First, congratulations on the success of Artemis 2. What did it feel like to have those astronauts land back on Earth safely?
Well, it was certainly a big relief. You know, in any space flight really, we have a lot of options available on the whole way uphill into space. You know, we have launch escape systems. There's a lot of time to sort out problems when you're on orbit. But it's when you come back that's where there's no plan B. Everything has to work perfectly. Now, like I said, that's applicable in any spaceflight mission, but when you're coming back from the moon at those velocities, yeah, I would say that's the highest blood pressure moment. When they were under parachute in the water, it was a huge sense of relief across the agency, and then we could start turning our attention to the next mission.
What were the conversations, those first initial conversations with the astronauts like?
Well, I met them of course on the flight deck of the landing ship. So, there was a lot of hugs initially and then a lot of expressing congratulations that they had done it. And letting them know that they don't realize it now, but they brought the whole world along with them. That, you know, literally the world kind of stopped turning for, you know, 10 days to follow along in their great journey. And that at some point probably the whole weight of that will be realized by them.
What did NASA learn most about or what were some of NASA's big takeaways that you learned during this Artemis 2 launch, the whole mission?
Well, I'd say even before the mission launched, we knew that we could not launch this rocket every three years. So last time prior to Artemis 2 was Artemis 1. It was an uncrewed demonstration of the rocket and spacecraft. That was in November of '22. And then what happened leading up to Artemis 2, we relearned all the same lessons. So we had, you know, hydrogen leaks, we had helium flow issues, exact same problems as before. And that's why what was initially intended to be a February launch window wound up launching on April 1st. So I think even before we launched this crew, we had come out and said, look, we are done with this approach. We're drawing upon the playbook that worked well for NASA in the 1960s. We're going to start launching with frequency. So we're going to launch again. We created Artemis 3 to launch in '27 before even Artemis 2 flew. So that we kind of rebuild that muscle memory and don't have the same issues that cause us to be stuck out at the launchpad for months. We learned a lot about the Orion spacecraft itself. So when it flew uncrewed in 2022, it did not have its life support systems on board. Didn't have humans on board. Now we have our life support systems on board and we put four amazing human beings on it for 10 days. We learned a lot. So there's definitely things we need to fix within the systems. There's procedures we need to update. When you update procedures and systems, you have to update your training for the operators on the ground and the astronauts. So that'll all get rolled into Artemis 3.
So Artemis 3 is what NASA or the Artemis program is focused on next. What happens during that mission?
So most importantly, we are going to test the Orion spacecraft with the landers, the lunar landers in Earth orbit. This is exactly what we did in the 1960s. Apollo 9 was a rendezvous of the spacecraft with the LEM in Earth orbit because if you're going to learn something there, you'd rather learn it when you're really close to home on Earth where you can be back in the water in hours instead of learn that problematic lesson when you're four days away on the moon. So again, drawing on the playbook, we're going to leverage the Apollo 9 profile and we're going to test this Orion with the landers in Earth orbit. This will be extremely cool because you will not only see that massive SLS and 8.8 million pounds of thrust put Orion into Earth orbit, you're going to see a SpaceX Starship launch and you're going to see a Blue Origin New Glenn launch all within a matter of days. I mean, this is going to be the most impressive heavy rocket launch, you know, week of time in like human history. It's going to be incredible.
And a really good demonstration of NASA working with these private companies in order to make this space exploration happen.
Absolutely. You can't do the near impossible alone. We didn't do it that way in the 1960s. You had McDonnell Douglas, you had Boeing, they all came together. You had Grumman, they built the LEM. A lot of them are still contributing to the Artemis program today. And then you have your new players. You have SpaceX and Blue Origin. And yeah, there's a lot of parallels. I mean, back during the Gemini program, we would launch, you know, the Titan 2 rocket with the Gemini spacecraft on it. Then you'd launch an Atlas with a target vehicle to practice rendezvous and docking. Well, we're going to do the same thing. It's just they're bigger rockets now. They're far more powerful with SLS as the NASA vehicle and then SpaceX and Blue Origin launching theirs. It's going to be a heck of a show, but most importantly, it's going to give us the learning environment to have the confidence to land astronauts on the moon with Artemis 4 in 2028.
So, Artemis 3 was initially, right, supposed to be the mission to put humans back on the moon. Now, we've added Artemis 4, made the intermediary Artemis 3 program. Why is it important to take this extra step?
Because it works. It's a great question, but this is exactly how we did it in the 1960s. You know, there was Mercury before Gemini, Gemini before Apollo and an awful lot of Apollo missions before Apollo 11. And why? Because this is extremely hard. There is a reason why we haven't been back to the moon since Apollo 17, you know, more than a half century ago. It's extremely demanding. I mean, the velocities that you have to put in a vehicle to send astronauts to the space station, that's 17,500 miles an hour to be in Earth orbit. You need 25,000 miles an hour. That's why it's such a huge rocket. You're putting all that energy in a spacecraft to then land on another celestial body and bring it back safely. It's extremely hard. You can't just jump right to the dream state. It doesn't work that way. So, we got Artemis 2 underway. So, let's call it your Apollo 7 and 8 come together. You need Apollo 9, which is what Artemis 3 will be, to gain comfort that the spacecraft and the landers will work well together. And you do that close to home. Then you set up for the landing with Artemis 4 in 2028. So NASA already has the successful blueprint from the Apollo program that we're reapplying absolutely to Artemis.
When can we see Artemis 3 launch?
So right now we're targeting mid-2027, but you don't have to wait that long to kind of know how well we're progressing. So, you know, later this week you're going to see SpaceX launch the first of their V3 Starships. You're going to need a lot of, they're going to need to have a lot of successful launches of that brand new version of Starship in order to put the lander in an environment where we could test it for Artemis 3. So like we're going to have one step in the right direction later this week with SpaceX. We are going to start bringing the public along as we build up the entire Artemis 3 rocket, the SLS. We are aiming to bring it out to the launchpad before the end of the year to start doing the wet dress testing of it to make sure we assembled it properly. So, we are going to bring the public along throughout this journey. We will keep everyone really informed of the progress that we're making. Every SpaceX launch, every New Glenn launch, including they're going to launch an uncrewed lander called Mark 1 to the moon later this summer. These are all going to be confidence building measures.
So President Trump wants to see humans, Americans on the moon before the end of his second term. Will that happen?
That's the plan. We have an achievable plan now. So, thanks to President Trump, the national space policy that he signed on my first day on the job, the funding, the $10 billion plus up we received from the One Big Beautiful Bill, the Working Family Tax Cut Act, that's the mandate and that's the resources necessary to have an achievable plan. It was not an achievable plan before. You can't go from Artemis 2 to landing on the moon in Artemis 3 and wait three years and hope for the best. We would lose. Right now, thanks to the president and his policy, thanks to the resources available, we have the means to add missions, rebuild core competencies, get back into the business of launching moon rockets with frequency and build the moon base in parallel. So when we get back to the moon this time, we get back to stay.
Talking about the moon base, that'll start the way I understand it before humans are even back on the moon.
Okay. Yeah. How does that work?
