From Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars, explore the world of human spaceflight with NASA each week on the official podcast of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Listen to in-depth conversations with the astronauts, scientists and engineers who make it possible.

On Episode 288, Artemis II lead flight directors walk us through what was learned from Artemis I and what we are doing right now in Mission Control to prepare for Artemis II and beyond. This episode was recorded on April 19, 2023.

Transcript

Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, we have a podcast! Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 288, “Evolving Artemis Mission Operations.” I’m Gary Jordan, and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, astronauts, all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human spaceflight and more. Artemis I was a critical demonstration of key technologies needed for the next generation of deep space exploration. The Space Launch System took its maiden flight, and Orion was pushed to its limits, while flight controllers monitored the 25-day operation. The flight test was deemed a success. Months later, the Artemis II crew was announced, preparing for the next step in the Artemis program, a flight test with humans. As these milestones were achieved, and as these months pass, the work to prepare the flight control teams for the next steps never stopped. Much was learned from Artemis I and is still being learned, that helps us to prepare for the next flight test with humans on board. The stakes are ever higher, but luckily there’s a dedicated team ensuring that mission control is ready. To walk us through what was learned from Artemis I and what we’re doing right now to evolve and prepare for Artemis II and beyond, we have the lead flight directors for the Artemis II mission, Zeb Scoville, currently acting, and Jeff Radigan, who will soon take on a permanent lead for the Artemis II mission operations from here in Mission Control Houston. All right, let’s go ahead and get started; enjoy.

[Music]

Host: Zeb and Jeff, thank you so much for coming on Houston We Have a Podcast.

Jeff Radigan: Good to be here.

Zeb Scoville: It’s awesome to be here. Thank you.

Host: All Right. Very good. Zeb, welcome back. We’ve had you on for, for Demo-2. It’s a while ago at this point, right? And now, we’re at the time that we’re recording this Crew-6 has already launched, Crew-7 is next. So it’s, it’s been a bit since we’ve had you on.

Zeb Scoville: It’s been a hot minute. You know, I think about, I think about the time during Demo-2 and when we’re designing that mission and that mission concept, we’d think about, you know, we really have to think way ahead to, to Crew-7 because we want to make sure that, that the system still works then, and now is Crew-7’s…

Host: And here we are! [Laughing]

Zeb Scoville:…ready to launch!

Host: [Laughter] Awesome. So it’s been a bit, what have you been up to? So, so you were the lead flight director for Demo-2. What have you been up to up to now?

Zeb Scoville: After Crew, after Demo-2, I took a rotation into the Commercial Crew Program where I was assistant to the, to the division for FOD (Flight Operations Directorate). So I was representing the Flight Operations Directorate to the, to the program on technical issues as we go and build and certify and complete all the execution of those missions. I came back and I was, if you remember Holly Ridings ended up going on a rotation for a, a bit of while which turned into a, a permanent position as the deputy of the Gateway program.

Host: Sure.

Zeb Scoville: So during that time, I was the acting chief of the flight director office. And then, now I’m the deputy chief and Emily Nelson’s taken over the chief role. And I, I have been fortunate enough to slide into another role as acting as the acting lead of Artemis II while Jeff is going to learn how to do some, some financial work on the Gateway side, and he’ll be coming back and, and flying this upcoming mission. So…

Host: Very cool. Well, it’s good to have you, and I definitely want to circle back on all of that experience. You’ve touched a little bit of pretty much every human spaceflight program. So, so, we’ll, we’ll definitely circle back and dive deeper into that. Jeff, it sounds like you’re, you’re, have a, a rotation going on now.

Jeff Radigan: Yeah, I do. So, I, I’ve, I was the Artemis II lead flight director for the last, oh geez, it’s been three years now.

Host: Wow.

Jeff Radigan: And you know, every, every once in a while you need a break and you need to go make sure you’re keeping your skills sharp. And so I’m off rotating through the Gateway program planning and control area. It’s all of the financial work, which of course is budget season for the government, which is a very fast and furious pace, which is good to learn something new, right? My whole experience has been in op[eration]s, so learning the financial aspects of building spacecraft has been something new to me. And it was nice to have this short break, as you can call it that, when I’m off learning something new, but it, it was definitely needed. And then I’ll come back here at the end of the year and keep working on Artemis II.

Host: You got to get through the, this budget season and then once you stamp it, and once you have all the budget ready, then you’re going to come back and do Artemis II.

Jeff Radigan: Yep. That’s, that’s the idea.

Host: All right, very cool. Now, I think it’s important to, to circle back and just saying your role as, as a flight director, right? Both of you are flight directors, and that means that you have to maintain these skills. So, so Jeff, even though you’re off doing, you know, working on budgets, are you still doing shifts in mission control?

Jeff Radigan: Absolutely. I’ll be there next week. [Laughter] Probably when this airs, it’ll have already passed.

Host: Yeah.

Jeff Radigan: But, yep, I’ll be flying the space station. That’s what I do in my spare time.

Host: Yeah.

Jeff Radigan: So it, it’s a, it’s a cool day.

Host: In your spare time.

Jeff Radigan: In my spare time.

Host: Yeah. That’s good. And Zeb, you’ve got a shift coming up tonight.

