If you’re fascinated by the idea of humans traveling through space and curious about how that all works, you’ve come to the right place.

“Houston We Have a Podcast” is the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center from Houston, Texas, home for NASA’s astronauts and Mission Control Center. Listen to the brightest minds of America’s space agency – astronauts, engineers, scientists and program leaders – discuss exciting topics in engineering, science and technology, sharing their personal stories and expertise on every aspect of human spaceflight. Learn more about how the work being done will help send humans forward to the Moon and on to Mars in the Artemis program.

On Episode 180, Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager, breaks down the intricate planning and integrated teams that are preparing the next missions to the Moon. Sarafin details the mission profile for Artemis I. This episode was recorded on December 15, 2020.

For more Artemis episodes check out the Houston We Have a Podcast Artemis Page.

Transcript

Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 180, “Artemis Mission Management.” 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 in the world of human spaceflight. Humans are returning to the Moon in a sustainable way through the Artemis program. Getting the boots of the first woman and the next man on the lunar surface will take a large integrated team and a lot of intricate planning. There will be an uncrewed test flight first to demonstrate the capabilities of the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion deep space capsule. Then a test flight with humans onboard that will break a number of previous spaceflight records will follow. Going into this detailed landscape of the management of future Artemis missions and the mission profile of some these upcoming Artemis missions is Mike Sarafin, Artemis Mission Manager. As the Mission Manager, it is Mike’s job to chair the Mission Management Team that brings together all of the critical function areas of an Artemis mission and analyzes and accepts the risks. So, let’s get right into it, Artemis Mission Management with Mike Sarafin. Enjoy.

[ Music]

Host: Mike Sarafin, thanks for coming on Houston We Have A Podcast today.

Mike Sarafin: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here to talk about these exciting Artemis missions we have ahead of us.

Host: Yeah, right. Returning to the Moon, not a bad thing to be a part of. How does it feel to be — I mean, that’s quite a title, Mike, is Artemis Mission Manager. It sounds like your kind of in charge of the leading the charge here for organizing what will be a Moon mission.

Mike Sarafin: Yeah. So effectively, the role is at the top decision authority when it comes to executing the mission. We’ve got an amazing team of engineers off designing and building and testing the hardware right now. When it’s ready to fly, the ball passes to the operations team and then to myself as the Mission Manager, and it’s up to us to execute the mission and accomplish these agency goals and objectives that we’ve set.

Host: And you’re no stranger to executing the mission, right? You’ve been a part of the shuttle program, the International Space Station program, you’ve even been part of the Orion program and in the operations world. Can you tell me a little bit about your background and some of your experience in all of these different programs?

Mike Sarafin:Yes. So, you’re right in that I lived in the operations realm for 22 of my 27 years in my NASA career. I supported initially as a flight controller. My callsign was GNC which was Guidance Nav[igation] and Control and I did that for a decade in the shuttle program supporting all phases of flight, launch, orbit, rendezvous, docking. We serviced the Hubble Space Telescope entry and we flew missions to the Mir space station and then did the early International Space Station assembly missions and around that time I was looking for something different, for some additional growth opportunities, and they opened a opportunity up to be a flight director and I applied in late 2004 and was selected, fortunately selected, with an amazing group of flight directors in 2005 and, you know, that group of nine is just a stellar bunch of folks to be a part of and it was a real privilege to be alongside that group of fellow flight directors, and then to learn the ropes as a flight director. And then I got to support a dozen missions as a space shuttle flight director, for those I was the lead for as well as International Space Station missions and then Orion’s maiden flight test called Exploration Flight Test-1, so this Artemis I will be my 65th mission and I very much look forward to that.

Host: Mike, you said your 65th mission. That’s quite a number of — quite an experience, quite a list of missions under your belt. How do you feel? Do you feel like you’re ready for this next phase of flight, just given everything that you’ve done? I mean, you just went over like all this — all the different programs. You think you’re ready for this next challenge and you already talked about the teams that are a part of it, but your thoughts about just this upcoming era that we’re in, Moon missions?

Mike Sarafin: I would say a qualified yes. We’ve got probably 10,000 things we’ve got to get ready between now and Artemis I mission and we’ve got an amazing team that we work together with at the Kennedy Space Center, the Marshall Space Flight Center, and the Johnson Space Center, all pull it together for the rocket, the spacecraft, the ground systems, the launch team, the recovery team, the flight team, and you know, we have a march, a marathon ahead of us to get to the Flight Readiness Review and that’s when we’ll be ready to fly. We still have some training in front of us. We still have some decisions to make as it pertains to flight readiness and I’ve been on this rollercoaster a number of times in the past and I know what it feels like and it feels like we’re on the right path, the right trajectory right now, so again, that’s a qualified yes.

