Moonbound Episode 1 | Charting the Course

0:08 And liftoff of Artemis 1...

0:10 Artemis 1 was incredible.

0:14 It was an iconic mission.

0:17 I was able to watch the launch of Artemis 1,

0:19 and I'll never forget I just turned into a small child

0:21 and I just was screaming at the rocket for about 30 seconds.

0:24 That is our generation, the Artemis generation,

0:27 that defines the starting point of our exploration future.

0:31 Next thing is getting ready to fly the crew on Artemis 2.

0:35 This mission paves the way for sustained missions on the Moon and then Mars.

0:40 We've got spaceflight vehicles that are done at the Kennedy

0:43 Space Center that are being built and integrated.

0:45 We've got components of the rocket that are being assembled.

0:48 We have international partners.

0:50 We have commercial partners and industry partners.

0:53 We've got the designs ready to go, how we're building up the operations.

0:56 It's real.

0:57 The team is ready to go.

0:59 Four names, four explorers, answering the call to once more rocket away

1:05 from Earth and charter course around the Moon.

1:10 This is the mission of Artemis 2.

1:24 Never before had man traveled so far, so fast,

1:29 or looked so closely upon another celestial body.

1:35 It's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

1:41 Apollo was so amazing because we didn't know we could do it.

1:46 The Apollo generation showed what was possible.

1:50 For me personally, I think it's an important endeavor to return to the Moon.

1:55 And as we look towards Mars,

1:56 the Moon is going to be an important staging area for us to learn quite a bit.

2:01 The longest we were ever on the moon as humans was 72 hours.

2:05 We have a lot to learn yet.

2:07 And as we leave the moon and towards Litrault, we leave as we came,

2:13 and God willing, as we shall return with peace and hope from in time.

2:25 The Artemis campaign is really a set of test flights.

2:30 We haven't been to the moon in over 50 years.

2:33 And so there's a lot of new systems that we need to test out.

2:36 We're going to a new part of the moon,

2:38 the South Pole that we've never been to before with crew.

2:40 The Artemis 2 mission is going to take

2:43 the next step in our flight test campaign.

2:48 We're going to focus on what are the new systems that we need to test

2:53 out so that we can fly crew to the moon and safely bring them back home.

2:58 That really sets us up for our big goal,

3:01 which is the return of human crew to the surface of the moon.

3:06 It's so important what we learn in that mission to the moon

3:10 because it instructs us on how we're going to get to Mars.

3:13 This is a generation defining effort.

3:20 My name's Jeff Radigan.

3:21 I'm the lead flight director for Artemis 2.

3:24 Here in mission control, I direct the operations of the spacecraft

3:27 and communicate with the crew on board in order

3:29 to have a successful mission of the first

3:31 mission back to lunar space in over 50 years.

3:34 We want to get back out to lunar space.

3:36 We want to fly around the moon.

3:37 And so to be a part of that is just very meaningful to me.

3:41 It's something I get excited about when I wake up in the morning.

3:43 It really is the next step in space exploration.

3:51 This room has a lot of historical significance.

3:54 We originally flew the space shuttle out of here and we're looking forward

3:57 to flying Artemis 2 out of this room here in the not too distant future.

4:01 Once the vehicle clears the tower,

4:03 control of the spacecraft is handed over to mission control Houston.

4:06 At that point, the team in mission control,

4:07 led by the ascent flight director, will take over.

4:10 It's a very distributed team.

4:11 Think of it as a big pyramid at the top of it.

4:13 It's the flight director,

4:15 but around him are specialists in every system on Orion.

4:19 They'll have teams in the front room that are working with the flight director.

4:22 They'll have teams in the back room that are supporting the front

4:25 room operators to make sure that they're specialists in all of their systems,

4:28 just in case we have a problem that we haven't seen.

4:31 And by the way, in my 20 years of human spaceflight experience,

4:34 I guarantee you we're going to have a problem that we haven't seen.

4:37 My name is Natasha Peek.

4:39 I'm a flight dynamics officer for Artemis 2.

4:41 We are trajectory specialists when it comes to Orion.

4:45 Really, my job is to know where your spaceship is and where it's going.

4:48 And if we need to come home for some reason, come home early,

4:51 or we get off track, our job is to figure out how to do that.

4:54 This mission is fundamentally different from a mission you might

4:56 do in low Earth orbit in a lot of ways.