Zeb Scoville: Yeah. I’ve got about an hour-and-a-half before I’ve got take over the console for ISS and you know, the interesting thing that I really love about the flight director role is, you know, we’re talking about the Artemis programs and building a space station around the Moon called Gateway and getting the Orion vehicle to launch on top of the SLS (Space Launch System). And we’re, you know, we have suit contracts going to the surface, and we have all of that amazing, like, exploration development that’s going on. Well, at the same time, we’re flying ISS and we get to, to work in the Commercial Crew Program. So as a flight director we get to touch and operate in all of these different elements, really every aspect of, of human spaceflight. And so the, what’s I think particularly rewarding for me, and I think, I hope valuable for the agency, is that while you have these programs which have to have people completely embedded into the, the deep dive technical issues of their system to make sure that this avionics box is tested and certified and built and paid for and, and assembled on the vehicle and ready to go, we can have people in the ops world that are able to, to bridge the gap across those programs to find what, what’s working really well with, with Commercial Crew and what’s working really well with ISS and what’s our experience we learned from Artemis I, and we can apply some of those best practices and, and those lessons learned for things that, that may not have gone so well so that we can make the best program going forward because it’s going to go non-linear with Artemis with the new elements and programs coming together, and we’ve got to be ready.

Host: I love that. And, and that’s a, bouncing right off of that, Zeb, is where exactly I wanted to start was, was talking about Artemis I, because Artemis I, just, you know, we, we talk about it a lot, we’ve put out a lot, we’ve analyzed it a lot, and, and a lot of people at this point have said that it was a successful flight test, meaning we learned a lot from it. And I’m sure you guys did too. Now, the thing is going into it, you had all this work going into the operations of the mission itself. And Jeff, you already mentioned that even, it sounded like throughout Artemis I you were constantly thinking about Artemis II. And so, how plugged in were, were you with the planning for Artemis I with planning for Artemis II, all the while doing exactly as Zeb was saying, pulling from the knowledge of other programs’ lessons learned to apply to Artemis I?

Jeff Radigan: All of these missions build on one another, right? And, and so, that’s something that we keep in mind as we’re going forward. And, you know, there’s multiple flight directors working all of the missions. You know, for example, we both sat console on Artemis I and, and flew the spacecraft, while that was, was mission was occurring. So it’s important to us that, that we keep in mind, it’s all building blocks. So Artemis I, you know, a crewed — or I’m sorry, an uncrewed flight test — which was, you know, roughly 70% of the systems on Orion that we’ll have going forward, it was a big deal to go check all of those out. And by and large the spacecraft and, and the SLS rocket that took us to space both performed very, very well. And so it was good to see those in action, but you never really know until you get over there, and you know, you know, watch it. And then while the Artemis I team was working, we’ve got a whole separate set of folks working on, you know, what I call that last 30%, which is all the crewed systems, right: the life support, the crew interfaces. We couldn’t not, we couldn’t wait till now to go work on those. We had to make sure that those were in development even as we were flying Artemis I. And so, there’s a, a lot of, lot of things to go work.

Host: And so, from your perspective, when you’re, when you have this overlap of, of working on Artemis I, you planning for Artemis II for as long as you were, is that where the bulk of your time is spent: coming up, understanding the systems, coming up with the flight rules that are necessary to add the human into the mix?

Jeff Radigan: It is. It is. And that’s why, you know, we have multiple flight directors working on these, these missions. You know, my job as the Artemis II lead in some ways was to make sure that the Artemis I guys were able to go do their job, right? And we weren’t thinking too far ahead…

Host: Yeah.

Jeff Radigan:…that we were letting, you know, the Artemis I folks get their flight rules and procedures all ready to go and not complicating things too much with all the things to come. But then of course, once Artemis I lands, now, you know, we’re the one up at the plate. And so, we have to bring in that work that was on the, on the back burner for a while and really, get that front and center.

Host: When it comes to the flight rules from Artemis I, the non-human parts, is there some rework that has to be done in order to include the human, or is it just as simple as copy paste into Artemis II?

Jeff Radigan: Well, it’s not as simple as copy paste. We’ll start there. [Laughter]

Host: If only it were, if only it were.

Jeff Radigan: [Laughter] We’d save some time and effort.

Host: Yeah.

Jeff Radigan: But the, the risk difference is really where I think, you know, where I think we should focus the conversation…

Host: OK.

Jeff Radigan:…because, you know, Artemis I was an uncrewed test flight. We really put those systems through a lot of environments that we knew we were going to take more risk, and the agency decided that, you know, if, if we lost the vehicle it was worth the risk to learn about the spacecraft, learn about the lunar environment, learn about the re-entry environment. You know, that was the, the risk trade that was made that we would not do the same thing with humans on board the spacecraft. And so, now we have to go re-evaluate those flight rules in light of the fact that we have a crew on board, right? And our, our first goal is to get them home safely. So we just have to, to really reassess how much risk are we willing to take, and when do we need to, you know, perhaps shorten the mission or, or abort and come home in light of the fact that the crew’s on board.

Host: It has to do with pushing Orion to the limit, right? For Artemis I, that’s what we want to do. We really wanted to push that spacecraft and so maybe within the flight rules designed within it is you, you, you push it, you really push it, whereas you, that pushing it has some risk of, and compromise to safety. And that’s just a no-go as soon as you put a human on board.

Jeff Radigan: Yeah. That’s, that’s a good way to frame it.

Host: Yeah.

Zeb Scoville: So let me extrapolate on that, though, looking towards future Artemis missions.

Host: OK.

Zeb Scoville: The complexity of, and the risk envelope for those is going to get higher, right? We’re going to be going with the crews into a more complex, near-rectilinear halo orbit, which basically, once you get in, you’ve got six days where you’ve got to go all the way around the orbit to be able to get the crew out of it. You’re going to include a lander, which has to go land on the surface; EVA (extravehicular activity) suits. There’s going to be a substantial mission risk associated with that. And so I really look at Artemis II, and Jeff and I have talked about this, that, that the, the Artemis II job is to buy down as much of the risk that we can on this mission from those future missions, so that they’re not having to, for the first time, understand the risk of rendezvous and prox[imity] ops, for example. So we have a test on this mission where we’re going to do some manual flying capabilities, show that if the automated system fails, this is what the handling qualities are. Like, this is, you know, the crew taking manual control and how it flies. This is real test pilot kind of stuff. We’re going to be looking at, you know, setting up makeshift radiation shelters if there was an event during this mission, so we’re ready for that if we ever need it. We’re going to practice depressing the cabin and repressing the cabin to a lower pressure, to 10.2 psi (pounds per square inch), knowing that, that we can test these things we have, we can take on some of that risk in Artemis II, so that we’re more informed about the overall risk going into [Artemis] III, IV, V, when it only gets more complex.

