SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Four people are about to make world and lunar history. The crew of NASA's Artemis II mission will be lifting off on a 10-day mission that will take them off planet Earth, beyond orbit. It will take them all the way to the moon. They'll fly around it and back, becoming the first people to do so in more than half a century. It's a big moment for NASA. Two summers ago, I visited the crew at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. I wanted to get a sense of what it is like to prepare for the mission.
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REID WISEMAN: Actually, kneel down...
DETROW: OK.
WISEMAN: ...Kind of facing the ground.
DETROW: Captain Reid Wiseman guided me as I awkwardly crouched down, trying not to bang my head and trying to figure out how to wedge myself into the front of the training mockup of an Orion space capsule.
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WISEMAN: We got to teach you how to do this like an astronaut, OK? And now, you just kind of start rolling your way in.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Just roll. Good.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yeah.
WISEMAN: Don't scratch your watch. Yep. And now your feet come up and over. Yes.
DETROW: And I'm in.
WISEMAN: Perfect.
DETROW: It should be said, he was much more smooth about making his way into the tiny space in the training capsule. Situated on our backs, we could see through four port windows when we craned our necks up. And looking straightforward, we were flush against a complicated panel of screens, knobs and switches, some of which they hope they will never need to touch.
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WISEMAN: In general, the switches are not intended to be used if everything is going well.
DETROW: OK.
WISEMAN: These switches are last-ditch efforts. Like, for here, this is main parachute deploy. So if we are in a really bad day and our main parachute does not deploy, moving this switch will send an electrical signal from the battery directly to the employment motors on the...
DETROW: The screens display dense lines of flight data. To me, they're all random numbers. To Wiseman, they're telling a high-stakes story.
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WISEMAN: This doesn't look like much, but this will be the acceleration time profile for going into space. The things that we really look at are VI in the upper left. That's our velocity. When we leave planet Earth, we're zero miles an hour. And when we hit low-Earth orbit, we're doing 17,000 miles an hour. And then when we come back in the atmosphere, we're doing 39 times the speed of sound - 25,000 miles an hour. It's crazy numbers.
DETROW: Wow.
Wiseman and three other astronauts will spend 10 days flying to the moon and back. Artemis II will be the first crewed mission to the moon since the end of the Apollo program. The Artemis program is intentionally more representative than Apollo was. Christina Koch will be the first woman to fly to the moon. The mission's pilot, Victor Glover, will be the first person of color to fly that far. Previously, he was the first Black astronaut to live on the International Space Station. He was training elsewhere on the day I visited NASA but spoke to NPR at another point.
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VICTOR GLOVER: We get to do something that's just wholly unique in all of human experience. We are all trying to move the needle forward, trying to make things better for humanity. And in doing that, we are also making it better for the groups that we come from or represent.
DETROW: It's all as historic and high stakes as it gets and also pretty daunting. There's that whole 25,000-mile-an-hour reentry to think about, and also the fact the crew will have to spend 10 whole days in this small capsule, about 12 feet wide inside, but in many places, just 5 feet or so tall.
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CHRISTINA KOCH: It's a lot bigger in 3D, when you can float around. That's what I'm telling myself.
DETROW: Yeah.
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DETROW: Mission specialist Christina Koch, like Wiseman, has been to space before. She spent nearly a year on the International Space Station.
KOCH: The other day, we figured out where we might all hang our sleeping bags. One person will be bat-like and hang in kind of from - to describe it, in the top part of what you can imagine the capsule shape is, there's a little bit of a little pop up, a tunnel. And so that will be where they hang either feet up or head up. And then the other folks are - kind of be more like what you might consider horizontal, with what is the bigger base of the capsule or the floor kind of.
DETROW: That seems like a cozy spot.
WISEMAN: Do you remember what...
KOCH: That's what I'm saying.
WISEMAN: I like how Christina didn't identify that she has already declared that spot hers, but we know that is her spot.
DETROW: Along with Glover, Koch and Wiseman, mission specialist Jeremy Hansen rounds out the crew. They've been preparing since April 2023, spending hundreds of hours in this mockup capsule and other simulators.
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WISEMAN: Every time you push a button, you take that split second before you push a button to think, what is this button about to do to this vehicle, and where am I going to be after I push that button? And that is a huge challenge to think through all of that.
DETROW: Artemis II is effectively a test flight. If anything goes wrong for the Artemis crew between the Earth and the moon, resources, the forces of gravity and just sheer distance from everybody else, makes the contingency plan very different.
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MORIBA JAH: There isn't this kind of backup system because they're going to be very far away.
DETROW: That's Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at UT Austin.
JAH: You know, we don't have more of these Orions just sitting on shelves to go launch, you know, the backup and rendezvous with them and all this other stuff. Like, they're going to have to figure it out or not.
DETROW: Which is why, as Jeremy Hansen underscored, all the training and preparation on the ground is so essential.
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JEREMY HANSEN: We have super smart people who try to dream up all the things that could go wrong, and then we try to have a backup plan or a redundant system. But at the end of the day, we also know there are the unknown unknowns, and there's risk involved. And part of the preparation of going to do something like this is understanding that there's a, you know, very real chance you don't come back. We're trying to understand the risks that we're taking and make an intentional decision to accept that risk or not accept that risk. And I feel really good about this program and the leadership and their courage to make hard decisions.
DETROW: Assuming everything goes according to plan, though, the crew has quite the to-do list and quite the view. Here's Koch.
KOCH: Our primary task is observing - observing the moon in the short period of time that we have our flyby. Our job is to tell the scientists back home the things that lunar probes can't see or tell, and that is what colors do human eyes see? What observations, large scale, do we see? And it's a supreme responsibility to have eyes on the far side of the moon. We hope that we'll be able to see it depending on its phase.
DETROW: I do wonder, like, when you think about your mindset, when you think about what you have to do, how much just the enormity of going to the moon, do you let the Neil Armstrong of it all kind of get into your head day to day (laughter)?
KOCH: I like to allow space for that every once in a while. And for me, allowing about two seconds every couple months is enough. The enormity, when it hits me, is there, and it's important, but for the most part, I'm focusing on the mission.
WISEMAN: Scott, as you were asking that question, that's very similar, but I have to expand two seconds 'cause last night I was in bed, getting ready to go to sleep and it - that started, like, thinking about riding this gigantic rocket, going all the way out to the moon with Christina, Victor, Jeremy. And I had to get up and go for a walk around my living room for a second because I just couldn't get myself back into the mode of going to sleep, and I knew I needed to rest.
DETROW: Yeah.
WISEMAN: But sometimes it does. Sometimes it hits you. And then most of the time, it's just kind of in the background.
DETROW: Talking to NPR, Victor Glover put it this way.
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GLOVER: One of the biggest challenges is going to be finding those quiet moments in that time to record and reflect and be in the moment because it'll be over so quickly. So just, I think a challenge will just be to really immerse and enjoy it in the moment.
DETROW: The world has changed a lot since astronauts last flew to the moon more than a half century ago. The sum total of the computing technology that powered the Apollo missions is inside most people's pockets. It's on their wrists. So after more than half a century, going back to the moon, it feels long overdue.
KOCH: When I look at humanity and the call to explore that humans have put out there, we were always going to go back to the moon and go back to stay. And so our role is just really answering that call.
DETROW: NPR's Scott Neuman contributed to this story.
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