Joshua Santora: NASA has been given its loftiest charge since the 1960s and KSC has a critical role…

Mark Wiese:We know we’re standing on the shoulders of giants and it’s pretty nostalgic and pretty emotional.

Joshua Santora:Next, on the Rocket Ranch.

Launch Countdown Sequence:EGS Program Chief Engineer, verify no constraints to launch.

EGS Chief Engineer team has no constraints.

I copy that. You are clear to launch.

Five, four, three, two, one, and lift-off.

All clear.

Now passing through max q, maximum dynamic pressure.

Welcome to space.

Joshua Santora: NASA’s accelerating a human return to the Moon and will put the first woman, and the next man, on the lunar South Pole by 2024. The agency’s going back to the Moon in two phases—the first is focused on speed. Second, NASA will establish sustainable missions by 2028. The Gateway will be the center of that exploration—serving as a home base in lunar orbit for missions to the surface of the Moon and beyond. The Gateway will be a collaboration with NASA, international partners and commercial companies.

Kennedy has been handed a piece of the puzzle and Mark Weise will leverage the expertise already at the space center to lead the logistics team for Gateway. I was able to catch up with Mark, but first, a disclaimer: while we’re definitely headed back to the Moon, we are still working out some of the details. As you enjoy this podcast, keep in mind that plans and details are in flux and what was accurate at time of recording may have changed since then—which is great because that just gives us a reason to do a follow-up episode! Now, Mark.

Mark Wiese: We love rockets down here. And this is the “Rocket Ranch” podcast, so—should have anticipated that coming.

Joshua Santora: And his sidekick, Johnny Nguyen.

Johnny Nguyen:It feels like it’s, like, project management 101.

Joshua Santora: Hoping they could teach me a thing or two about Gateway. But first, I had some nagging questions about our history with the Moon.

Gene Cernan (astronaut):Probably one of the most significant things we can think about when we think about Apollo, is that it has opened for us being the world a challenge of the future. The door is now cracked, but the promise of that future lies in the young people, not just in America, but the young people all over the world.

Joshua Santora: All right, so, I am here now in the booth with Mark Wiese and Johnny Nguyen. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me.

Mark Wiese:Thank you.

Johnny Nguyen: Thanks for having us.

Joshua Santora: So, I want to actually go way back for a second and ask the question, why did we stop flying to the Moon? Because we’re about to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first man walking on the Moon, and it’s been a long time since we’ve been there. So we’re about to return to that kind of phase of exploration, but why stop?

Mark Wiese: I think the place our country was at back then, it just wasn’t as urgent anymore. You know, we made that initial flag to show we were beating the Russians in the space race that we had going on at the time. And I think, in our country, there was a lot more politically going on domestically of where to spend money, what was a priority, and space just wasn’t the priority right then.

Joshua Santora: So, is that to say that we’ve kind of come full circle now and, like, this is becoming a greater priority for our nation?

Johnny Nguyen: I’m not sure if it’s full circle or even a greater priority, but that’s where we’re at right now.

Mike Pence: Just as the United States was the first nation to reach the Moon in the twentieth century, so too will we be the first nation to return astronauts to the Moon in the 21st century.

Johnny Nguyen: So I think that’s an exciting place to be. We’re getting to the Moon, going to Mars with this mandate from the White House.

Joshua Santora: What’s really the significance of returning to the Moon, for NASA and for America?

Johnny Nguyen: I think it’s a great time to be here at the Space Center.

Mark Wiese: So, it’s finally at the point where we can go really expand and get out of low Earth orbit, right. We’ve been trying to commercialize low Earth orbit for a while, and now we’re at the point where we can go find a way to leverage the technologies, try to learn from a deep-space environment, and the Moon is our closest neighbor to go from. And other countries are going now. I mean, you see, competition is something that’s in our veins as Americans. So, China just put a rover on the Moon. So we want to be a part of that again, right, so that’s what charges our political machine to try to find a way to help us get there.

Joshua Santora: So, between almost 50 years ago, when we left the Moon, and our return, hopefully within the next five years, we’ve done a lot. We’ve learned a lot. And, so, what has been evolution for us of, “Hey, we’re smarter now. It might be taking us a little bit of time to get back there, but we’re way smarter than we were 45 years ago.”