Host: How far can you get in terms of reducing that risk? When it comes to, I’m, and I’m, I’m thinking about this from the perspective of their different mission profiles, right, from Artemis II, you’re swinging around the Moon, you, you never enter into the near-rectilinear, rectilinear halo orbit, so what can you design within the mission profile of Artemis II to draw down that risk and, and try to understand as, as much as possible what it’s going to be like in near-rectilinear halo orbit?

Zeb Scoville: So some of the things I think about are the, the crew systems. So I want to know, are the life support systems able to sustain? Are, are, are they having effective control for CO₂ (carbon dioxide) scrubbing? Are they able to manage the humidity while the crew is exercising in the small cabin? Are, are we able to have the toilet work effectively? Is the cabin and stowage management in there able to work? Is the crew able to control the stowage for landing so that we’re able to keep the, the CG (center of gravity) within the box for loading? Are we able to have crew piloting control to be able to have them recover lost communications so that they can reacquire or, you know, tracking communications with the Earth? So the, there’s a fair amount that we can do. We are limited a little bit by the fact that we are only flying Orion and we have, we don’t, we can’t bring a lander into this mission. We’re not bringing in a Gateway into this mission. So we can’t naturally test those aspects of it. We have a lot of experience from the, the guidance and navigation from Artemis I in, in terms of being able to know, you know, this is where Orion is, this is where it’s going, how can we track that, and we, we learned some lessons there, and we’ll pick up more of that on, on this mission. But as much as we can do on Artemis II, we’re, we’re going to, going to do well keeping the crew safe.

Jeff Radigan: I think the, the biggest goal is as you look at Artemis III, IV, and V, we want to ensure that the new pieces on those missions are the only challenges we’re facing on those missions, and not we have carry over from Artemis II of things that we just didn’t try or didn’t think about. So, you know, Zeb and I are spending our time, you know, talking and working with the teams on filling every minute of this mission with Orion checkouts so that they’re known quantities — even if they’re not fully successful, they’re things that we know we have to work or have figured out so that when we get a lander, when we get Gateway, those are the only new things we’re having to deal with.

Host: OK. Is 10-ish days enough then with the, with what you want to accomplish? Or are you still looking into it?

Jeff Radigan: I would tell you, we will put as much content into ten days as possible. If we had 11 or 12, we would, we would add. But, you know, trajectory-wise, that’s not really what we’re looking at, right? We’re looking at ten days.

Host: Zeb mentioned lessons learned from Artemis I, right? Obviously, you guys are pulling quite a bit from that lesson. We’ve, we’ve had time after the mission to digest. You, you yourself said that you sat in on the mission and got to understand what it’s like to, to perform a lunar mission operation. What are some of those key things that we’re pulling from Artemis I to bring into the next Artemis missions?

Jeff Radigan: You know, I would start again with the fact that the Orion spacecraft worked, worked fantastic. When we were sitting on console, you know, looking at the solar array power generation, the, the Sun is always on in, in lunar space, and it’s a way to, you know, ensure we’ve got the power systems working. The thermal environment was a little more benign than we expected. Our heaters weren’t coming on nearly as much as, as we thought they might need to, which was good, right? That’ll give us more power for payloads and, and science objectives when we go fly those in future missions. You know, Zeb mentioned the orbital navigation. You know, figuring out where you are in space is actually a tough problem. I think everybody’s gotten very used to GPS (Global Positioning System). And of course, there’s no GPS around the Moon, yet.

Host: Ahh.

Jeff Radigan: Perhaps one day there will be, but without that, you know, we had to go back and, and really relearn how to figure out where we were in space. And, you know, I think we did that quite successfully. And our navigation systems worked, worked quite well. So there was a lot of adjusting from low-Earth orbit where we’ve been flying human spacecraft for, for a long time now, and readjusting back to lunar space because it’s a little bit different.

Host: Zeb, how was that? You got to, you, you did a, you know, as a flight director you’ve been flying in low-Earth orbit for pretty much your whole career, and now you get to experience what this is like. Was it, was it fundamentally different? Was it a lot of the same? How, how was it comparing?

Zeb Scoville: It was gobsmackingly awesome. [Laughter] Let me just tell you. So, you know, thing, one thing that stands out to mine and I will hold this forever. The, a particular moment in Artemis I when, you know, they’ve launched, they’re, you know, they’re heading out, they had just burned TLI, translunar injection burn, and we got some of the first video looking back at the Earth, just for a moment, and it sort of faded down below to, to go out of the field of, of view of the camera. But there was just this moment, like, we built this spaceship, we’re going to put people on it, and everyone on Earth is right there in that, in that frame. And it just really brought home to me that this is happening. This is not something that, or this is something that has sustained presidential administrations, it’s got partners on board and committed, both international partners and commercial partners; we’ve got contracts, we’ve got metal being cut to build all these elements from, from, you know, the rocket bodies to the space station, to the landers and the suits, right? We’re, we’re going. I mean, that’s for the catchphrase of the Artemis program, but…

Host: We’re going.