Host: Well, let’s kind of explore. When you talk about flight readiness, when you talk about some of the upcoming milestones, that’s what we’re really going to be discussing in depth today is mission management. Just what is that? There’s a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes to make a mission, to prepare for a mission and to eventually execute a mission, so can you tell us a little bit about what’s going on when it comes to mission management and how even pulling some examples from your previous experience, with shuttle, with ISS, just more about mission management?

Mike Sarafin: Yes. So mission management is really the process of taking a rocket and a spacecraft that has limitations and known system capabilities and applying it to a purpose, so we have the Space Launch System rocket, the Orion spacecraft, and we are at the agency level being asked to execute a series of flight tests to return humans to the Moon and progressively get more complicated objectives accomplished and to buy down risk as we move forward in that manifest. So you know, mission management is the process of determining what objectives we can achieve with reasonable risk that will lead us to return humans on the surface to the Moon and you know, we’ve got a series of flight tests, Artemis I, an uncrewed flight test, Artemis II, a crewed flight test, and then Artemis III, which is our goal to return humans to the Moon. As part of that, you kind of break it down into smaller pieces. You look at discrete flight phases and the objectives you want to achieve within those flight phases, and then you assess kind of the overall risk profile and then the implementation of it by our operations teams, whether it’s our launch and ground operations and recovery team led by the Exploration Ground Systems at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, or our flight operations team led out of the Mission Control Center in Houston. We look at, you know, all of the mission end to end, and then roll it up and work with the operations teams to ensure that they have the requirements end to end and then turn it over to them, give them the keys when it’s time to go fly. I used to be one of those folks, and now being on the customer side of that as opposed to the operations agent side of it, I have a full appreciation and a healthy understanding of some of the challenges and what it’s like to be in that chair, so you know, it’s all about having clarity in expectations, in clearly communicating what it is that we want to achieve and in return, understanding what risk we’re about to bite off.

Host: And you’ve kind of alluded to just, you know, who in this process is analyzing that risk and contributing to making sure that we are ready to go for the operations. You talked about there’s the operations side, there’s the SLS, there’s the Orion, there’s ground systems, there’s — I guess there’s a lot of players here that have to sit down and talk about all of these different aspects of a mission before you, like you said, you’re ready to hand over those keys.

Mike Sarafin: Right. So, it’s holistically looking at the mission and then looking at the mission within the context of the manifest so that you do have that bigger picture risk profile. It’s not tactical. It is more of a strategic view of the mission.

Host: Is there — does it look a lot like what we currently do for International Space Station missions, or maybe because we’re talking about the Moon here, maybe there’s a few more players involved?

Mike Sarafin: I would say it’s just different. You know, when you look at the different models that are out there for a Mission Management Team, I’ll take the Space Shuttle Program for example. That was a NASA-owned, NASA-led program with a prime contractor that worked with that Mission Management Team, and while it was distributed across multiple NASA centers, the Johnson Space Center, the Marshall Space Flight Center, the Kennedy Space Center, it was a fairly discrete and a fairly compartmentalized government-led effort. When you look at the International Space Station model, it is very different. All 16 international partners are represented on that Mission Management Team. Our neighbors to the north, our friends at the Canadian Space Agency, the European Space Agency, the Japanese exploration agency, our Russian colleagues, and our NASA team and our prime contractor on that team, and that’s largely an artifact of the international collaboration and the low-Earth orbit mission, and then occasionally commercial partners enter the equation there as part of the International Space Station Mission Management Team. And what we have for Artemis is leveraging that experience but it is focused around our programmatic construct and the Space Launch System rocket being led out of the Marshall Space Flight Center with a handful of prime contractors, and they’re on the Mission Management Team, and then the Orion program out of the Johnson Space Center in Houston with a prime contractor, and then the Exploration Ground Systems out of the Kennedy Space Center with a prime contractor. And then we had a system of checks and balances with our technical authorities which all Mission Management Teams have, so it’s tailored to what we need and it’s really there to look for what decisions need to be made and to have key gates in place and then to have a process that allows you to communicate when a decision is necessary and to make an informed decision with the right parties involved, so it’s a little bit different but its function is very similar to what we’ve had in the past.

Host: So, then what’s your role as the mission manager? People are presenting a lot of information from their own respective areas towards you. Is it you making the decisions? Is it you accepting that risk? What’s your role in all of this?

Mike Sarafin: Yes. There is one decisional authority and that’s the chair of the Mission Management Team, and that is me, as the mission manager, so I work in close collaboration with our design centers, our engineering technical authorities, our safety and mission assurance teams and our operations agents to make sure that when it comes to either a decision gate or a risk acceptance decision, that we’ve got the right players involved, that we understand and can ask the right questions before we move forward and, you know, sometimes we may decide to knock it off and come home early or to scrub the launch, and there may be other days when we decide to press ahead and accept the risk, so it really comes down to a high level of trust, having efficient communication, and knowing who has the information is all part of that process.