4:59 But one of them is that we're looking to rendezvous with the moon.

5:02 Every minute you wait to launch, the moon is moving.

5:04 So in order to rendezvous with it efficiently,

5:06 we have to change the inclination of our orbit

5:08 to make sure we line up with the moon.

5:11 In a month, you get about 14 days of a launch period.

5:14 Our team all hunkers down.

5:15 And for every day, we look at the open and close of the window

5:19 and come up with a trajectory end

5:21 to end from liftoff all the way through splashdown.

5:31 You know, I often talk about that LaunchOps is like a team sport.

5:36 It's certainly you have to produce on game day,

5:39 but that the preparation for a championship begins in the off season.

5:43 We've made some significant upgrades since Artemis 1,

5:47 and that includes not just the software

5:49 that you see out here running on the consoles,

5:52 but it's also in our model and simulation environment.

5:55 The big difference between Artemis 1 and Artemis 2 is, of course, the crew.

6:00 And it's the systems,

6:01 the new systems that are specifically in place to support a crewed flight.

6:06 And so we have new launch commit criteria.

6:08 We have changes to our procedures, changes to our timelines.

6:11 And we want to make sure that we've gone through those time and time again,

6:16 so that when launch day rolls around,

6:18 we're ready for anything that the hardware may throw at us.

6:22 We woke up this morning, went through medical checks, had breakfast as a crew,

6:26 while Charlie and her team were getting

6:29 the simulated vehicle ready for launch day.

6:31 We got in our crew transfer vehicles, our CTVs, we came out to the pad.

6:35 We went up two elevators to the 274 foot level and we met there,

6:40 our white room closeout team.

6:42 So it was a great end to end run through of what we

6:45 will do when we get on this vehicle and head to the moon.

6:48 There are no shortcuts.

6:49 I mean, you have to do it all.

6:51 Because on launch day, that is game day.

6:55 And it is in all of our work together that gets

6:58 us to a successful T-Zero and a safe and successful mission.

7:06 [door opens] [door closes] Hey Sam.

7:12 What's going on?

7:13 Not much.

7:13 Long time no see.

7:15 Time to see.

7:16 The seriousness of what it takes to take the risk with humans

7:19 in and of itself creates enough of a pressure for the entire organization,

7:24 enough of a concern, enough of a sense of rigor.

7:27 Everything goes up a notch.

7:28 We have to have an atmosphere to breathe, a temperature to be able to control,

7:31 to be able to take out the carbon dioxide and the humidity that's in the air,

7:35 feed the crew, deal with a small environment,

7:37 proving that we can fly by the moon and come back and have a safe re-entry.

7:40 There's an extra element when you have humans on board,

7:43 the nuances by which the system operates,

7:46 the understanding of what it is to live in this crew module that we have.

7:51 Artemis 2 is also another flight test of the other

7:54 systems that are required to enable human space exploration.

7:58 That is life support system, that is displays,

8:01 that is the controllers, that stick that you need to fly spacecraft.

8:05 All those pieces were not part of Artemis 1, but are really key for Artemis 2,

8:09 and the crew will need that capability

8:12 to go forward to do human space exploration.

8:15 When you go to the moon, you're 250,000 miles away, and there's no choice.

8:20 It takes time to get home.

8:21 Everything we check, everything we try and make sure we understand, we double,

8:24 we triple, we quadruple check, because we wanna make sure we get it right.

8:28 The mission will prove the Orion spacecraft is

8:30 ready to keep astronauts alive in deep space

8:33 and allow the crew and ground teams to practice

8:36 operations essential to the success of future missions.

8:39 This top portion is the crew module.

8:41 It's the pressurized area where the crew sits.

8:44 The bottom portion here with the solar arrays and the engines,

8:47 primary engines, is what's called the service module.

8:50 The European Service Module, or ESM, will provide electricity, water,

8:55 and air to NASA's Orion crew capsule,

8:59 as well as maintaining temperature for life support.

9:02 It's been a fabulous partnership with our ESA partners.

9:04 The agency made a decision a long time ago

9:06 that we wanna do lunar exploration as a global partnership.

9:12 Now that we're having crew, that's the new element for Artemis 2 on onwards.

9:16 We will really go into the testing of the live support systems and try

9:20 to figure out how is that behaving with the astronaut in the loop?