Zeb Scoville:…it was, it really became apparent to me when I saw that moment. And then from, you know, at that moment I also realized we need to tell this story better. And one thing that we hadn’t really appreciated was the challenge of trying to balance the engineering telemetry data that we’re trying to get down from all the systems on the spacecraft that we’re looking at — accelerations and prop usages and temperatures and, you know, manifold pressures and all these things — and really also what we wanted to make sure we had room for was some bandwidth for some, some video to get down, not just the, the, the images and stuff that we’re going to downlink, or we’re going to, you know, download off the vehicle when it lands, but we no kidding, have to show this story to the people, right? And so, we, we set up a streaming service, right? And you may recall this, like we, we opened up some of the bandwidth to, to start making it live as much as we could. And, and I think that that is a, a lessons learned for me to make sure that, you know, we bring the world on Artemis II, right?

Host: You’re preaching to the choirs. We keep, we keep yelling at you guys — more bandwidth, more videos!

Zeb Scoville:Yeah. But you know, that, that’s, that, you know, unlike, you know, when we’re in low-Earth orbit and we have TDRS (tracking and data relay satellite) where we can go 600 megabytes a second, right?

Host: Yeah.

Zeb Scoville: We now have to adapt to the Deep Space Network and the drop off in bandwidth as we go to distances where we’re talking at, at full throttle, we can get six megabytes per second. And that’s subject to, to losses due to, due to coding and so forth, such that, you know, we’re working at, at some really interesting tests on Artemis II to be able to increase that. We’ve got a, an optical comm system that we’re going to be testing for the first time, which we use a, a laser instead of an RF (radio frequency) signal to transmit the data. So hopefully we’ll be able to get some, some pretty exciting high-definition video and, and the crew there to tell the story. And, and I, I can’t wait to show the world.

Host: Oh, yeah. We are, we, I got my eyes locked on that one, the, the laser communications for sure, because, and we actually are trying to get someone on the podcast to talk about that, because I’m like, get me video. [Laughter] I want to, I want to plead my case here, but, yeah, yeah. Jeff, I think I, you know, I, I’ve, I’m sure both of you, you know, appreciate a lot of the work that was done for Apollo as well, and I know, you know, looking, watching the documentaries, reading the books, knowing the history, there’s that moment that a couple of flight directors, a couple of historical figures, have talked about of switching that map. You know, you’ve done all these tests in low-Earth orbit and for Apollo 8, for example, switching the map on the front room to Earth and, and Moon in the same picture. And now, that’s, that’s something that we are going to do repetitively. That’s something that you have to think about continuously. I wonder if that’s something that sort of, if you, if you, so you see that, you got to sit on console and be there for that moment, if you had sort of the same reactions as Zeb, thinking like, gosh, they had this is, this is happening.

Jeff Radigan: I think when it really hit home for me was, was a little bit before the mission, as we were looking at what the communications with the vehicle would be. And if you look at the maps in the control center, the vehicles always go from west to east, right? We launch in an easterly direction, and we achieve orbit, and then, that they, that’s just, that’s the way every space vehicle goes, right, because that’s the way the, the world turns. But when you do TLI, if you put the spacecraft and you map it where it is on the Earth, it starts going west. And it just has this interesting behavior to where we, we call it the hook is, is the colloquial term, to where after you do TLI, the trajectory basically makes a hook — in our case over Africa — and starts going, what in my mind is the wrong direction. It’s like, wow, how are we going west? Oh, we’re not: we’re just going higher and higher and higher towards the Moon. And so you have to flip your frame of reference to, it’s not low-Earth orbit anymore, you are just getting further away from Earth, and the Earth is spinning below you, and that’s why it looks like you’re going west in an Earth reference frame. But from the vehicle’s reference frame, again, the world is just turning below you and you’re flying to the Moon. And to me that’s the, the point at which it really hit me. Like, hey, this is different.

Host:Wow. Unbelievable. When, when it comes to the, when it comes to the process, though, now, I’m, I’m getting back into like the nitty gritty a bit, is just understanding, we talked about, Artemis I lessons learned, but now, I’m, I’m thinking, I’m thinking ahead, I’m thinking about Artemis II since Jeff, you’ve been such a part, a part of it for a long time, and Zeb you are and will continue to be for throughout the, throughout the year. Artemis II, you know, how, how do we prepare for that? What is it, what is it like, is it, is it constant simulations? Is it, is it the conversations with the, with technical folks? How do you, how do you have the conversations to convince people that video is important when there are so many other drivers of telemetry and, and, you know, subsystem folks that want to understand the telemetry coming from their system and they have to prioritize that. So what is it like, you know, as a leader sort of navigating that in terms of what Artemis II operations is going to look like?

Jeff Radigan: It’s really been a constant negotiation. I mean, that’s, that’s I think the way Zeb and I view our roles in that we’re trying to get everything that’s necessary, and a lot of times folks will ask for more than they need thinking that they won’t get everything they want, and our job in some ways is kind of make sure that happens, that they get only what they need and not anything extra. And then it’s, it’s balancing priorities and, and time. So we have to go learn the systems. We’ve got a whole team of folks that are doing that and have been doing that for, for years to really understand the way they operate. And then we, you know, make suggestions because we’re still in a design process. A lot of these systems, they’ve been through their, their critical design reviews. But there’s still, you know, open questions in some of the software as it’s being finalized that we make inputs to, in order to make the vehicle easier to operate. And so that’s what we spend a lot of our, our time doing. What we will be doing in the future is then taking that and building the flight rules book for Artemis II, all the procedures that we’re going to need to operate the vehicle. And then just like Artemis I, we’ll do a series of simulations to get the team ready to go fly the vehicle and, and be ready for, for the mission.

Host: OK. Very lengthy process.