Host: And it’s not just that one that everybody thinks about is launch, right? That’s — when I think — when you think about a mission you always think about the launch teams getting ready for launch, but there’s more to this. There’s mission phases. There’s mission teams. So, let’s kind of dive deeper into that, the breakdown of a mission management. You know, what are all these different phases that we’re looking at and that you’re heading up as the mission manager?

Mike Sarafin: Right. So again, I look across the holistic mission so there’s really a handful of discrete kind of if everything’s normal decision gates, and the first one is our launch readiness review at two days prior to launch, and that enables us to set up for a specific launch window on a specific day and attempt to get off the ground. So that’s again, at launch minus two days, and then we have our tanking decision. Do we load the rocket with cryogenic fuel for both the core stage and the upper stage and put over 700,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen on this thing? And we assess the weather, we assess the range readiness and the health of the rocket and the spacecraft as well as the readiness of the overall team and the ground systems, so that’s our tanking decision. And then when we get down to T minus 10 minutes, that’s kind of the final commit decision from a Mission Management Team standpoint. There’s a built-in hold at T minus 10 minutes and I’ll poll all of the elements, the rocket, the spacecraft, the ground teams, our operations agents, our technical authorities, and assuming everybody’s go and we understand the risk in front of us, we will commit to not only terminal countdown and launch the rocket, but also orbit the Earth and send it on its way to the Moon through the translunar injection maneuver. That’s quite a bit of risk to proceeding at the T minus 10-minute hold. And then there’s another decision gate. Do we enter orbit about the Moon? And I’ll talk a little bit more about the distant retrograde orbit, but that is a two-maneuver sequence that commits you to a non-Earth return trajectory, and you want to make sure that you have a healthy spacecraft before you do that, so we’ve got a decision gate there. And then when we exit the distant retrograde orbit, we’re going to commit to returning to the Earth from a quarter million miles away, like a four-day long journey, and position a recovery ship out there to receive the spacecraft after it splashes down in the ocean and then for crewed flights, bring our crew home. So, you know, those are the big decision gates if everything’s normal, and then if something rears its head, if we have unforeseen events, that’s where the Mission Management Team really earns its pay.

Host: So, when you’re talking about decision gates, my assumption is, you know, everybody’s getting together and they’re going over these different milestones, making sure everything is set for that particular part of the mission, whether it’s prelaunch, whether it’s pre-lunar injection burn, whatever it is, but in order to get to that point, how are you analyzing the information? Everybody I guess breaks off, goes to their respective rooms, teams, gets the information that they need. How are you kind of following along the mission to make sure that when you get to that point where you’re — that decision gate, you can say confidently, yes, my part is ready for that next phase of flight?

Mike Sarafin: In large part, those are planned prior to the mission and agreed on with our lead operations team, so our launch operations team out of the firing room at the Kennedy Space Center or with our flight operations team out of mission control in Houston or our recovery team on the ship out in the Pacific Ocean. We’ve preplanned those and assuming we are, you know, per the script, it’s essentially a green light condition where you just continue on, but we do spend that time to assess it and we pull the team together and we talk about, you know, how’s the team doing, how’s the vehicle doing, how is the ground infrastructure doing? And you know, assuming we meet our minimum criteria to continue through things like launch commit criteria, through flight rules, through recovery decision criteria that I was a part of in making those decisions before we ever flew and delegating that authority to our operations agents, you know, we stay on plan. But if there’s something unexpected, then we either call an emergency Mission Management Team meeting which is fairly rare. It does happen but it’s fairly rare, or we meet at the next planned interval and address whatever issue there, and time is of the essence, right? And we rely on our operations agents to tell us when do they need the decision. And you know, an example is if we just committed to the translunar injection maneuver and we’re on our way to the Moon, we’ve got another four days before we need to decide whether we enter the orbit about the Moon, so I don’t need to hold an emergency meeting to make that decision, but if it happens, you know, six hours, if we have a problem with our propulsion system six hours before we’re about to enter orbit about the Moon, we’re going to get together quick and talk about that one, so we’re relying on our operations teams to say here’s when I needed a decision, and if it’s outside of what we’ve agreed to preflight and I was a part of that process preflight, then we have that foundation that we can work from and we can communicate quickly.

Host: I think a big piece of the puzzle of that people I think often don’t think about is whenever you get to this point where you’re looking at all these checkpoints and running the mission, during the mission, there has been a significant amount of work ahead of time to think about all of these different phases of flight, and as you said, Mike, basically write down, you know, the go’s and no-go’s, so I guess all the teams have been deeply analyzing the operations of a mission to the Moon, of some of the upcoming Artemis missions, and writing down on paper hey, “this is what we will and will not accept at these different phases of flight,” so there’s been a lot of work ahead of time.

