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After weeks of delays, four astronauts are preparing to launch Wednesday evening on a trip around the moon, the first such spaceflight to be undertaken in more than 50 years.

“It’s really just a historic mission for the future Artemis missions, but also to prepare us for the human journey to Mars and further space exploration,” said Voula Saridakis, National Aeronautics and Space Administration Solar System ambassador. “So it has this wider purpose, if you will.”

As head curator of the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, Saridakis is also preparing to bring the celebration of this historic space launch to Chicago — offering residents and visitors an opportunity to experience history firsthand.

From sunrise to well past sundown, Rodney Bushmeyer has been driving his tractor over freshly turned soil on his western Illinois farm, planting soybean seeds. He has covered nearly 800 acres. But with another 2,200 acres to go, spring planting season is far from over.

Bushmeyer has been cultivating fields in Hull for over 50 years, growing corn, soybeans and wheat on land that’s been farmed by his father and grandfather before him. Like many other Illinois farmers, Bushmeyer had already applied nitrogen fertilizer to the ground last fall to prepare corn crops for planting.

But as the Iran war enters its fifth week and fertilizer prices surge, he’s not sure he will be able to afford additional applications that could boost his crop production.

“We’ll put some fertilizer on after the crop comes up,” Bushmeyer said. “But if the price stays where it is now, we may not. We may need to sacrifice yield for it, but it’s a balancing act.”

A few hundred feet off the shoreline of Kenwood and Hyde Park lives an underwater marvel few Chicagoans ever see: the remnants of a 400 million-year-old coral reef scattered with ancient fossils and the wreckage of the Silver Spray, a steamship that sank after striking the shallow bedrock in 1914.

For free diver Jessica Christopher, the milelong stretch of underwater dolomite known as Morgan Shoal is a rare natural refuge along Chicago’s otherwise engineered lakefront.

When the weather warms, Christopher can glide over fossilized coral and sponge formations while fish weave through the crevices of the shallow bedrock.

A Logan Square resident and former competitive swimmer, Christopher first visited Hyde Park in 2012 to experience the shoal’s unusually crystal clear, sand-free waters. She returns to Morgan Shoal for the community of swimmers that gathers above it — often meeting atop the sunken ship’s boiler, which emerges during periods of low water levels.