Mark Wiese: I think a lot of it is fiscally. Like, it’s cost us tons of money to do what we’ve done. And shuttle was announced, and supposed to launch weekly, right, and we couldn’t pull that off. And now—you know, there’s ways for commercial companies to make money with data from on-orbit, right. I mean, our cellphone companies want to find a way to get out of the cell-tower business and into orbit. So there’s more of an industry participation, which is helping us, I think, make these steps quicker. Then you take the miniaturization of electronics, the added manufacturing capabilities—it’s just a little more doable.

Johnny Nguyen: Yeah, I think you’re right. Like, back then, it was just NASA, but nowadays we’ve got so many different commercial companies, commercial partners, and all of us working together, using the right capabilities with each other, I think that’s what’s really spurring the innovation, and the ability to get back so much faster this time around.

Mark Wiese: I mean, ISS was sold—it was the first program I worked when I first came out of college. And ISS was all about science. And I remember, in the beginning, it was this constant battle of, “Well, things are going wrong. Things are breaking. We have to spend crew time on fixing things.” And you just couldn’t get science up there. And they’re finally at that point. Six-person crew, and you have talks of a commercial space station, and lots of healthcare companies and research-and-development companies trying to find ways to take advantage of microgravity to benefit all of us.

Joshua Santora: So, you mentioned, obviously, both of you, the commercial aspect of where we are today. So I’m assuming that it’s safe to say that, as we look towards Gateway—which, obviously, we’re gonna get to here in a second—we’re going arm in arm with commercial companies to make this a successful mission, yeah?

Mark Wiese: Yes, arm in arm. And, you know, it’s both—we need them. Again, this commercial business case that’s starting to be out there. The first piece of Gateway is a power-propulsion element. So there’s commercial satellites that will benefit from solar propulsion, solar-electric propulsion, and finding ways to leverage that for us, as well.

Joshua Santora: The power and propulsion element will provide power, propulsion and communications to the entire Gateway. NASA is getting ready to make an award to an American company or companies to develop, launch and test this element. It’s targeted to launch on a commercial rocket by 2022.

Johnny Nguyen: Yeah. I mean, arm in arm. Sometimes they’re pulling us. Sometimes we’re pulling them. But one way or another, we’re all in this together. And, of course, you can’t forget the government side of the house, too, with SLS and Orion. That’s a crucial, crucial piece for us, as well. And how it all plays together, again, I think that’s what makes it interesting, and hopefully a positive perception by everybody, too.

Mark Wiese: It’s a way to make us stronger. You know, the beginning of NASA, that 10 healthy centers, and you spread out the political leverage across the country. Now we have this spread-out political leverage over government systems, commercial systems, all working and leveraging each other. It’s a really good time.

Joshua Santora: So, Mark, tell me what exactly is Gateway?

Mark Wiese: So, Gateway is a lunar outpost in the Moon’s orbit. It’s a camping trip. I mean, we’re going a quarter of a million miles away from home. We need just the minimal stuff. It’s an RV in lunar orbit. It’s small.

Joshua Santora: Okay.

Mark Wiese: It’s not Space Station. It’s a spacecraft. It’s a lunar outpost, a way point for us to aggregate pieces and, really, to get down to the surface of the Moon.

Joshua Santora: And, so, is this a “deliver it all at one time”? Is this “fly things one piece at a time” like we did with Space Station, and connect them once we’re in orbit? What’s the process for getting from Earth’s surface to orbit around the Moon?

Mark Wiese: So, it’s that “one piece at a time,” like we did Space Station, and definitely figure out what’s that minimal capability you need now that we have this huge charge to land humans on the Moon within five years. So, get up that power-propulsion element, commercially launched. Delivery on orbit, actually, where a commercial provider will get it on orbit, check it out for a year on their own, and then turn it over to the government. So we will kind of be even more hands-off there. Then JSC’s building a utilization module, kind of like a node on Space Station—a bunch of docking ports, connector space, some habitable volume on the inside. Get that up there, get logistics up there so that you’ve got some supplies, and then start to put pieces of the lander up there so we can get boots on the Moon in 2024. And then, after that, you grow Gateway a little bit more, and you start to put some habitable volume on there and you get a little bigger.

Johnny Nguyen: And it feels like we couldn’t do what we do today with our strategy without the foundational steps of what LSP has done, Commercial Crew has done, commercial cargo resupply, all these other folks. I can’t imagine doing a program like this in the way we’re doing it, lean and agile, 10, 15 years ago.