Mike Sarafin: That’s exactly right. It’s the planning prepares you, it prepares the team, it sets expectations, and then you work from that framework, and you cannot possibly imagine every single scenario that could go wrong, but what you can do is prepare for the likely ones, and then to have a strategy in place as to how you’re going to manage it for the unlikely ones or the unforeseen ones.

Host: So, let’s zoom in on some of the upcoming Artemis missions and really take a deep dive into really what we can expect whenever and go through that mission profile of some of these upcoming Artemis missions to really understand these points that you’re sitting down and saying “hey, this is a go/no-go point, these are the risks we’re going to accept.” First pulling back though before we get into the details of the mission profile and just understanding the objectives, what exactly are we doing? Let’s focus on the first one, Artemis I. This is a test flight, and it’s an uncrewed test flight, so there’s no astronauts onboard. What are we trying to learn from this first Artemis mission?

Mike Sarafin: Yeah. We have four primary objectives on Artemis I. The first one is to test the heat shield at lunar reentry conditions. The second one is to demonstrate the flight vehicle in the flight environment. The third is to simply recover the spacecraft, and the last is what I like to call bonus objectives but there’s a whole host of objectives there that are important, we would love to accomplish but do not materially impact our ability to fly crew on the very next mission. Those first three though, are important to flying and enabling our astronauts to fly on Artemis II. So, Artemis I objectives, if you break them down a little bit further, demonstrate the heat shield at lunar reentry conditions. When we come back from low-Earth orbit, we’re coming back at Mach 25 or 17,500 miles an hour, but when we come back from the Moon, we’re coming back at Mach 32 or 24,500 miles an hour. It’s a lot faster and from an engineering standpoint, the heat rate and heat load is, it’s asymptotic. It’s far higher than what we experience when we come back from the International Space Station, so we want to make sure that our heat shield is going to protect our astronauts and protect the health of the spacecraft when it comes back from a quarter million miles away from the Moon and hits the Earth’s atmosphere. And it’s a brand-new heat shield design, and there’s no way to test it completely on the ground, so we really have to demonstrate it in the flight environment. We’ve done what we can on the ground, but there’s no arc jet or aerodynamic or aerothermal test facility here on Earth that is capable of replicating the conditions that we’re going to see at that speed and under those conditions. So, getting that number one priority puts us on a great path to fly crew on Artemis II. Demonstrating the spacecraft in the flight environment shows that we can fly Orion out into deep space in the micrometeoroid and orbital debris environment, in the high radiation environment where you’re outside of the Earth’s magnetic field and you don’t have the protection that it affords like we do in low-Earth orbit. It also demonstrates our ability to fly above things like the tracking and data relay satellites that are used for low-Earth orbit and terrestrial communications. It also demonstrates our ability to navigate in deep space without use of the global positioning satellites that a lot of low-Earth orbit and terrestrial users use. And then we’re also exposed to the deep space thermal environment which is far colder than it is in low-Earth orbit where you get a little bit of radiant heating from the Earth by itself. So, demonstrating the Orion spacecraft in that deep space environment, it helps us understand all of the testing that we’ve done on the ground, all the modeling on the ground. How accurate is it? How much uncertainty do we have, and can we buy down some of that uncertainty? Number three objective is retrieve the spacecraft. By retrieving it, we physically get the spacecraft back. We can look at and touch the heatshield and see if there were hotspots or areas of erosion during reentry or heating. We can recover all of the flight instrumentation that’s recorded onboard and the imagery that’s recorded onboard, and that takes into account that we’re going to have a blackout period of about three minutes during reentry when we come in through peak heating which is one of our primary objectives. We cannot receive the telemetry from the spacecraft during peak heating so it’s recorded onboard, and by retrieving the spacecraft, we can have access to that information and validate the heat shield performance through instruments that are buried in the base heat shield. We can also re-fly the avionics. These are precision avionics. They are radiation-tolerant avionics. We can re-fly those on future missions as a cost savings, and then we can also reuse the capsule for structural testing on the ground so there’s significant cost savings to the program by retrieving the spacecraft in addition to getting the engineering data. And then priority four is what I call bonus objectives, again, which is conduct payload operations. We have technology payloads; we have biological experiments that are going to help us understand the deep space radiation environment and model it before we put astronauts onboard. We’re going to deploy CubeSats, thirteen of them total from the Space Launch System rocket, each on their own science or technology mission and then we’re going to do things like send back imagery for just consumption by the general public and we’re going to have pictures of Orion with the Moon in the background and our ability to reach the public and share the mission as we fly it is a priority. It’s important to us and we’ve got a lot of cameras on this mission and that’s part of our bonus objectives. We will share as much of that as we can. So those are the four things we intend to accomplish on Artemis I and it’s a lot, but it also puts us on a great path to flying our crew of four astronauts on Artemis II.

