The Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen will be one of the first four astronauts to ever ride NASA’s powerful Space Launch System (SLS) rocket led by Boeing, as Hansen and the Artemis 2 crew launch to the moon.
Hansen is expected to launch for a round-the-moon mission no earlier than February 2026, serving as a mission specialist on a crew with three other astronauts from NASA: Reid Wiseman (commander), Victor Glover (pilot) and Christina Koch (also a mission specialist.) The variant of SLS launching the Artemis 2 crew will include a core stage with four RS-25 engines, and two solid rocket boosters similar to (but not exactly the same) as space shuttle SRBs.
Long-time SpaceQ readers will know that SLS RS-25 engines are often reused from the space shuttle program. In this case, Engine 2062 aboard Artemis 2’s SLS is a new RS-25 engine, while the other three (2047, 2059, 2061) are veterans of 22 space shuttle missions between them. Notably, 2047 was on board the final space shuttle flight in 2011 (STS-135) and 2059 was aboard the penultimate flight (STS-134), according to documentation from L3Harris.
SpaceQ spoke in late September with NASA’s Judd Frieling, who will lead the ascent flight control team for Artemis 2. Frieling is a highly experienced launch director: he supported more than 20 shuttle missions as a flight controller, and also was a flight director for Artemis 1.
In NASA’s words, Frieling’s tasks during the action-packed launch sequence (and slightly beyond) include these: “overseeing the crew’s ascent to space, including performance of SLS core stage engines, solid rocket boosters, and propulsion systems from the moment of launch until the separation of Orion from the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage.”
The ICPS is used to send the Orion spacecraft from Earth’s orbit to trans-lunar injection towards the moon, and is planned to be used for the first three Artemis missions – the uncrewed Artemis 1 in 2022 that was already completed, Artemis 2 in 2026 or so, and Artemis 3 that is manifested to launch no earlier than 2027 (but which will likely launch later, based on progress of the SpaceX Starship landing vehicle). ICPS is based on the United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV’s Deltra Cryogenic Second Stage, according to NASA materials.
Artemis 1, the predecessor to Artemis 2, had an interesting launch campaign. For several weeks in mid-2022, Artemis 1 struggled to achieve a milestone in testing launch operations with cryogenic fuels, known as the “wet dress rehearsal”, due to leaks and other issues which NASA Watch wrote about in some detail. NASA declared the wet dress a success on June 20, 2022 after making some modifications, such as doing a single run-through of the terminal countdown.
To be sure, Artemis 1 is part of a developmental program and some delays were inevitable; the mission also required several launch attempts before SLS – on its first flight – successfully lifted off on Nov. 16 – thanks in no small part to NASA’s “red team”, which diagnosed and addressed a small leak on a hydrogen valve inside the mobile launcher while the rocket was being fueled.
SLS did the job of launching Orion on Artemis 1, but as always there were “lessons learned” from the process. A significant example highlighted in media was pressure and vibration damaging some of the mobile launcher’s structure, including “tubing welds and the protective cover on the launcher’s elevator doors,” NASA officials wrote at the time, despite “the mobile launcher [being] equipped with several water systems designed to dampen pressure forces and acoustic waves.”
The agency vowed to learn more about the physics of the problem to prevent such damage with Artemis 2. In terms of other overall design changes, the boosters on Artemis 2’s SLS have been mounted at a slight, 15-degree angle (that differs from Artemis 1) to allow for a faster and wider separation from the core stage; these boosters will also drop a few seconds sooner from the core stage. The ICPS also has lidar reflectors to allow for the crew to practice docking operations ahead of Artemis 3, which is manifested as a landing mission and requires a docking as well.
When asked about operations lessons learned for Artemis 2, Frieling added that putting humans on board the rocket will be a significant change – “an order of magnitude harder than our first mission,” which NASA is extensively simulating with the flight control team and the crew. (Artemis 2 training and operations are proceeding with an exemption to the ongoing government shutdown since Oct. 1 that is otherwise furloughing more than 15,000 agency employees, as NASA and the U.S. government deem the mission’s 2026 launch date a priority.)
As is typical of NASA missions, Frieling said the simulations aim to “test out failure conditions, and how we would respond to various failure conditions, and that helps us drive that iteration process” to the point where the team feels comfortable with both “mission parameters and failure scenarios.”
After Artemis 1 got off the ground, Frieling said the SLS had a “really successful flight [where] there were very few anomalies.” The biggest issue was a remote power control unit linked to the service module that turned off on its own. He said it was not an issue in the moment, due to redundancy, but procedures have been developed on how to recover from future, similar issues. The team also uncovered, post-flight, a design issue that found these power controllers are susceptible to radiation, which may have explained the behaviour.
There were also indications in-orbit that both of the star trackers were malfunctioning, which ended up being due to confusion from tracking space debris associated with the staging separation events, Frieling said. The mission rules, however, said that trans-lunar injection could proceed as the attitude solution would be correct for at least 144 hours (6 days) of the mission. “That was another reinforcement that you really need to understand the criticality of each of the instruments and when you really need to have those, and how long you can work the mission without those, so that you understand how much – what’s your runway – in order to troubleshoot,” he said.
SpaceQ asked about how flight controllers think during the highly dynamic phases of ascent, and Frieling said the mindset is having a basic outline of how to deal with common failures. “When you lose critical pieces of equipment, every situation is going to be different,” he added, but if the team has a plan of attack and has worked on that plan through repeated simulation, “you know what are the most important things that we need to deal with in in that timeframe, and that helps us to crystallize what are the most important things – in what priority order – to deal with, as failures happen.”
The ascent team has largely been pulled from the Artemis 1 team, and aside from that, NASA has the option to use people from a pool of certified flight controllers based on their experience on International Space Station operations and their seniority, Frieling added.
In closing the short interview with SpaceQ, Frieling noted that while the ascent team has worked its hardest to mitigate risk on Artemis 2, he also wanted to pay tribute to backup systems – including the fact that Orion can land in “two big oceans”, as opposed to aiming for a small runway as the space shuttle’s design required.
“All of that together, I would say, created what I call a different risk posture than the vehicles that we have commanded before. And I would say it’s really exciting because, just to understand that, that we’re propelling humans further than they’ve been before,” Frieling added, pointing to the fact that Artemis 2 will be sending Hansen and his three crewmates to an unprecedented 5,000 nautical miles beyond the moon’s far side.
- Read our exclusive interview with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.