Mark Wiese: I mean, the timing is perfect with Commercial Crew. I mean, all the work they’ve had to do to put human systems on commercial rockets and figure out how to get requirements lined up to give a lot to the commercial providers and find a way to assess that on our side, we’re gonna learn and leverage from that, and Gateway’s gonna be a human-tended system when Orion docks. So we’re trying to find that sweet spot of, we’re not human-rated all the time, but when Orion’s there, we’ve got to find the right requirements to levy. So, I mean, we’re leveraging all over the place. And then partnering with EGS, like I said, SLS/Orion is key. That’s how we get the crew up there. And, ideally, the agency wants that huge, heavy lift capability to put up as big of pieces as we can. That’s where you get efficiencies of scale.

Joshua Santora: All right. So, coming back to where we are now. So, Mark, you have been—and I’m gonna get this wrong, so correct me. You’ve been set up as the director at the Kennedy Space Center for the logistics module of Gateway.

Johnny Nguyen: What is your title?

Mark Wiese: Yeah, so, I’ll come off of that pedestal that Josh put me on. I am the manager of the logistics element, which is really just a project office. So, Johnson Space Center is the program office for Gateway, for all the different pieces of gateway. And my title now—I guess I’m, like, Johnny, two weeks, maybe a month it’s official, I think. So, it’s manager of Logistics Element for the Gateway Program.

Joshua Santora:In my defense, Mark described his job about three different ways to me over the course of our time together that day. The punchline is that these guys are way more focused on getting the job done than job titles.

Johnny Nguyen: I just make up a new title for you every week. [ Laughter ]

Joshua Santora: Just every time somebody asks you, just make it up a little bit different?

Johnny Nguyen: “Oh, Mark? Yeah, yeah. Czar of Logistics. Yes, yes, yes.”

Joshua Santora: What exactly is the logistics module, and what’s kind of included in that?

Mark Wiese: So, we’re officially given the logistics element. The “element” term means project office. So we are all things delivery services to Gateway. That includes a launch and a spacecraft. The spacecraft will include a logistics module—so, a volume that can carry cargo, whether it’s inside, pressurized, and will hook up to a docking port and astronauts can go enter that habitable volume and do science or take out food or load it with trash, and it’s also the external ability to lock payloads onto the outside, or other pieces of Gateway that we might want to bring up, like a robotic arm.

Joshua Santora: And, so, Johnny, where do you fit in this picture with Gateway?

Johnny Nguyen: I am supporting Mark and helping to set up what I’ll call the project-control type stuff.

Mark Wiese: Listen to the inflection in his voice, because he’s not sure what his title is, yet, either. [ Laughter ]

Joshua Santora: So, project control. What does that mean? Unpack that for me.

Johnny Nguyen: So, it’s like all the background, backbone type stuff. Risk management, config management, budget resource, workforce, standing up the organization, data management, how do we all collaborate and work together cohesively as a team? So, hopefully, it’s all behind-the-scenes type stuff that just makes things work easier.

Mark Wiese: He’s selling himself short. So, I mean, the amount of whiteboard sessions we’ve done in the past—I don’t know if there’s a title for, like, strategist. The two of us spent a lot of time in the beginning trying to brainstorm, “How do we pull in and leverage the rest of the center? How do we do this?” And he’s got a great creative brain, so it’s been a huge help.

Joshua Santora: So, what’s got you really excited? What are you really focused on going into this project?

Mark Wiese: I love doing what I’m doing right now. So, today has been this really cool day where we did these two town halls at the center, and I get to sit in this, like, padded room that’s not because I’m banging my head against the walls.

Joshua Santora: I was gonna say—[ Laughs ]

Mark Wiese: Trying to make sure I can get the message out. I enjoy trying to inspire others and connect them with this awesome mission that we get. We do a lot of hard things in this agency, and it’s so easy to get wrapped up in the art of what’s impossible, and I get to try to help inspire people to the art of the possible. And that’s what gets me out of bed.

Joshua Santora: So, explain to me a little bit about kind of the path forward for Gateway. So, it seems like you guys are really in kind of a brainstorming and planning period. So how much do the other operations of Gateway impact you guys, and how much of it is you guys just really trying to figure out, like, “We need to be masters of our piece here. We need to make sure we can connect to the other guy. But we’re just here doing our thing.”