Host: I love that breakdown, Mike. I mean, it makes — the way you broke it down and structured that, it just makes a lot of sense. You know, before you put astronauts on a vehicle, you got to make sure these things are accomplished, and then the bonus objectives are nice, too. I wonder what we can pull or what we have pulled from because you were the lead flight director for EFT-1, Exploration Flight Test-1, and it did accomplish some objectives like, you know, passing through the atmosphere with a heat shield and it did go into space, not into a lunar orbit, but it did go pretty deep. What were some of those things that we learned from EFT-1 back in 2014 that we can bring or that we are bringing to this first Artemis mission?

Mike Sarafin: We learned a lot from Exploration Flight Test-1 and it included what are the hard to manufacturer piece parts onboard the spacecraft and which ones do we really need to stay in front of from a production standpoint so that we can have a steady cadence of missions to come. In flight, we learned about how the vehicle operates in the flight environment, not to the extent that I just described for Artemis I because we didn’t go to deep space or about the Moon, it was a four and a half hour flight test, but we came back at a speed higher than low-Earth orbit and we tested the heat shield. We tested the structure. We figured out how to make it lighter so that we could carry other things into deep space rather than just pure structure of the spacecraft. We also figured out that the separation mechanisms, and there’s a number of them to deploy the parachutes and to separate from the launch vehicle, that our engineering was good, that our design was good, and that we could focus our efforts in other higher risk areas, and it really — the one thing that really strikes me about EFT-1 was how much thirst there was for exactly what we did on that flight. The mission had such an overwhelming positive response by the general public, both nationally and internationally, that I just frankly underestimated it. I remember after we flew the flight, looking at all the news articles and, you know, every major media outlet, it was front page news, including overseas. And the one that strikes me still to this day was it was front page news for Al-Jazeera, so it shows that folks around the world pay attention to what we do in the United States and that we are leaders and other people do care about what we’re doing and that was a key moment for me learning, because maybe I had taken it for granted a little bit with the frequency that we fly the International Space Station missions and with the frequency that we flew the space shuttle. Maybe I was a little bit too close to it, but that one, it really struck me because it was a new program and it was so well received, and we hadn’t flown for a while.

Host: That’s so, so important, and so, Mike, let’s get folks ready and excited for this next generation. Let’s dive into Artemis I. You talked about the mission objectives. Let’s talk about the mission itself. What exactly is going to happen and what can folks expect to see whenever this thing takes off?

