“We are ready to go fly.”
That’s Reid Wiseman, a NASA astronaut and Artemis 2 commander, saying today (Sept. 24) that his international crew is ready to return humanity to the moon for the first time in 50-plus years.
There’s no doubt that Wiseman and his crewmates – Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, and NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch – have been training hard for 2.5 years, on top of their decades of life experience. They’ve done mock splashdowns with the U.S. Navy. They’ve walked out on the launch gantry to simulate leaving Earth. They’ve talked with contractors all over the world, not to mention media and schoolchildren. They’ve done more simulator runs than we can count, while developing the simulators at the same time.
But what does it mean to be “ready” after so long away from the moon? The last landing by humans was by the Apollo 17 NASA crew in December 1972. American funding priorities shifted with the success of Apollo, the cost of the Vietnam War and numerous other factors outlined in the excellent 1997 book “Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership”, by then-NASA chief historian Roger D. Launius and U.S. space policy expert Howard McCurdy.
There’s no need (or time) to retread that ground here, but as the movie Apollo 13 replays in theatres for its 30th anniversary this week and we once again hear talk of a “space race” (this time not only with Russia – the former Soviet Union – but with China), it’s worth taking a moment to think about the monument today’s lunar crew conference represented.
The author of this article was not born when Apollo flew its last mission, but as a 40-something she’s lived long enough to remember several past attempts to bring astronauts to the moon again: The Space Exploration Initiative of the 1980s and the Constellation program of the early 2000s are just some examples. (The Obama administration’s “flexible path” is more complicated to discuss, but to put it in a few words, it didn’t specifically name the moon as the destination.)
Suffice it to say when Apollo 13 first played in front of my eyes on VHS in 1996, the real-life mission upon which it was based seemed unreal to a teenager used to the extraordinary yet Earth-orbiting space shuttle – imagine having the energy to go to the moon, despite the risk.
The roots of the main Artemis technologies go back at least to Constellation and shuttle, although many NASA and international programs and policies – especially Apollo, of course – played some kind of a role. For example: Learning to live in space for long periods of time (meaning, beyond two weeks or so) is something the community honed on the International Space Station (ISS), the Soviet-Russian Mir, NASA’s Skylab and several Soviet space stations. And there were always folks at NASA willing to talk about going back to the moon even if it wasn’t official policy. We also can’t forget the extraordinary success of the Canadarm program, which was used for space shuttle tile safety checks, satellite retrieval, the complex ISS build and for the next-gen Canadarm3, monitoring of the NASA-led Gateway lunar space station.
But looking at the top: The moon-facing policy shift seems most directly tied to the first Trump administration’s Space Policy Directive 1 in 2017, which has its own complex background reasoning beyond the scope of this article. As the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote at the time, the directive was not without its complications – funding and will, among them. But for what it’s worth, Biden’s administration and both Trump administrations decided to go through with Artemis. And eight years later there are astronauts almost ready for the first Artemis mission.
In numerous past conversations I had with the Artemis 2 crew since their selection announcement in April 2023, they have always said the mission is developmental – meaning no timeline is fixed, and to train at the pace of learning and technology change. As such, through a CSA meeting link SpaceQ asked Wiseman today what he meant by “ready to go” – as there is always something more to learn in a situation such as that.
“Usually in a crew, there’s like a magical moment where you’re just – you all of a sudden – you just look around and you’re like, ‘Ah, we’re ready to go.’ And I have really started to feel that recently,” said Wiseman, a veteran of the ISS Expeditions 40/41 long-duration mission in 2014.
There’s a line in Apollo 13 (the movie) when Tom Hanks, playing commander Jim Lovell, alludes to being able to understand the tone of his crew’s voices. Wiseman used similar language: “You get to that point where you do not have to communicate any longer. You’re just listening to everything happening, and all four of us are watching each other and the mission, and we do not need to speak. We just know – I can just see out the corner of an eye and know exactly what is happening on that person.”
An example took place a few months ago, Wiseman continued, when the crew was in the multi-payload processing facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. They could see their Orion spacecraft – newly named “Integrity”, which was credited to Hansen expressing the hope of “peace and hope for all humankind” – getting fuelled, along with the European Service Module.
While at KSC, Wiseman said, “Victor reached up to point at something in the display. I was triggering the microphone to talk to the launch control team about that exact piece of telemetry. It was in that specific moment where I said, ‘We’re ready to go.’ That was a good moment.”