Mark Wiese: There’s so much of that going on right now. You know, the traditional NASA way of doing things is, line up all these requirements, decompose requirements for a long time, get them all perfect, and then let’s go move forward. And we don’t have that time. So, you know, once you talk about, Johnny’s in the throes right now of a bottoms-up, you know? We have to go figure out what this is gonna cost for the next 10 years. And you’re starting at zero.

Johnny Nguyen: 10 years, man.

Joshua Santora: That’s a long time.

Johnny Nguyen: Trying to figure out how much it costs us.

Mark Wiese: Have we been here 10 years? I don’t think I’ve been at—No, I guess we’ve been here 10 years. Time goes fast. But, I mean, it’s hard. Think about the early years of your career, and saying, “All right, what am I gonna do for the next 10 years?” It’s hard.

Johnny Nguyen: But it does feel like—all right, you tell me if I am wrong here, Mark, but it feels like it’s project management 101 to the degree where, “All right. Let’s start this massive new project. What will it take? ‘A,’ I got to assemble the team. I got to figure out roles and responsibilities. What are the crucial first steps I need to outline out there?” Let that get some traction, let that grow a little bit. And then, as the team grows, and as the responsibility grows, we’ll just keep on expanding a little more. But the core building blocks have to be there in terms of, like, requirements, operations, schedules, stuff like that.

Mark Wiese: Yeah. You know, and it brings more emphasis to light of how you have to trust people and leverage expertise, right. Delegate things down to the lowest level. Ask people what they think is right. And make sure you have open communication, transparent communication as you roll that stuff up, and everybody understands the trades you’re bouncing around in your head. Because you’re spitballing it. You’re trying to take that early wag. And then, in the requirements straight space, I mean, that’s eating our lunch right now, trying to—Level 2 would like to—and I say Level 2. The program office at JSC, right. They’re working hard to try to nail down exactly what this is. But it’s a commercial partnership, so there’s only so much they know, and we don’t have the time to wait for everything. So we’re trying to run in parallel with them and communicate along the way. “All right. We’re writing this down. Does that look like it lines up with you?” And as long as we set up our contracts appropriately and have the flexibility, you can always change things. It might cost you money to change things, but if you set it up the right way, and you push down authority to the contracts, as well, you should have the flexibility to enable this in the long run.

Joshua Santora: Sustainability is a big component of our return to the Moon, but what’s that mean?

Mark Wiese: We’ve got to be sustainable. We have to find a way to be reusable, right? I mean, we’re spending the taxpayers’ dollars. Let’s not just throw it all away in one shot. We want to go there to stay, and ultimately we want to find ways to push towards deep-space transportation capabilities so that we can go out further in our solar system. So this is the learning, the early building blocks for us to get there.

Joshua Santora: And, on a technical level, what do you see as being the greatest engineering challenges? Are we talking about, we’re just repackaging lots of great technology, or are we, like, cutting-edge stuff here?

Mark Wiese: So, the environment out there in the lunar vicinity is much harsher. So, a lot stronger radiation environment. The extremes of hot and cold are definitely tougher. The biggest challenge—and I remember an early control board talking through this—we’re not gonna have a crew there 24/7, so how do we make sure we’re not just throwing things up to our garage and it sits there forever, like happens at my house? So there’s a lot of talk about, how do we make sure we have intra-vehicle robotics, and how do we design things now for capabilities we’re not sure of how we’ll use them yet? So we got to, like, really leverage flexible designs so that we can do as many things autonomously as possible.

Joshua Santora: I’ve been told that the orbit is not what you would typically think about for, like, orbiting a body. Like, Space Station stays fairly similar range to the Earth as it orbits. It’s something like 250 miles. But I’ve heard that the orbit around the Moon for Gateway is much different. Is that accurate?

Mark Wiese: It’s a highly elliptical orbit. So it gets really close. Now they’re looking at, again, this halo orbit. It’s an elliptical orbit. I don’t know. We’re starting to get out of my wheelhouse. This is where we’re leveraging LSP, because the PR only goes so far. You know, the orbital mechanics takes a lot of smart people that know exactly what they’re doing. It’s in that highly elliptical orbit. We’re orbiting the Earth just like the Moon. So, we just showed some views in a town hall where, if you step back, Gateway orbits the Earth, goes around the Earth in the same period as the Moon. And then, if you look at it from a different perspective, it’s this highly elliptical orbit around the Moon, and kind of leveraging some of the equilibrium points in gravity, Lagrange points out there so that it’s pretty stable, it’s easy to get in and out of, and it’s a great place to leverage science opportunities.

