Artemis II Astronauts Discover Website on Dark Side of the Moon
"Please check on your websites. Update your content. Secure your hosting. Optimize your Core Web Vitals. Conduct regular technical audits per Google Search Console guidelines. Implement a professional SEO strategy and maintain it continuously. Do not allow your website to achieve lunar orbit. We have enough to deal with up here."
CAPE CANAVERAL, FL — In what NASA officials are calling "the most baffling discovery in the history of human spaceflight," the four-person crew of Artemis II has reported stumbling upon a functioning website on the far side of the Moon — a website that, by all accounts, no one on Earth has visited since approximately 2011.
The site, believed to belong to a now-defunct Hoboken, New Jersey-based plumbing supply company called Drainco & Sons, was discovered when mission specialist Dr. Priya Nair's helmet display inexplicably loaded a page offering "COMPETITIVE PRICING ON ELBOW JOINTS & PIPE FITTINGS — FREE SHIPPING ON ORDERS OVER $49!"
"I thought my visor had fogged up," Dr. Nair told reporters via a crackling comm channel. "It took eleven minutes to load, but as the image began moving, I realized it was a Flash animation of a dancing wrench!"
How Did It Get There?
NASA scientists are still working to understand the mechanics of how an entire website ended up on the lunar surface, though several leading theories have been proposed. The most widely accepted explanation is simply that the site's hosting provider — believed to be running on a server roughly the size and speed of a 2003 Hewlett-Packard desktop — had been pointed vaguely "upward" for so long that it eventually got there.
"Slow, insecure shared hosting doesn't just hurt your rankings," explained Dr. Felix Drummond of MIT's Digital Infrastructure Lab, who was briefed on the discovery. "Apparently, it can also achieve escape velocity."
The implications for the web industry are significant. Experts note that had Drainco & Sons invested in fast, enterprise-level hosting with proper SSL certificates and server-side optimizations, their website might have remained on planet Earth, where their customers presumably also lived.
A Relic of a Bygone Web Era
Upon closer inspection, the crew found that the Drainco website had been built on an antiquated, heavily bloated CMS platform — one that shall remain nameless but rhymes with "WordPress." The installation included 74 active plugins, 12 of which were described as "essential" and 9 of which were actively in conflict with each other.
Commander Reid Wiseman, attempting to click the site's "About Us" page, reported that his glove triggered a popup offering him a chance to subscribe to a newsletter. Then another popup. Then a cookie consent banner that covered the entire screen. Then a chat widget that asked if he needed help. Then an autoplay video.
"I've walked in space," Wiseman said solemnly. "I've re-entered the atmosphere in a capsule traveling 25,000 miles per hour. Nothing has prepared me for this."
Mission specialists noted that the website's homepage had not been updated since Barack Obama's first term, still prominently featuring a banner that read "NOW ACCEPTING CHECKS." The blog section contained a single post from 2009 titled "Welcome to Our New Website!" that had received zero comments and, until this mission, zero visitors.
Google Could Not Be Reached for Comment
Back on Earth, SEO analysts watching the mission livestream were unsurprised by the discovery. Brian Burns, Chief Technologist & Grand Imagineer at Lost Highway Media, shook his head slowly as the footage of the lunar website aired.
"This is what happens when you hang a site up on the Internet and just leave it... twisting in the wind," he said. "Cheap, shared IP hosting, no design or content updates, no SEO initiatives or keyword strategy. No technical optimizations, not a meta tag in sight; we see this a lot—they just launch it into orbit and hope someone will find it."
Indeed, a search of Google's index confirmed that Drainco & Sons had not appeared on the first page of search results — or any page, for that matter — since Google introduced its Panda algorithm update of 2011. The site's metadata still described itself as "BEST PLUMBING SUPPLY WEBSITE," a claim that Google's crawlers had apparently evaluated and firmly disagreed with.
"Optimization isn't something you do once and forget," Burns continued. "It's an ongoing campaign. You have to keep optimizing until your competitors stop optimizing, and they won't stop. So keep building that authority, keep creating that fresh content, and keep outpacing that competition—longevity also goes a long, long way. Otherwise, your competitors stay at the top of the results page, and you end up...." he pointed toward the Moon.
Other Design Experts Weigh In
Other seasoned experts were equally horrified by what the astronauts encountered. Streaming footage showed a site rendered in a fixed 800-pixel-wide layout, with a color scheme best described as "aggressive teal on cream." Navigation was handled by a horizontal scrolling ticker. Images were sized in absolute pixels and displayed as stretched, blurry JPEGs. On mobile — specifically, astronaut Marcus Henderson's iPhone, which somehow had two bars of LTE — the site rendered as a single column of overlapping text and a button that read "CLICK HEAR."
"Clean. Visually compelling. User-friendly. Mobile-responsive," said web designer Tomás Reyes of what a good website should be. "This site was none of those things. It was the opposite of those things. It was a crime against those things."
Reyes noted that a professionally designed website — one that loads quickly, guides the user naturally through well-structured content, and functions beautifully on any device — builds immediate trust with visitors. "Your website is your first impression," he said. "If your first impression is a dancing wrench on a teal background, the moon is probably where you belong."
NASA Issues Advisory
Following the discovery, NASA issued a brief but pointed advisory to all businesses, organizations, and individuals currently operating websites. The advisory read, in part:
"Please check on your websites. Update your content. Secure your hosting. Optimize your Core Web Vitals. Conduct regular technical audits per Google Search Console guidelines. Implement a professional SEO strategy and maintain it continuously. Do not allow your website to achieve lunar orbit. We have enough to deal with up here."
The Artemis II crew, for their part, has moved on from the Drainco site — though Commander Wiseman admits the dancing wrench continues to haunt him.
"Out here in the void of space," he said quietly, staring out the window at the infinite cosmos, "I keep thinking about that pipe fitting company. They built that website, the most fundamental and crucial tool for advertising and promoting their business. They put it out there. And then they just... walked away. Never updated it. Never optimized it. Never even checked if it was still working."
He paused.
"Please, don't let that be you."
The Artemis II crew is expected to return to Earth in the coming days. Drainco & Sons could not be reached for comment, as their "Contact Us" form returned a 404 (page not found) error.
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