9:24 How is the CO2 scrubbing working on the crew module site?

9:27 How are we providing the oxygen to the astronauts and the water?

9:31 That environmental control system is so complicated.

9:34 It's a series of chemical and mechanical and electrical

9:36 engineering problems that all have to come together.

9:39 That spacecraft has to basically be a mini-Earth,

9:41 and that Earth is basically driven by the elements of that life-support system.

9:45 We also have crew interfaces with the crew piloting the vehicle.

9:49 Artemis 1 was uncrewed, and so we're gonna go do a checkout

9:52 right at the beginning of the mission while we're

9:54 in an Earth orbit to be able to ensure

9:56 that the crew is able to successfully pilot the vehicle.

9:59 We're not just testing the systems in Orion.

10:02 One of the key things we really wanna do is we're gonna do science.

10:07 When we think about Artemis II science,

10:10 there are really three big areas that we're studying.

10:13 One is understanding the space environment.

10:15 The second is understanding how that environment

10:17 interacts with life and humans and the systems.

10:21 And then the third is looking at the moon itself

10:23 from an vantage point where humans haven't looked for over 50 years.

10:28 They're going to be describing what they see.

10:29 They'll see things that human beings have never seen before.

10:32 They'll be describing, observing,

10:33 and documenting what they see for the scientists back home.

10:37 They've done a significant amount of training in the field here on Earth,

10:41 learning about geology and planetary scale processes.

10:46 They'll be looking for the evidence

10:47 of those processes from orbit and describing to us

10:51 anything unique that we maybe haven't been able

10:54 to really sense with orbiters and robotic measurements.

10:58 We're also going to do human research on the crew members themselves.

11:02 We haven't had data sets for over 50 years on how

11:06 the physiology of the crew themselves adapt to the radiation environment,

11:11 to the microgravity environment so far away from Earth.

11:19 When you think about Artemis 2,

11:21 we've never had humans get on top of an SLS rocket.

11:25 And when that rocket launches, 8.8 million pounds of thrust are going

11:30 to defeat gravity for a 5.8 million pound vehicle.

11:35 So they're going to feel vibrations to hear

11:37 sounds that no humans have ever experienced.

11:39 If you want to be an astronaut,

11:40 that's the thing you've been waiting for your whole life.

11:43 Riding the elevator up the rocket, climbing in that capsule, very surreal.

11:46 I often say that the only reason anybody actually gets

11:49 on a rocket is because it'd be too embarrassing to turn

11:51 around and run away from the rocket once the fire

11:53 starts coming and the rocket starts vibrating and you lift off.

11:56 It's a completely different experience.

11:58 When you put crew on a rocket, it's no longer a test flight.

12:01 This one needs to perform and will perform

12:04 as good or better than the first one did.

12:08 No doubt about it.

12:13 Artemis 2 begins with launch from Kennedy Space Center.

12:18 Getting them through that eight and a half minutes to get

12:21 them to escape Earth will be the first big milestone.

12:23 First you'll do about two minutes of flight with the boosters.

12:27 The boosters will separate, leaving you on just the core stage all

12:32 the way through about eight minutes into the mission.

12:34 At that point, the upper stage will separate from the core stage

12:37 and perform a perigee raise maneuver to keep you in a stable orbit.

12:42 The crew's going to be in a high Earth orbit, check out orbit.

12:45 So this is a highly elliptical orbit that just takes them up,

12:49 away from the Earth, and then back down close to it.

12:52 From there, Orion backs away and separates from ICPS,

12:55 preparing us for manual piloting by the crew of the Orion vehicle,

12:59 imagining that they are approaching and docking

13:02 with the upper stage of the rocket.

13:05 The crew have their hands on flying it for the first time.

13:08 And that allow them to see, do we have the pulse size correct?

13:11 Do we make the pulse size smaller?

13:13 Do we have enough thrust?

13:14 Does it have enough control authority to give us the rates

13:17 and the movement that we need to in the vehicle when we need it?

13:20 We need to really understand how Orion's going to perform

13:23 in order such that we can dock it on future missions.

13:28 We're going to fly information for a good two hours to ensure that we

13:31 can do the checkouts to really understand

13:34 the way this vehicle is going to operate.