Joshua Santora: So, spitball me some numbers. How close do we get at our closest, and how far away do we get at our furthest?

Mark Wiese: I don’t know. I’d be making it up. [ Laughter ]

Joshua Santora: Well, hey, you said that’s what you’re doing right now, right? You said you’re just making it up as you go.

Mark Wiese: I want to say you’re in, like, the—I don’t even know. Hundreds of kilometers at the closest. And then it’s probably tens of thousands a the furthest.

Joshua Santora: Okay.

Mark Wiese: I’m gonna go back and look at that, and then everybody can laugh at me and say, “Yep, keep him doing podcasts and now actually running pen to paper.”

Joshua Santora: [ Laughs ]

Mark Wiese: It’s not as close as Space Station. When it gets in that low orbit around the Moon—I wish I still had Joe Dant. He was just in here with us with the town hall. We got some really sharp people across this center that know this stuff better. But I don’t think it gets as close as Space Station is to us today. So the lunar landers have to bring the capabilities to actually descend. But, again, the gravity well is a lot different. It’s not as strong, so it’s easier to get down, and they got to have the ascent capability to get back. So Gateway’s kind of that safe haven for them to get back to and be able to stage the crew, get back on Orion, and get back home.

Joshua Santora:Mark was actually pretty close. We got a hold of Joe Dant, who is the ranking member of the Gateway team representing safety and mission assurance, and he was able to confirm that Gateway’s apolune, or furthest point from the Moon, is 75,000 km and its perilune, or closest point to the Moon, is 3,200 km. At its closest, that’s about the diameter of the Moon and at its farthest it is equivalent to about 20 percent of the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

Joshua Santora: And, so, why is this kind of an orbit better than just kind of staying close to the moon and kind of keeping that tight orbit around the Moon?

Mark Wiese: Because then it’s easier for Orion to get to. So, we don’t have to have the tight tolerances of getting Orion really close to the Moon. You can go rendezvous with Gateway when it’s further away and it’s not as hard to get into. Gives you a little bit less Delta-v to get there, and then you ride this orbit—you know, when you kind of switch planes a little bit and ride this orbit in closer to the surface.

Joshua Santora: And I know you mentioned 10 years for budget, planning. That’s a long time. [ Chuckles ] So, what’s the projected timeline for things coming together? And when you think about a 10-year plan, what are you guys putting in that 10-year plan?

Johnny Nguyen: So, kind of like you mentioned, the first element—

Joshua Santora: For the record, I just got a couple of guys staring at each other, really, like…

Mark Wiese: It’s, like, changing every day, so we had to look at each other like, “Did anything happen this morning? Did it change again?”

Johnny Nguyen: I mean, like, there’s a manifest out there. So there’s a high-level guidance as far as, like, “Here’s Gateway. Here’s the essential building blocks for that, and here’s when we want to launch it and put it all together.” So, we have a rough master plan, per se, to build against, and that’s what we’re executing against. So as we’re laying the details for each of those components, we kind of fine tune it and say, “Oh, okay, I think this is much more realistic. Oh, hey, I think this is not so realistic,” or, “We’ll need some more money to make this happen or not.” So I think that’s where this cycle all comes together. We have the rough blueprints, but as we come together with this project-management review, I think we’ll see exactly, “Okay, this is highly achievable. Okay, this, we need to carry a risk against,” and we can work on that over the next couple years.

Mark Wiese: I mean, Space Station took 10, 12 years for assembly complete. You know, that first FGB in the node I think went up in ’98. Mr. Cabana, I hear him scratching his head, wondering why I don’t know the exact date. That was his mission. So, that was the first two pieces going together. The first crew went on orbit—that was when I first started working—was in October 2000. And it went through the end of the shuttle program, was getting all the major pieces up there and assembling it. So, we’re not a space station. I mentioned that before. It’s something smaller. So it’s like six launches, you know, to get all the main pieces we need put together. So everything that we’re looking at in this 10-year period is in the short term. It’s accelerated a little bit to get boots on the Moon even sooner.

[sound effect]

Joshua Santora: And is the focus really on the Moon at that point, or is there opportunity to use Gateway for further exploration?