Zeb Scoville: I sort of put it in, you know, in the lists of buckets of, of activities you described. I would say some of, a little bit of all of the above. So Jeff mentioned the procedure development, the flight rule development, and, you know, trying to, to balance objectives and priorities and, and requirements, right? I would say it’s also getting hands on the hardware and talking to the engineers and going out and testing the hatch and, and being with the recovery teams at the vessels to see what that process is going to look like when you, when you’re getting the crew out of the boat, and having the crew go through suited tests in the cabin and prelaunch dress rehearsals. But then also, you think about, Artemis I, we demonstrated that the crew, that the ground can fly this vehicle without a crew on board, right? Added the crew into the picture, what procedures do we want the crew to execute versus the ground? We want the capabilities so that the crew can also demonstrate they can fly the entire vehicle back home without us, so if we lost comm[unication] they can be the masters of their own destiny. You know, we’ve showed we can do it, we need to show that they can do it. And, you know, within those procedures, all those things we had as, had as, you know, ground commanding procedures, we need to now implement onto things that are executable by the crew and their displays. And I think there’s a lot of crew capabilities and interfaces that, that there’s no substitute for putting your hands on hardware, for making the sure that the actions you can do while you’re suited, strapped into that seat, to make sure that’s sort of an end-to-end mission profile that, that comes together. So as, as many hands as we can shake for the people that, that build that hardware, and then you show it to us is, is what our job is, I think, from here to launch.

Host: There’s a, there’s an interpersonal component, too. I know, you know, we, we, we keep talking about the crew and, and we talk about the procedures and stuff, but I know, I know, Zeb, when the Artemis II crew was announced, you guys got to, you guys got to meet them, shake hands and, and sort of get some face-to-face time with them. And I wonder if it sort of sank with you in that moment when you guys were, were talking and meeting, and I’m, I’m sure it was, it was a joyous occasion, right, but just the gravity of understanding, like, exactly what you’re saying, like, you know, they, they are the masters of their own destiny to a certain extent, and that you have to make sure that you have the, the processes, the, the procedures, and, and you have a, the best understanding of what this mission is and can be, and you’re preparing for the future, but you understand, you know, the risks that go in with that. That interpersonal connection of looking the person in the eye and saying, I’m, don’t worry, I’m going to take care of you; I wonder if that’s a component of it too.

Zeb Scoville: We cannot ask for a better crew. I mean, we could fly Artemis II with anyone in the Astronaut Office; it’s, it’s across the board a great group.

Host: Yeah.

Zeb Scoville: This, this crew I am particularly excited with. I’ve known them all for a long time. And they gel together. I think that, that Jeff and I have all had, you know, experiences with them at a, at a personal level, on a technical level, and, you know, just as much as, you know, we’ll have their back, they’ve got our back as well. And that’s, that comes down to trust and, you know, I’m glad to know that we’ve got it in spades.

Host: And Jeff, that, that’s true for the team too, right? I mean, we have, you have to make sure that you have experienced and trustworthy flight controllers at your side every, every step of the way. And that’s why you’re doing the sim[ulation]s. That’s why you’re training across the board. And so, you know, what are you doing now, really, guys, for Artemis II to make sure that you’re going to have a trustworthy, ready-to-go team by the time we fly?

Jeff Radigan: Yeah. And, and it’s, you hit on it, right? Trust is, is what really holds any operations team together, right, whether it’s in human spaceflight or whether it’s, it’s somewhere else. You know, at this point we’ve got a number of folks who have been working this mission for years, like I have, and they’ve gotten opportunities to go meet the engineers who are designing the vehicle or design the vehicle, the folks that are building it, to really build trust with those people as well so that we’re able to communicate effectively. You know, trust leads to good communication…

Host: Yeah.

Jeff Radigan:…to really fully understand the system so that we can make good decisions. I know we’ll have some additional folks joining the team as time goes on. There’s always a little bit of turnover in any operations team. And that’s why we have, have the training regimen that we do in order to, to bring folks in, get them integrated with the team. But I, I, it’s really the folks that have been with us for a while on this mission that are going to hang around till the end. I mean, that’s, that’s, those are my right-hand folks, and, you know, I, Zeb can probably talk about it because, you know, he took my, my team and he’s running it now and it seemed to be, be pretty flawless from what I’ve been able to see that they’re…

Zeb Scoville: Jeff runs a tight shift. [Laughter] His team is primed; they know their stuff.

Jeff Radigan: But it really comes down to that. And, and I know they’ll treat the crew the same way. It, it’s, it’s always, it’s interesting to hear you talk about the crew, right, because from my perspective these are folks that we’ve flown before. And so, there, there wasn’t maybe the new shine on, oh, these are the astronauts for, for Artemis II.

Host: Interesting.

Jeff Radigan: It was, alright, these are great astronauts. I’m really happy to have them flying on II. But they’re folks I already know and happy to work with again.

Host: That’s awesome. I want to kind of lead into sort of the evolution of, of operations because I think, you know, historically, I, I, just learning from, from my own selfish perspective on, on commentary, I, I pull from a, from folks who have done commentary before me to, to learn how they did things. And the things I think that is, has changed the most dramatically is, for me at least, is the number of spacecraft systems players that are involved in human, human spaceflight: you got to learn about Dragon, you got to learn about Starliner, you got to learn about the cargo vehicles, spacesuits. Now Orion, we have to think about the HLS (Human Landing System). We have to think about all these different components. I wonder how you guys balance it because, you know, Jeff, I know you’re talking about the Orion, and you want to make sure Orion is prepared, right? But it’s not like the flight control teams in general are ignoring HLS operations and Gateway operations, and you guys are thinking about it, right? There’s, you have to plan actively for that. How do you balance the huge variety of spacecraft systems, flight, flight rules and, and everything? It’s, it seems to be a more dynamic time than ever.

Jeff Radigan: There’s a core set of spaceflight systems and spaceflight knowledge that we all have to have, and that really apply to any vehicle we fly. And we, I think we start there is really…

Host: OK.

