequently face difficulties.

The pope’s presence should offer a boost to the Algerian Catholic Church, known for working closely with its Muslim counterparts in the country, while highlighting Algeria’s ancient Christian roots.

“(In Algeria) Christianity still carries memories of an oppressive past,” the Reverend Martin McGee, a Benedictine monk and expert on Christian-Muslim relations in Algeria, told CNN.

“Pope Leo will also be seeking to strengthen Christian-Muslim relationships. Since the independence of the country from France in 1962, the tiny remnant of the Catholic Church in Algeria has consistently worked at breaking down barriers between Christian and Muslim believers,” he added.

Bishop Diego Sarrió Cucarella, who leads the diocese of Laghouat in Algeria, told CNN the church in the country is not one of “numbers or visibility” but a “church of presence – unarmed and disarming.”

“In a world often marked by fear or misunderstanding between religions and cultures, our experience here suggests that another path is possible,” he said. “Algerian society has a strong sense of hospitality, and many will recognize in him (the pope) not a foreign leader, but a man of peace – a brother seeking peace with the brethren.”

Leo will also make a very poignant pilgrimage in Algeria by taking a day trip to the city of Annaba, where Saint Augustine of Hippo served as a bishop in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. St Augustine, one of Christianity’s most influential figures, is the inspiration for the religious order of the Augustinians, of which Leo is a member and former leader.

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Michel Guillaud, the Bishop of Constantine and Hippo, said Leo had visited Algeria twice before his election as pope, and that the Augustine link provides “a sense of kinship between this pope and the Algerian people” in a country that is “a bridge” between the African continent, the Arab-Muslim world and the “other shores of the Mediterranean world.”

“It is as if Algeria were welcoming one of its own sons, since he is ‘a son of Augustine,’” he told CNN.

A growing, youthful church

The other African countries Leo will visit have large and growing Catholic populations. During his trip, he will see the vibrant church up close, celebrating open-air Masses and visiting nursing homes, a prison, university campuses and a psychiatric hospital. A Vatican spokesman said “600,000 faithful” are expected to take part in a Mass presided by Leo in a carpark adjacent to the Japoma Stadium in Douala, Cameroon.

While in Cameroon, Leo will focus on a message of reconciliation in a country where an English-speaking minority has protested against perceived discrimination by the Francophone government. The pope will go to Bamenda, the largest Anglophone city in the country, to take part in a peace meeting. The meeting will be attended by an internally displaced family, the traditional leader of the Mankon people, which is a prominent ethnic group in the region, a Catholic nun, an Imam and other church leaders.

Bamenda has been at the center of a long-running conflict between government forces and Anglophone separatists, which has killed thousands since 2017, including civilians.

“Much of the world pays little or no attention to the conflict and violence that have crippled socioeconomic life and caused intolerable human casualties in the northwestern and southwestern anglophone parts of Cameroon. His visit to Bamenda is particularly poignant,” said Orobator at Santa Clara University.

“Leo is perhaps the only religious leader with the soft power to convene the belligerent and opposing forces to come to the table of dialogue and seek just peace. It will be a unique occasion for him to remind Cameroonians that there are alternatives pathways to conflict and violence.”

Foreign visits offer the pope a chance to address the country’s leadership and shine a spotlight on certain issues. While in Angola, Leo will fly to the city of Saurimo, the heart of the country’s controversial diamond industry, where he’ll celebrate an open-air Mass.

While the diamond industry is a major contributor to the economy, concerns have been raised about its effect on the environment and the treatment of miners. During his pontificate Leo has talked about the importance of protecting the planet, so environmental stewardship could be a topic he addresses while in Angola and elsewhere in Africa.

“By modeling peace as a ‘humble and disarming’ force, the pope not only draws global attention to the region’s suffering but also positions the African Church as a trusted mediator for reconciliation,” said Jaisy A. Joseph, a theologian at Villanova University, Pope Leo’s alma mater.

Missionary pope

Leo’s Africa trip will see him outside of the Vatican for the longest time since his election, and the constant travel in the country has echoes of his time as a missionary and bishop in Latin America.

It is fitting that he’ll mark the first anniversary of the death of his predecessor, Pope Francis, on April 21 in Equatorial Guinea, a small country with a mainly Catholic population and where around 70% live in poverty. Leo’s visit to the country – the first papal trip since 1982 – will see him put into action Francis’ vision of a church that goes out to the margins, serving the poorest.

The pope’s jam-packed schedule in Equatorial Guinea includes a visit to a prison and an oceanfront memorial for the victims of a series of explosions in 2021 at a military barracks. President Teodoro Obiang and his government said the blasts were the result of “negligence” and a fire begun by farmers nearby, but human rights groups have called for an independent inquiry into the explosions.

From the moment of his election, Leo has sought to offer a leadership that breaks down divisions. His whirlwind visit to Africa will seek to put that vision into action on the continent.

This report has been updated with additional developments.

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