NASA is heading back to the moon. Meet the astronauts leading Artemis II : NPR

NASA’s Orion space capsule is not a place you would describe as “roomy.”

The not-quite-cone-shaped spacecraft is about 12 feet across on the inside, and, aside from the center that slants up toward a hatch door, it’s mostly less than five feet tall. Moving around it — in gravity at least — is an awkward process of crouching and ducking.

““It’s a lot bigger in 3D, when you can float around,” mission specialist Christina Koch says. “That’s what I’m telling myself.”

As soon as a year from now, Koch will be in that chrome-colored capsule, flying toward the moon at thousands of feet per second. She and two of the four total Artemis II crew members were available on a recent late-August day to show NPR how they’re preparing for their mission around the moon and back, which will be the first human flight to Earth’s satellite in more than half a century.

The capsule Koch and other NASA employees showed NPR isn’t the real thing, though. It’s a full-scale training mockup at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where the crew has been spending hours at a time familiarizing themselves with the layout and running through the paces of their upcoming mission.

Mission commander Reid Wiseman explains a dizzying panel of screens, knobs and switches. He points to the velocity monitor.

“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 into the atmosphere we’re doing 39 times the speed of sound, 25,000 miles per hour.” Wiseman says. “Crazy numbers.”

This time next year, if all goes according to plan, Wiseman will command a key moment in NASA’s Artemis program. Over the course of 10 days, the crew will travel to the moon, swing around its orbit, and slingshot back to Earth.

A history-making mission, for multiple reasons

Along with Koch and Wiseman, mission specialist Jeremy Hansen and pilot Victor Glover round out the crew. Koch, Hansen and Glover will be the first woman, Canadian and Black astronauts, respectively, to head to the moon.

The mission’s high ambitions also come with equally high stakes, as the spacecraft is designed to travel more than 250,000 miles, taking them farther away from Earth than any human before, all while moving at incredible speeds.

This mission is the second phase of NASA’s broader Artemis program: the first sent the Orion space capsule along this path uncrewed in 2022. The goal of Artemis II will be to test out the Orion capsule and all the other equipment, so that by 2026, Artemis III can put astronauts back on the moon.

The program’s overall ambitions go far beyond replicating NASA’s Apollo glory days.

“The goal is not just to go back to the moon,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told NPR in May. “The goal is to go to the moon to learn so we can go farther to Mars and beyond. Now it so happens that we’re going to go to a different part of the moon. We’ll go into the South Pole, and that is attractive because we know there’s ice there in the crevices of the rocks in the constant shadow or darkness. And if in fact there is water, then we [can create hydrogen] rocket fuel.”

The further the plans stretch out, the more they may seem like science fiction. A key eventual component of Artemis will be a moon-orbiting space station.

But first, NASA needs to make sure it can get a human crew to the moon and back. That’s where the four Artemis II astronauts come in.

They’ve been training since April 2023, spending hours inside the mockup capsule, practicing the various physical tasks they’ll need to carry out on the mission. That means hours of looking around its small interior, thinking about what it will be like to share the space with three other people.

The astronauts laugh knowingly when asked about this, because for all the high-level science they’re cramming on, they’re intently focused on this human chemistry, too.

“We just have to trust each other,” Wiseman says.

The crew has spent a lot of time talking intentionally about how to give each other the personal space they’ll need during the high-stress mission.

“If I can’t physically go to a different space, because we’re all in the same ‘Hershey kiss’ together, then I can put on my headphones and that’s my way to signal [to the rest of the crew] that I’m in my cabin right now,” says Koch, giving one example.

A peek into the high-stakes training

Training has taken the astronauts to the Pacific Ocean, where they’ve practiced how they’ll get out of the capsule and into helicopters after their mission ends in a splash down. They’ve hiked in Iceland, to learn more about the volcanic geology they’ll be observing on the lunar surface.

The most critical training, though, happens in the high-tech simulator on the Johnson Space Center campus — the same building that has housed simulators going back to NASA’s Gemini program.

“The goal in this building is to serve the needs of the flight control team, to train them so that if they have a bad day in the real mission, it’s like automatic to them,” says Grace Lauderdale, the simulator manager for the Orion, where she heads a team of NASA engineers, physicists and computer scientists. Lauderdale and her team come up with different scenarios that have one unexpected problem or another flare up at different points, so that if and when something does go wrong in space, it isn’t unexpected.

The windows of the simulator are fitted with monitors that display a digital rendering of Earth, the moon and stars. The astronauts can then use the controls to operate simulated thrusters and virtually fly through space, practicing the rocket burns and docking maneuvers they’ll eventually carry out while orbiting Earth.

“The purpose is to train the crew in all of the devices that they have to interact with during a mission,” Lauderdale explains. “The training team takes that simulation and creates all of the training scenarios in order to train the crew, train the flight controllers, to work as a team to understand what they need to do in case something goes wrong.”

And things can and do go wrong in space exploration. The world got a vivid reminder of that reality this summer: Two NASA astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, will end up spending eight months on the International Space Station — instead of their initially planned eight days — because of problems with the Boeing Starliner capsule they were testing.

Artemis II is a much more complicated endeavor than Starliner, so if anything goes wrong for the Artemis II crew between Earth and the moon, the contingency plans are much more limited.

“There isn’t this kind of backup system because they’re going to be very far away,” says Moribah Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at UT Austin.

“We don’t have more of these Orions just sitting on shelves to go launch and rendezvous with them and all this other stuff. They’re going to have to figure it out or not.”

And the high stakes and limited room for error is exactly why preparation on the ground is so essential.

“Part of the preparation of going to do something like this is understanding that there’s a … very real chance you don’t come back,” says mission specialist Jeremy Hansen. “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.”

How the crew feels about ‘a supreme responsibility’

Assuming everything goes according to plan, though, the crew has quite the to-do list — and quite the view.

“Our primary task is observing, observing the moon,” said Koch. “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 we’re being trained to do just that, to describe and observe.”

“It’s a supreme responsibility to have eyes on the far side of the moon,” she adds.

Which leads to a key question: how often is the Artemis II crew overwhelmed by the magnitude of their upcoming task?

“I like to allow space for that every once in a while,” says Koch. ” And for me, allowing about two seconds every couple of 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 and my role in it, just like any other mission.”

Wiseman admits that he sometimes dwells on it for a little more than two seconds at a time, including a recent night where he couldn’t easily get to sleep, “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. But sometimes it does. Sometimes it hits you.”

Besides the enormity of the mission, after more than half a century some Artemis II crew members also say going back to the moon feels long overdue.

“For me, 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,” says Koch. “There was never a time in our history as a species when that wasn’t going to happen, when we weren’t going to push further. And so our role is just really answering that call.”