Jeff Radigan:…where we, we have our, our, I think of it as core set, you know, there’s multiple prop systems but they’re all propellant to, you know, put delta-v (change in velocity) into the vehicle to, to move it around. There’s life support systems; they all keep the crews alive. Now the specifics of those are different. And so, that’s where understanding the core principles at first and then really trusting our team because I’ll be, I’ll be honest with you, I can’t keep up with every detail of every vehicle that we fly, but that’s why we have a team. That’s why we have dedicated folks to go specifically learn the ISS ECLSS (environmental control and life support systems) components or specifically work and interface with SpaceX and the entire SpaceX team for their ECLSS equipment. You know, we’ve got folks that have learned and are learning Orion; we’ll have the same thing for HLS and Gateway. So it really, I think, you have to start with that firm foundation and then each and every time make sure you get the right experts on your team for the vehicle you’re flying, and ensure that they’ve got time to train appropriately, right? I think that’s what Zeb and I worry about a fair amount is ensuring that we’ve got folks time to go get smart on those systems. Yes, they’re, they’re confident at that, that core understanding as I mentioned, but we got to get guys into the details and really have those on our teams.

Zeb Scoville: What I think is particularly super-cool about leaving low-Earth orbit and going on a mission like Artemis II is finding the differences from those systems, right? So, I was in a, a meeting this morning talking about the rendezvous profile to dock Orion to Gateway. And some of the differences when you’re not trying to rendezvous in a low-Earth orbit where you’ve got a 90-minute period, all of a sudden you don’t have these relative velocities that will bring the vehicles apart or separate them because there are different altitudes. Like, you basically can fly straight and true in a, in a NRHO orbit, you know, for miles and miles, miles, right, because you don’t have the Earth’s gravity perturbing it in the same way. You have, when you have a mission that’s nine days instead of six months, how you treat the crew in terms of psychological support for long-duration expeditions versus a nine-day sprint mission where we’re going to be pushing them and pushing the vehicle to its limits, changes how we plan and schedule their day. What sort of debriefs we need to be able to get from them, what sort of rest periods we need to be able to factor in? And so, like looking to make sure we don’t apply, we apply the right lessons from past programs, but don’t apply patterns which may not always be applicable, and, and those little differences are what really make it, in my mind, interesting to, to see how those evolve based on the environment.

Host: That is fascinating. If you think about Artemis missions beyond that too, right, so Artemis II, you’re, you’re, you’re quoting nine days, ten days, it’s around that area. It’s a really short duration, which you’re recategorize, we’ve talked a lot of six-month expeditions as marathons, now we’re talking about a sprint. And so I wonder, you know, for, for Artemis missions going forward, you know, is it, is it that same mentality, or, or, you know, is there, is there this growth period where Artemis missions get progressively longer, maybe not to six months, but you start have to having some kind of nice mix of the sprint and the marathon and those sorts of things?

Jeff Radigan: I think we’re getting into the, the relay races, the track analogy here where you’ve got a long, first day, you know, the crew’s got to go through launch and we’ve got TLI to get them on their way. Then you’ve got a few days of, you know, getting ready to, to get into lunar orbit, whether it’s the NRHO or, you know, some of the other burns that are there, but there’s not a lot else to do. And so, it’s kind of a, just a, you know, a calm before the storm. And then once you hit the Gateway or lander, then you’re on, you know, another one of those sprints where you’re going down to the surface and you got to make sure you get down safely, and then we’ll have six-ish days on the surface. Well, that’s a lot of, that’s a lot of time that we need to go do the EVAs and then get the crew back to the vehicle and it’s going to be a hard-charging time. But once you undock Gateway, now you’ve got a five-day ride home that there’s not a lot going on, so you got a little bit of time to rest again all before you get into re-entry, which is obviously a, a dynamic timeframe. So there’s some really active, really heavy times, but then there’s also some times where I think the crew can, can catch their breath, or the ground team can catch our breath, and then prepare for the next activity. So it’s really going to be a, a series of sprints rather than a marathon.

Host: OK. That’s a good way, yeah, and the marathon is the everyday on space station. You got your whatever, ten, 12 hours, you got your workouts, you got to make sure you get through it all. And there’s a lot of science to do that you have to get through. And then everything has to play off of each other in terms of priority. Is, is there anything that, you know, when you’re talking about things to do, things to check on, on Artemis, you know, are, are you, what are you doing to make sure that you can go into it with a certain level of confidence? Jeff, you mentioned, one of the goals here for Artemis II is to make sure that for Artemis III you’ve done as much as possible to make sure Orion is ready, that you can think about Orion for future Artemis missions. What are you, who are you going to, to check on to make sure that you, you have the confidence in that? Are you looping in the human research folks? Are you looping in the, you know, like the right subsystem folks? What do you have to do to give yourself that confidence that you can say, you know what, Orion’s ready for, for future Artemis missions?

Jeff Radigan: So we put a call out a few years ago to talk about tests, you know, test objectives that we would, we would put on Orion. Our operations team came up with a list of things that we thought would be valuable, but, you know, sometimes, you know, we come up with a test and, and you know, maybe the engineering team wants to tweak it, or maybe the health and human performance folks, the, the crew health folks want to tweak it, which is a good thing, right? We really want all the eyes to make sure that we’re able to get the best tests we can. And so those are, have been developed and I, I think they’ll continue to get tweaked as we go forward, to ensure that we’re really getting the, the best tests we can. And so those are run past our engineering folks here at NASA. And, and as well as our medical folks. There’s another piece of it though, which is, you know, more forward looking: what are we going to do on Artemis III that we don’t have to do on Artemis II, and can we do as much of that on II as possible, right? Zeb mentioned the, the cabin depress; we don’t, we don’t need to depress the cabin on Artemis II, we can keep it at 14-7 the whole flight, but we are going to have to depress it to dock to Gateway and the lander. So is that something we can do, and we, it is something we are going to do on Artemis II, to go ensure that we’ve got the right procedures in place to depress and repress the cabin. We think that’s a good activity to ensure that we fully understand those systems and we can do that, not because it’s necessary for Artemis II but because it’s necessary for Artemis III and beyond to be able to do those missions. And so that’s what we’re really trying to look at. You know, prox ops for Artemis III, Artemis IV; that’s why we have the prox ops demo on Artemis II. And we’re going to fly the Orion around the ICPS (Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage) is not because we need it again for Artemis II, but because the Artemis campaign, the future Artemis missions, are going to need our knowledge that was gained on II.