13:38 As we do Ascent and as we go through our ProxOps demo,

13:41 it's gonna be a long day for the crew,

13:42 it's gonna be a long day for us in the ground.

13:46 Once we convince ourselves that the systems are solid,

13:48 we will engage the Orion main engine and that will

13:50 commit us to what we call translunar injection.

13:53 The translunar injection burn is the big burn

13:55 that puts us on the path to the moon.

13:58 For that flyby out to the moon,

13:59 we're doing what we call a free return trajectory.

14:02 The idea there is that without doing any more major burns, you can just coast.

14:06 And the gravity of the moon will redirect

14:07 Orion and bring it back to Earth safely.

14:10 Okay, Apollo 13, Houston.

14:11 You have a goal for...

14:12 We have done a free return only one time, and that was during Apollo 13.

14:16 We have designed deliberately to do

14:18 a free return on this particular mission because, again, our risk tolerance,

14:21 our willingness to take risks with the vehicle, with the crew on board,

14:25 is much, much lower for a crew test flight.

14:28 The next three days are spent in transit

14:29 and so the crew has activities to again continue

14:32 to check out the systems on the Orion that we

14:34 weren't able to get to in the first day.

14:36 We need to go through checking out the radiation shelter

14:38 that all of our stowage is in the right spot.

14:41 We need to check out the cabin to ensure that we can

14:43 depress it to be able to dock within HLS in the future.

14:46 Then we're going to fly around the moon.

14:50 You'll fly by the moon at about flight day five.

14:53 You'll be between 2,900 and 7,900 nautical miles from the lunar surface.

14:58 That'll be the first time we'll have four crew members being able

15:01 to share the experience of seeing the far side of the moon together.

15:05 They'll be the most separated from Earth than

15:07 any four humans could possibly be at that point.

15:10 We're going to turn the spacecraft so you have

15:12 the best view of anybody of the moon in 50 years.

15:15 We want to ensure that we're getting the videos

15:17 of the moon that all of us back here on Earth want

15:20 to see and ensuring that all of our systems work

15:23 on the far side of the moon as well the way we expect.

15:27 Once the crew flies past the moon,

15:29 they'll begin the three-day journey home where they'll

15:31 again begin to do some checkouts Including trying

15:33 to take the cabin down to a lower

15:35 pressure which is needed for future flights Finally,

15:39 as they get closer to Earth, they're gonna prepare for reentry.

15:42 We have to configure the cockpit, do our final targeting,

15:44 final burns, get the crew in their suits,

15:46 get them in their seats, and then they'll get into the reentry sequence.

15:52 The back half of the crew module has the heat shield,

15:56 which is covered right up until just before what we call entry interface,

16:00 when you're re-entering the atmosphere,

16:02 at which point the crew module separates from the service module,

16:05 puts the heat shield towards the Earth, and then begins its entry.

16:09 The way Orion enters the Earth's atmosphere, it's a capsule shape,

16:13 and when that capsule engages with the atmosphere,

16:15 it hits at a tremendous speed.

16:19 The speeds that we're enduring produce

16:21 temperatures as hot as 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit,

16:24 which is close to the surface of the sun.

16:26 The way we protect and absorb that energy is we build a heat shield.

16:30 That heat shield serves as a function to transfer and absorb

16:33 that energy so that ultimately we can come down gently under chutes.

16:38 That 19-ish minutes is the most critical of a flight.

16:42 That heat shield has to work, the guidance has to put them in the right spot.

16:45 And if we're anywhere as close as we were on Artemis 1,

16:49 we're gonna drop that capsule within a couple miles of the landing ship.

16:52 Splashdown.

16:54 We're gonna land off the coast of San Diego in the Pacific Ocean,

16:57 and we're gonna test out in real,

16:59 real space in real time the recovery of crew from the capsule.

17:04 So all of these are new things that we haven't had to do before in a long time.

17:08 They'll be recovered by our recovery forces, and we'll see their smiling faces.

17:15 That's the mission.

17:16 That's Artemis 2.

17:20 (engine revving) We learned a ton on Artemis 1.

17:29 A lot of just how the vehicle works and how to fly it,

17:33 especially from our perspective.

17:35 When SLS cleared the tower at Pad B, we put Orion exactly where it needed to be.

17:39 The upper stage conducted a perfect burn.

17:42 Orion spent an incredible retrograde orbit around the moon achieving a distance

17:46 further than any spacecraft designed to carry humans that ever been.