Mike Sarafin: Yeah. End to end, the mission is going to be anywhere between 25 and 42 days in duration. We’ll have a prelaunch phase where we’ll power up the rocket and the spacecraft in our launch operations team led by our launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson. We’ll fuel the rocket and we’ll load over 700,000 gallons of cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen into the rocket and then we’ll come up to that key decision point at T minus 10 minutes and we’ll go through terminal count and we will watch a 322-foot-tall rocket put out 8.8 million pounds of thrust from the Kennedy Space Center and go skyward and it’ll be impressive. I mean, I’ve seen a couple of shuttle launches and shuttles had the solid rocket boosters. We have similar solid rocket boosters but they’re 25% more powerful and those are the ones that you really, really feel if you stand there in person that you feel the thump in your chest. You can hear the crackle of the rocket. And we also have the four RS-25 engines on this thing, and each engine will put out over a half million pounds of thrust in addition to the over six million pounds. of thrust put out by the two solid rocket boosters, so it’ll be an impressive show. We’ll get to orbit, and on the first orbit, the rocket will commit Orion to a lunar trajectory at the translunar injection maneuver. The TLI maneuver will last 20 minutes and it’ll increase the spacecraft’s velocity enough that it will no longer be under the primary influence of the Earth’s gravity and send us on the way to the Moon and will arrive four to five days later. It’s kind of day-of-launch dependent. And then we will come up on another decision gate. Do we enter that distant retrograde orbit about the Moon? And if we do, we’ll conduct a two-maneuver sequence, and that two-maneuver sequence, the first one uses lunar gravity to slingshot us, in combination with the Orion main engine, by the Moon, and we’ll be just 62 miles from the surface of the Moon on the far side of the Moon. So, what that means is we’re not going to be able to see the maneuver when it executes, when the Orion main engine fires up. It’ll all be preprogrammed and we’ll know whether we were successful or not when the spacecraft comes around the far side of the Moon, and after it executes, we’ll essentially set ourselves up to enter this distant retrograde orbit with a second firing of the Orion main engine, and then we’ll be in the coast for, you know, a week and a half, two weeks, depending on the mission day that we launch. We’ll coast about the Moon 37,000 nautical miles from the surface of the Moon, which is a quarter million miles from Earth, so we’ll be probably 270,000 miles, 275,000 miles from Earth at the farthest point. And when we get to that farthest point, that’s kind of the moment that I really want to see on Artemis I because we’ll have the Moon in the background and this little, teeny, tiny dot, the Earth, off in the distance. And then we’ll decide when it’s time to come home where we deploy our recovery forces in the Pacific. We’ll look at the weather, and then we’ll reverse that two-maneuver sequence and exit that distant retrograde orbit and we’ll fire the first one to set up the lunar gravity assist by the Moon, and then the second one, again, it will go behind the Moon and we’ll have a communications outage and we’ll use the lunar gravity to slingshot us on our way back to Earth and when we come acquisition of signal and lock back up with the communications link with the spacecraft through the Deep Space Network, we’ll be on our way back to the Earth but we’ll still be a quarter million miles away and we’ll still be about four or five days before we splash down, and that’s essentially our deorbit burn. We’re setting up entry interface from a quarter million miles away, and that’s amazing precision. That is something that we got to get right. The entry corridor for this is, it’s pretty small from that far away. If you miss a little bit too shallow, you’re going to skip off the Earth’s atmosphere and head back out into space, and if you miss too steep, you may overstress the vehicle, so you want to hit it just right. The reentry corridor and the set up for that is key and we’ll adjust it on that coast back from the Moon to the Earth, and then on day of entry, the European service module provided by our European partners will have done its job. We will jettison it about 20 minutes before entry interface, and now the capsule is free flying by itself for the first time and we’ll turn the heat shield into the direction of the velocity vector, and then we’ll get aerocapture at an altitude of 400,000 feet, and then the peak heating will pick up. We’ll go into a blackout period and then when we come out of blackout, we’ll get into our peak aerodynamic load and our spacecraft will slow from Mach 32 to zero in just about 20 minutes after we deploy the parachutes and splash down in the ocean, and our goal is to do it in eyesight of our recovery ship and get the spacecraft home just a couple hours after we do a test in the surface of the ocean to figure out how much heat soaked back into the structure of the spacecraft. So, we’ve got a lot of objectives. It is going to be a challenging mission. It’s purposely designed, this distant retrograde orbit is purposely designed to stress the envelope of the spacecraft in terms of communication, deep space communication, in terms of thermal, in terms of propulsion and it will be a real challenge, but if we pull it off, and we have every intention of pulling this thing off, it will put us on the great path to fly astronauts on the very next mission to the Moon.

Host: What an incredible — my gosh. What an incredible mission. I mean, I was getting excited just listening to all of these different milestones when you’re talking about, you know, that burn to get into the orbit of the Moon, and you talked about that moment of being the farthest away from the Earth. These are all going to be very big moments, I think, for everyone and I love that you describe the, you know, not only as you defined these four primary objectives, testing the heat shields, demonstrating the vehicle in flight, recovering the spacecraft, and then of course the bonus objectives, but you mention that you’re taking really everything to the limit here. You’re pushing the vehicle to really test that this thing is going to be ready for humans to get onboard.

Mike Sarafin: Yes. I mean, it is by choice and by design a stress test, and that’s why we’re doing it without a crew onboard. We’ve done a lot of work on the ground to make sure we’re ready for this. We’ve done thermal vacuum testing. We’ve done end-to-end software testing. We’re coming up on the green run hot fire which is going to be a full hot fire of the core stage in the four RS-25 engines. We’ve hot fired the boosters out in the desert in Utah. We’ve done all the piece parts but we haven’t done it all together, and when you pull it together, sometimes you learn things that you need to adjust moving forward and that’s our objective here is to really make sure that there’s not something that we missed, but also to check our engineering, check our math, and to make sure that we really do understand what we’re getting ourselves into before we fly astronauts on the next flight.

Host: Now, one of the items that you brought up was in the very beginning when you were going over this mission profile, is you talked about a pretty wide range of mission duration. I think that what you said was 25 — anywhere between 25 and 42 days. That’s quite a spread, so why is it that way for a mission to the Moon?

