252,756
— That’s how many miles the Artemis II astronauts were from Earth last night. It’s a big number. New York Times writer Evan Gorelick offers a few points of comparison.
Wiener dogs: If you took 22-inch dachshunds and laid them nose to tail, you’d need a very cooperative pack of almost 728 million dogs to cover the distance. It would be tough: There are only around 900 million dogs, of any breed, in existence.
Walking a dog: If you took one of the dachshunds on a brisk 3-mile-per-hour walk, you’d need to walk for more than 84,000 hours to get there. That translates to nearly 10 years of continuous walking. (If the dog let out a celebratory bark upon arrival, and if sound could travel through space, it would reach Earth around 14 days later.)
Eating hot dogs: You’d need a chain of 2.37 billion Nathan’s Famous hot dogs to cover the distance. If the competitive eater Joey Chestnut shoveled them down at his record-breaking pace of 76 dogs every 10 minutes, he’d need to eat nonstop for almost 594 years to devour the entire chain. (His monstrous meal would top 700 billion calories.)