As much as we in the media frame this as a moon mission, the crew is more cautious, Wiseman said in his opening remarks. “We are going to launch when this vehicle is ready, when this team is ready, and we are going to go execute this mission to the best of our abilities. When we get off the planet, we might come right back home. We might spend three or four days around Earth. We might go to the moon. That’s where we want to go, but it is a test mission, and we are ready for every scenario as we ride this amazing Space Launch System in the Orion spacecraft.”
While discussing the long mission prep, Wiseman paid special tribute to the workers at the Vehicle Assembly Building stacking Orion for integrated testing and the rollout to the pad. “You see these young men and women: These are the people you want building your rocket. They’re covered in tattoos. They’re wearing hard hats. They’ve got huge harnesses on. They’re getting roped in, going up to unimaginable heights, putting their lives at risk, putting themselves in danger, and they’re doing it with a calm confidence every single day.”
Wiseman added these types of people are also the first to call out an unsafe procedure. During a visit presumably at Northrop Grumman’s factory in Promontory, Utah – as the astronauts said they were watching the completed solid rocket boosters being loaded into a railcar in Utah for shipment to KSC – the Artemis 2 crew was “carrying on like four children looking at these boosters,” Wiseman said.
Somebody on staff in Utah told the four astronauts – which surely takes some courage given their growing notoriety – to “Please quiet down. We have a critical lift in progress over here.” Wiseman concluded of this: “They have the courage to do the right thing.”
With regard to buying down risk, Glover thanked Mission Control as well as the simulation trainers, “who come up with these sort of evil tests for us. And we’ll be sitting in the sim, all our mission controllers are in Mission Control, and then stuff will just start breaking. You’re like, ‘Oh, come on, really, that?’ And then we’ll just have to see what we can create to come home, kind of Apollo 13-style, and that is a really important muscle to continue to build. It really feels like it’s coming along.”
Each of the astronauts has been exposed to risk in some facet of their flights, career or their training, and Glover shared an example from flying the second crewed spaceflight of Dragon, Crew-1, which brought his crew to the ISS for Expeditions 64/65 in 2020-21. His crew, for example, flew a different heat shield design based on data from Demo-2, the first-ever crewed flight of Dragon before his.
But while Glover sees similarities to his ISS excursion, a moon mission brings “a host of differences. This is a whole different scale, and so the same preparation, though, is what goes into it for me.”
Koch, who spent nearly a year on the ISS between Expeditions 59 and 61 in 2019, pointed to a part of the mission design that makes Artemis 2 a little less risky, in a sense: its trans-lunar injection (TLI) is meant to be the last major engine burn of the mission, as it will slingshot the crew around the back side on what is called a “free-return trajectory”, using gravity. That said, in the sims the crew has discussed the significance of a TLI, as it also means committing to a certain type of re-entry – meaning very high-speed, and after several days out in space.
“The truth is we are re-entering before and at the moment we do TLI, and recognizing that our team has to be ready for that full mission as soon as we buy in. That is a really interesting risk posture, and that’s why I’m so glad we have spent so much time with our team – super integrated, learning the vehicle, hopefully better than anyone will ever have to in the future as we get those reps,” Koch said.
Hansen, a military pilot by training, used his opening remarks to say the “lens of mission success” is in part “buying down all this risk” for the next crew – Artemis 3, which is presumed to be a moon landing. (The official landing date is still pegged at mid-2027 for now, althoug NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel said days ago that is unrealistic given testing progress of the SpaceX Starship lander that is also in development.)
Hansen emphasized that the different missions are all an integrated whole within the Artemis program, and that comes through partnership: “For us, Artemis 2 is about much more than just going back to the moon. It is about the pursuit of excellence. And just let me speak first to our American partners. You should be extraordinarily, extraordinarily proud of your space leadership that you have held for over half a century. You are constantly in that pursuit of excellence. You have this incredible industry in academia who is supporting and leading us back to the moon, with an eye of going to Mars. And it truly is extraordinary. And then you do one more thing that great leaders do, and that is, you carve out space for others to join you, to bring their talents and gifts and make a contribution.
“And to my fellow Canadians,” he continued, “you should also be extraordinarily proud that we are represented in the Artemis program, and it wasn’t a gift. You earned it over decades. For over decades now, you have responded to that call – to that opportunity – with a can-do attitude, and you have used strategic investments, and you have innovated and created things like Canadarm and many other examples that have put us in this position where we can earn our place on the global stage.”
Related: Here’s how Artemis 2 will fly around the moon and back