Mike Sarafin: Yeah. You have to remember for lunar flights we have a three-body problem. We’ve got the Earth, we got the Moon going about the Earth, and then we got our spacecraft. And the Moon going about the Earth is in its lunar cycle, its 28-day, 29-day lunar cycle and as the Moon goes about the Earth and the Earth is rotating below it, because its spinning on its axis, the lighting conditions in our chosen landing site, which is in the Pacific Ocean, vary depending on the day that we launch, so we have more lighting on some days and less lighting on others abnd we need to take that into account as we set up for a specific launch attempt, and when we initially looked at our mission design for Artemis I, we quickly learned that our launch availability was only about a week per month, so five to seven days out of a 30-day period, we had launch availability for what we call a short-class mission which is about 25 and a half days, so if we were to just launch and land 25 and a half days later and have lighting at the landing site to support the recovery operation and to support the flight test objectives that we need to get with imagery, as the vehicle comes in and it deploys its parachute and splashes down, we only had, again, five to seven days. But we have an amazing team of engineers and mission designers and what they quickly came up with was an augmentation plan where we add an additional couple of days, or in this case week and a half or two weeks to the mission, and what that does is, is it changes the position of the Moon about the Earth such that if we launch on that day and we spend a little bit longer period of time about the Moon, up to two weeks now, so that we have a 42ish-day mission, we can get lighting at the landing site. So, by varying the mission duration and supporting the test objectives that need lighting for imagery purposes at the landing site, we can get our mission availability within a given month up to about half the month, somewhere between like 14 and 16 days a month, so we went from five to seven days a month where we could launch, to 14 to 16 days a month if we have variable mission duration, so it was a clever solution from a mission design standpoint and I’m always amazed at the capability of our team coming up with creative solutions.

Host: Yeah. Giving yourselves more options is very, very cool. So where are you, Mike, during the mission? What are you going to be doing through all these different phases?

Mike Sarafin: So, as the Mission Management Team chair, we go through the Flight Readiness Review process and then we get handed the keys to the mission and we are located at the center of the operation so the center of the operation prior to launch is at the Kennedy Space Center. So, I’m physically in the Launch Control Center sitting in what we affectionately call the Mission Management Team bubble. It’s an enclosed area for privacy reasons in Firing Room 1. And it’s co-located with our launch operations team and as they go through their decision gates, you know, I’ll be listening to them on the loops and they will tee up any risk acceptance decisions or decision gates to me and I’ll pull the team and I’ll be within eyesight of those folks and if we need to talk, we can step aside and talk and I’ll be able to look out the window at the Launch Complex 39 where our rocket sits and follow along, so having a high situational awareness for that critical decision making time frame is key, so I’ll be at the Kennedy Space Center and then once we launch and commit Orion to a lunar trajectory, I’ll relocate to the Johnson Space Center in Houston for the duration of the mission all the way up through splashdown and handover to the recovery team. Ideally, I’d like to be on the recovery ship, but the best information is not on the recovery ship. The spacecraft telemetry goes to our critical node or our hub in Houston and it is not sent to the recovery ship, so actually, the best place for me to be is in Houston all the way up from Flight Day 2 through the end of the mission.

Host: That does make sense and you know, that’s where the operations for missions even today, that’s where they’re based out of. You talked about on the pad, on pad 30 or the Launch Complex 39, I know 39-A, that’s where their SpaceX has been taking off recently with a lot of their commercial crew missions. Where is the SLS going to take off?

Mike Sarafin: Yeah. The Space Launch System and Orion will take off of Space Launch Complex 39-B which is adjacent to it right there. It’s just a little bit farther north —

Host: Cool.

Mike Sarafin: — and we used both 39-A and 39-B in the shuttle program and under our commercial crew program and our commercial cargo program, 39-A has been leased to SpaceX and they’ve been doing a fantastic job providing crew and cargo services there and we’re going to operate off the adjacent pad which has been renovated and refurbished for Artemis missions and it’s undergone significant modification. They completely replaced the flame trench. The redid the pad surface. They tore down the old shuttle launch tower that we no longer need because we have a clean pad configuration and now, we take our launch tower with us from the Vehicle Assembly Building out to the pad similar to what Apollo did. We actually have a mobile launcher. That baby weighs about 11 million pounds and it’s a feat of engineering in itself. I’ve been on it several times and in it, and it’s amazing if you ever get a chance to see it.

Host: Very, very cool. Now when you were going through the mission profile, Mike, you talked about this is going to be a challenging mission and you talked about really pushing the envelope here. So, when it comes to Artemis I, what are those primary risks, those primary challenges that we’re going to have to face to complete the mission?