17:49 And when it came back to Earth,

17:50 it performed the first ever skip reentry of a vehicle.

17:56 For Artemis 1, the number one priority mission objective was

18:00 a test of the heat shield on Orion for lunar return.

18:03 Orion conducted the final major maneuver of its mission,

18:06 a return trajectory correction burn of its thrusters to further

18:10 fine tune its path toward its splashdown site in the Pacific.

18:16 One of the biggest learnings we had from Artemis 1 was

18:18 how the thermal protection system was able to perform during reentry.

18:23 We looked at the heat shield and there

18:24 were little chunks of that char that were missing.

18:27 And we didn't really understand that and we thought that wasn't predicted.

18:31 What happened is some of the heat shield materials started to break off.

18:35 And that we think could happen a little bit,

18:37 but you don't want to happen too much.

18:39 Our decision has been made first around safety on the heat

18:44 shield as we understand and mitigate the risks that come with spaceflight.

18:50 Sometimes in space delays are agonizing and slowing down

18:54 is agonizing and it's not what we like to do.

18:57 But from the crew perspective the thing that we most asked our leadership

19:01 for after Artemis 1 was root cause of the ablation of the heat shield.

19:07 We had an independent review team with a lot

19:09 of outside experts and internal experts to look at this.

19:12 So we really appreciate the willingness to take

19:14 the risk to actually slow down and understand root cause,

19:17 determine the path forward,

19:19 corrective action for Artemis 2 and Artemis 3 so that when Victor,

19:23 Christine and Jeremy and I launch and land after

19:26 a successful Artemis 2 we will look to Artemis 3

19:29 to carry the torch forward and to put humans back

19:32 on the moon and that is really our ultimate objective.

19:36 Had the crew been on Artemis I in the Orion heat shield,

19:39 they would have been safe.

19:40 This was certainly an area that we knew we wanted to test out.

19:43 One reason why, of course, there were no crew on Artemis I's,

19:45 we could test out that heat shield.

19:47 But we wanted to make sure we understood that problem.

19:49 And we did an enormous number

19:51 of tests to confirm that under specific conditions, yes, we can fly it safely.

19:56 But in the future, we want to take this learning

19:58 and not only apply it to safely flying Artemis II,

20:01 but to changing how we design and build

20:04 the heat shield for the Artemis III and beyond.

20:07 This is what we do.

20:08 We are ready for it.

20:09 This is how we work.

20:10 This is how we learn.

20:14 It will be a 10-day journey, going half a million miles,

20:18 continuing to test out every bit of Orion,

20:21 going around the far side of the moon,

20:23 heading home through the Earth's atmosphere at over 25,000 miles per hour,

20:29 and splashing down in the Pacific.

20:32 Crew's going to have a horizon, they have a moon,

20:34 so I feel pretty good about pressing into this opportunity.

20:38 I think NASA is at its best when it has big ideas and bold exploration.

20:43 That's when the finest comes out of NASA,

20:45 that's when the finest comes out of America.

20:46 Their story is made up of the success

20:49 of this institution that makes this country so proud.

20:53 For Orion, success means first we bring the crew home.

20:57 Second, we demonstrate what we know already is

21:00 a robust spacecraft that's ready for these Artemis missions.

21:04 We want to continue to explore.

21:06 We want to continue to learn.

21:07 We want to go beyond.

21:08 We want to go even further.

21:10 And through the success of this particular

21:12 mission of Artemis 2 will help spur us

21:14 on for the additional exploration and discoveries

21:17 that are out there for us to find.

21:20 Our destiny is always to go and see what's further and what's next.

21:24 It's our generation's opportunity to have our own literal moonshot.

21:27 When we focus on one thing and we focus on it together, we can achieve anything.

21:32 It's the lesson that we can do more together than we can as individuals.

21:37 It's a new beginning.

21:38 It's a rebirth of human exploration.

21:40 The question is no longer if we're going to return to the moon or reach Mars.

21:44 It's a matter of when.

21:46 It starts with one flight, one crew, Artemis 2.

21:50 We all have batons, relay race batons,

21:53 and they are there as a symbol of coming back from Artemis 2

21:56 and handing those batons to Artemis 3 and saying it's your turn, go.

21:59 That is what we live for.

22:00 We are ready.