Mark Wiese: So, the focus is definitely on the Moon. But what Gateway is showing, it’s that test objective for us to start to understand what would it take to go to Mars. So the agency’s looked at, for years, a deep-space transport capability, which would have to be something small, to have habitable volume for a crew, and have to have some kind of propulsion that could get them out there, and you’d probably dock Orion to it. So Gateway is kind of a first analogue for what that might become, and help us learn from that. Just like we learned in low Earth orbit Space Station, now we’re gonna go learn a quarter of a million miles away from home, something a lot smaller, that camping trip, and start to understand how we can explore deep space.

Joshua Santora: Will there be a regular human presence on board like we see with Space Station today?

Mark Wiese: So, no. So, Space Station, right, it’s got 24/7 human operations. Gateway is that camping trip. So we’re setting it up to go out there for a 30-day mission at first, and as we start to expand the habitable capabilities of the modules, we can hopefully get to 60, 90 days, maybe got a little bit beyond. But we’re trying to size it for that small. Go once a year, and go for 30, 60, 90 days.

Joshua Santora: And, kind of, as the leader of the team here at KSC, do you guys feel a significant weight this year with the 50th anniversary of our first walk on the Moon?

Mark Wiese: So, I am blessed to have some amazing people at the Space Center helping me, and I couldn’t get there without all the expertise and all the passion that’s coming from this team. And it’s definitely—you know, we all look around, a lot of us don’t have memories of 50 years ago, right? So we know we’re standing on the shoulders of giants, and it’s pretty nostalgic and pretty emotional to think about the opportunity that’s before us. So we’re all really excited about that. That definitely makes it much more impactful and exciting. I’ve had the opportunity over the course of my career to work a couple times where you get to put together something that people don’t think you’re able to do. That’s what our agency’s founded on, right? I mean, this whole “Failure is not an option,” right? That’s what we’re doing in Gateway. So, I mean, we are totally focused on trying to mold the clay into something that’s gonna be sustained excitement for the Space Coast, for Florida, for our agency, and something that we’re proud of going forward.

Joshua Santora: And we’re getting a little bit ahead of ourselves with this question, but thinking about the future, obviously thinking about—whenever you start a new project, you’re thinking about your end goal. What do you think it’s gonna be like? How are you gonna be feeling when we start seeing pieces of Gateway fly, and when we turn on the lights?

Mark Wiese: So, I’ve thought about this question a couple times as I go through it. You know, there’s so many times where you lose sleep, where your head is just spinning trying to understand what information is being throw at you, and how you’re gonna put it all together. And you get a little bit of reprieve when you step back and think about how awesome of a challenge this is we’re doing. I have a feeling that when the day comes that we first turn on the lights, I’m gonna be so buried in trying to figure out how we get past the next problem that I’m not gonna be able to step back and enjoy it. But I hope someone pinches me and we do, because we’re going back to the Moon. I mean, this is—it’s hard to even fathom this. It’s really amazing. I mean, this is the stuff that inspires the next generation. And I was inspired by movies. And so many people find little things in science fiction and turn it into science fact, and we’re paving in that ground for our kindergartners and our sixth graders and the child that’s not born yet, which is really neat.

Joshua Santora: All right, guys. Thank you so much, Johnny and Mark. Best of luck to you guys. Obviously the nation is watching. We’re excited to see you guys succeed over the next five years.

Mark Wiese: Thank you for having us, Josh. This was awesome. We’re very excited to be the voice of Kennedy to try to bring this to bear, and it’s gonna take the whole workforce.

Johnny Nguyen: Yeah, me too. And thank you. It’s a great time to be out here, to be part of something so important, to have a little bit of a legacy.

Mark Wiese: We got a design review to get to.

Joshua Santora: I’m Joshua Santora, and that’s our show. Thanks for stoppin’ by the rocket ranch. And special thanks to our guests Mark Wiese and Johnny Nguyen.

To learn more about mankind’s future exploration of the Moon, visit nasa.gov/moontomars. And to learn more about everything going on at the Kennedy Space Center, go to nasa.gov/kennedy. Check out NASA’s other podcasts to learn more about what’s happening at all of our centers at nasa.gov/podcasts.

A special shout-out to my colleague, Amanda Griffin, our producer, John Sackman, our soundman Lorne Mathre, and editor Michelle Stone. And remember: on the rocket ranch… even the sky isn’t the limit.

Mark Wiese: Did he say that with a smirk on his face?

Johnny Nguyen: A little bit. A little bit. But I’ll take it.