Host: Yeah. Very interesting. You know, there’s a lot, there’s a lot of rabbit holes that I think we can, we can go down when it comes to the operations. I do want to keep it, you know, more high-level so that we’re not, you know, we, we can get into some of the, like the, the deeper sort of nitty gritty things, but I think, in general, I think one of the things to, to take away from this is just that this is happening, that Artemis I already happened and that we have a crew, that we can look into their eyes and say, you’re going to be flying to the Moon. And that we’re having these conversations now. One of the things that we talk about a lot when it comes to Artemis is, you know, the whole Moon to Mars idea. And I think, a lot of this conversation so far, we’ve been thinking about the Moon and preparing for the Moon and, and it’s, to me, having that grounded perspective is something that I, I certainly appreciate because time and time again, I, I, we keep talking about this Moon to Mars thing, but I’m sure it’s ingrained in the flight operations team as well, that you guys are, you know, when you think about the next step, when you think about how Artemis II leads to Artemis III and beyond, that you’re also thinking about how everything we’re doing now will eventually lead to humans on Mars, and that this, these steps are the right ones to take. I wonder if you guys have a sense of appreciation for that and are maybe even thinking that far ahead purposefully as you are going through the Artemis or, you know, just, or maybe it’s lost as, as you, as you get to…

Zeb Scoville: No, it’s not lost.

Host: It’s not.

Zeb Scoville: Yeah. 100%. 100%.

Host: OK, very cool.

Zeb Scoville: But there’s some nuance there, right? I mean, I think the, the wrong way to interpret that question would be that we are going to the Moon only to practice an operation so that we can go to Mars, right?

Host: OK.

Zeb Scoville: We are going to the Moon to go to the Moon. Let’s be very clear about that. There is a lot that we’re going to be able to get out of the Moon and the capabilities that we’re going to get from the South Pole region, both from the scientific resources, the mineral resources, the, the volatile resources that potentially allow us to take the, the South Polar ice. You know, I, I can break that down to hydrogen and oxygen; last time I checked, that’s the recipe for water and rocket fuel. With that, you know, we can potentially learn how to get cryogenic fuel off of the South Pole of the Moon, out of the gravity wall of the Earth and that will enable humans to be interplanetary and potentially be a fuel source to be able to take us to Mars, right? Yes, absolutely. It’s sort of like you have to have the, the decadal vision that, that we want to have humans on the surface of Mars. But that does not make the Moon just a practice short term, you know, test ground on the way.

Host: Yeah.

Zeb Scoville: There are areas on the far side of the Moon that are shielded from the radio frequency noise of the Earth. So you can have radio telescopes that can have the most pure view of the universe without the, the noise from the Earth transmissions. There are, there are volatiles from comets that crashed into the South Pole of the Moon that are, go back, you know, 4.5 billion years ago, original, you know, you know, ice from those comets that we’re able to, as I said, extract volatiles. The impact history of the Moon is identical to that of the Earth. All of those craters that are on the Moon, the same frequency hit the Earth; it just got eroded and absorbed by the atmosphere or by tectonic plates or by rain and by, and by wind. But we can go look at that and understand what the Earth has been through as well when this perfectly preserved record of four of, you know, 4.5 billion years of history, right? So yes, we are going to Mars and with that, when we get to Mars, like the whole, you know, non-linear, you know, expansion of, of discovery, we’re going to be able to have there both for exploration and, and taking the human race to Mars. But, but don’t let it be lost that we are going to the Moon also to go to the Moon.

Host: I think that’s an important perspective and I think in a lot of conversations we’ve had, we’ve maybe lost sight of that a little bit. And so, I appreciate that. That’s, that’s an awesome perspective to really bring it back to the Moon. Is that, Jeff, I wonder if you have the same sort of thoughts, maybe on the Moon or maybe you are maybe forward linking to, to forward-looking to Mars?

Jeff Radigan: Well, I, I think Zeb covered the Moon, [Laughter] so may, maybe I’ll take the other part of the question, which is, which is how do, how do we keep going, right? If…

Host: Yeah.

Jeff Radigan:…if you take a look at, and I think of it in risk management, right? In low-Earth orbit, we can be back on Earth in a couple of hours. In lunar space, it’s going to be a week or more to getting back on, on Earth. And in Martian space it’s going to be six months till you can get home. The, the amount that you have to sustain yourself as a crew in a vehicle just grows as, you know, the further away from, from Earth we get. And that transition is really what we are learning here. I, I know a lot of, of our folks going through the Artemis II development have kind of made that mental shift, but there’s, there’s more to go because, you know, on Artemis II, we can get back in anywhere from two to five days, you know, worst case return time; as we get into the NRHO, it’s going to be, you know, seven, eight days home. That’s a long time. And so your mindset has to change from, do we need to do everything we can to get home as possible, to hold on, I got to stabilize where I’m at, right? I have to be able to handle, you know, whether it’s a failure case or whether it’s an unforeseen situation, I don’t have the luxury of just returning to home as fast as possible. I have to be self-sufficient. And that concept, that shift, is what’s going to get us to Mars, because we have to be self-sufficient to be able to, to trans, you know, go over the distance between the Earth and, and Mars. So we have to make that shift. We have to keep going on that. The Moon is, is the next step. It’s not the first step, but it’s the next step.

Host: Yeah.

Jeff Radigan: And we have to be able to, to just again, be more self-sufficient with the spacecrafts, which leads to the operations team on the ground figuring out how can we support the crew in the spacecraft rather than, you know, fly from the ground. We’ve gotten kind of used to flying the space station from the ground, and some of the other satellites from the ground, and we’re going to have to get back to how do we best prepare the crew in the vehicle to fly on their own, and then, you know, we’re the, the troubleshooters that they can call for help, but it’s, it’s them and the spacecraft flying itself.

Host: It is a shift, isn’t it? There’s a certain level of discomfort because there’s almost an ease in knowing that you can do things real time, you can control things from the ground, you can relieve the crew, but it is sort of a shift. And in a way, I guess to me, I would think that it’s kind of a, a good, like you say, shift in the mentality that it would take for sustained operations. Is it fair to say that, you know, the more that we do Artemis missions, the more that we do that, the more that those procedures are refined and the better prepared we are for Mars?

Jeff Radigan: I think if we do it the right way, the answer is yes. And I, I think it, it’s going to take us having to, you know, perhaps put our ego and pride aside a little bit and say, OK, what’s, what’s best for the long-term mission? That is an operations team that is in some ways on call to a vehicle and a crew that has to sustain themselves. And that’s just a little, little bit different. If we do this the right way, it’s absolutely great preparation for going to Mars. It’s, it’s going to teach us a lot about how we’re going to go do that successfully. If we treat it as a, a time-delayed low-Earth orbit where we call the ground for everything, that’s not really setting us up for long-term success. And so, we have to make sure that we have the right mentality going in.

Host: And so, Zeb, bringing it back to the Moon, you spoke so passionately about the Moon. I, I wonder how it builds, how Artemis builds on itself in a way? If you think about it, Artemis I, Artemis II, a lot of these are sort of the stepping stones. We’re doing Artemis II; we call it a flight test because that’s what it is. We’re making sure the system is ready for those future Artemis missions. But the idea is that it’s a sustained program and then it gets increasingly more complicated. And you can try new things. You could do some of the lunar excursions, you can stay there for longer periods, and it just sort of keeps building and building and building. Thinking about that and preparing for that, that’s, it’s, is it fair to characterize it as an ever-evolving thing, and how are we tackling that?

Zeb Scoville: In many ways, it reminds me of the early ISS assembly days where each shuttle mission might be happening a few months after the previous one, and it’s going to bring up a new laboratory module or a new truss segment or a new solar arrays or new radiators or new, you know, power system’s going to be reconfigured. And so, each flight of that vehicle keeps evolving and with it comes new systems and new capabilities. Now take that and, and look at that on an exponential scale with, with Artemis and you bring in the lander and the partnership with SpaceX there for the first one, there’s going to be a, a second partnership for future landers on the Artemis V timeframe. You bring in all the international and commercial partners to the Gateway program, and that’s going to take an assembly sequence itself. It’ll be a smaller scale than ISS, but still, nonetheless, it’ll have evolving capabilities that, that get built into that. The, the lunar surface, I really believe is where there’s also going to be a similar growth of capabilities, not just for the NASA missions that are, that are for humans, but there’ll be the CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) missions bringing logistics. There’ll be communication infrastructure potentially being put into orbit and on the ground. There’ll be, potentially, you know, commercial missions that are going to, to the surface regions, and, and there’ll be, as I said, multiple landers, multiple suit developers, is there eventually going to be a, a lunar habitat that is more long term, do, how the, the duration of the stay goes from the six days that Jeff talked about to potentially 30 days or even longer. That is going to be something that at the cost and effort of each mission, we don’t have the luxury of not expanding the capability rapidly on each mission. We can’t repeat the missions without growing each time because it’s such a, an investment by, all the, the partner nations and companies to be able to do this, that we’ve got to grow quick, and we’ve got to learn fast.

Host: Yeah. Yeah. I think of the space station that way that it’s, it is not necessarily the same thing, but it is, I mean, we, it’s, it’s a very, it’s a very refined process and we have these long expeditions to continue to do science, right? They go up there, the mission is science, but it is sort of different, Artemis, being in that way that it, like we can see increasingly complex, we are trying new things, every single mission, like you’re saying. And it’s a very exciting time. I’m definitely looking forward to it. Zeb and Jeff, thank you so much for coming on Houston We Have a Podcast. This was a fascinating discussion. Lots of work ahead to prepare for Artemis II and beyond, and you guys are the right folks to do it, so I appreciate your time.

Jeff Radigan: Yeah. Thank You.

Zeb Scoville: My pleasure. It’ll be here before you know it.

Host: That’s true. [Laughter]

Zeb Scoville: I got to get back to work. See you later. [Laughter]

Host: All right. [Laughter]

[Music]

Host: Hey, thanks for sticking around. I really enjoyed my conversation today with Zeb and Jeff. I learned a lot and hope you did too. You can check out NASA.gov/Artemis for the latest on everything going on with that program. And of course, if you just want to listen to podcasts, we are not the only one. You can go to NASA.gov/podcasts to check out some of the other great shows we have across the agency. If you do want to talk to us, though, Houston We Have a Podcast, we’re on the Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can use the hashtag #AskNASA on your favorite platform to submit an idea for the show or maybe ask a question, just make sure to mention it’s for us at Houston We Have a Podcast. This episode was recorded on April 19, 2023. Thanks again to Will Flato, Pat Ryan, Heidi Lavelle, Belinda Pulido, and Jaden Jennings. And of course, thanks again to Zeb Scoville and Jeff Radigan for taking the time to come on the show. Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on and tell us what you think of our podcast. We’ll be back next week.