Mike Sarafin: Yeah. Our primary challenges and risk drivers are familiar to a lot of spaceflight programs. Micrometeoroid and orbital debris is by far our primary risk driver. Artemis flights, though, are a little bit unique compared to low-Earth orbit. When you look at the micrometeoroid and orbital debris environment in low-Earth orbit, it’s largely dominated by man-made orbital debris, but once you get past the Earth’s primary gravitational field and geosynchronous orbit, the environment is dominated by micrometeoroids and we’re going to spend the bulk of our mission in the micrometeoroid dominant environment, so that’s our primary risk driver. We also need to fly, as I mentioned earlier, outside the Earth’s magnetic field and what that does is it pokes us through the Van Allen radiation belts to get to the Moon and then on our way back to Earth, and that’s a high radiation environment where there are concentrations of particles, radiation particles, that could overcome some of our avionics and electronics and we’ve built in fault tolerance for that very thing and some redundancy for that very thing, but that is a risk driver as well. And then we have a whole host of what I’ll call first flight risks like the brand-new heat shield design on the spacecraft, which is our primary objective because we cannot demonstrate it on the ground. It’s the first flight of the Space Launch System rocket and the launch with five-segment solid rocket boosters. It’s first flight of the core stage and the four RS-25 engines and it’s the first use of the mobile launcher and the modified Launch Complex 39-B. You know, there’s a lot of kind of first flight elements there. Some of those were already from a risk standpoint bought down through EFT-1 like the separation events of the parachute system on the Orion spacecraft and recovery operations. We’ve done a good job of buying those down but there are some things that, you know, we’ve tested them to the extent possible we can on the ground. We’ve analyzed them to the extent possible but we’re not going to fully understand or appreciate it until we get into the flight. And if we do have problems along the way, we do have aborts available to us as well as alternate missions, and alternate missions, it’s not a full abort. It’s just we’ll go as high and as far as we can go, and we’ll accomplish as many of the objectives as we can. Some of those include downmoding from distant retrograde orbit to a free-return trajectory, or fly a high-Earth orbit instead of, you know, a low-Earth orbit or just coming home. So, we’ve got a whole host of options available to us should we need those and as we talked earlier, we have predefined knock-off criteria and off ramps that we’ve been working hard to preplan, and our teams are off training right now.

Host: Very good. Now Artemis I, you talk about pushing the envelope, and you’re right. You know, you can’t really call it like a proven capability, a proven heat shield, proven rocket, until you actually prove it on Artemis I. Now, going past that to Artemis II, what changes? Let’s say, you know, we met all these mission objectives on Artemis I, what changes for an Artemis II crewed mission?

Mike Sarafin: Well, we add the human element. That’s the biggest change, as well as the crewed systems and we’re all about human spaceflight. That’s why I’m here, to fly humans in space and you know, flying hardware and flight-testing hardware and testing software, it’s exciting. It’s good work, but we’re unique in that we’re a human spaceflight program and we’re going to lunar destinations and beyond so when we add that human element, it changes things. You have additional risks that you need to consider. You got to make sure that the astronauts have a safe and healthy environment, that they can exercise, that the waste management system or the space toilet’s working. You know, those kind of things matter in the context of a human spaceflight mission that in a robotic mission or an uncrewed flight test really don’t enter into the equation.

Host: That’s really, really important stuff, right. I mean, is there any human — you talked about some bonus objectives on Artemis I, is there any bonus objective that’s looking at maybe some element of the human, whether it’s life support systems or just something, some capability that’s going to make sure that whenever we do fly humans on Artemis II that it is human-ready?

Mike Sarafin: Yes. So, on Artemis II we are testing again the life support systems, the exercise equipment, the food systems, the waste management systems on the ground to the extent possible and as well as using the International Space Station as a test bed for things like the waste management system and some radiation monitoring equipment to ensure that our astronauts are healthy both during the mission but also over the course of their lifetime from chronic health effects, and developing the medical protocol with our flight surgeons and the flight docs and they’ve spent a considerable effort and time and expertise has been built up in those areas. But a few things that are unique about Artemis II that we intend to accomplish include doing a full in-the-space-environment check out of the life support system before we ever commit to a lunar trajectory, so on the first day of the mission we’re going to launch, we’re going to get our — well, we’re going to get our crew suited up, we’re going to send them out to the pad. They’re going to climb on the top of this 322-foot-tall rocket that’s been fueled and is waiting for them, and then they’re going to launch and on the first orbit the Space Launch System will deliver them to this point where we’ll enter what’s called a high-Earth orbit. And the high-Earth orbit is purposefully designed as a waiting period of about two days. It’s a 42-hour orbit period. It’s highly elliptical and it’s going to send the crew 59,000 nautical miles from Earth before they come back and decide whether to commit to the Moon on a translunar injection maneuver. And during that 42-hour period, we’re going to do two pretty unique things. One is we’re going to dedicate that two-day long period to checking out the life support systems, so there’s this thing called an Amine Swingbed, and it has three different beds and each of which is capable of removing carbon dioxide and humidity from the atmosphere and maintaining a healthy atmospheric environment. We’re going to check out all three of those swingbeds, and we’re going to do it under peak metabolic loading as well as the lowest metabolic loading, and the way that we’ll do that is we’ll have the crew exercise on that two-day orbit and when they exercise, they increase their metabolic rate and they exhale the highest amount of water vapor and carbon dioxide and we’ll have the crew awake and exercise back to back and that’ll be our peak metabolic loading on our life support system. And then we’ll go to the lowest point when they go to sleep and their heart rate is the lowest and their breathing and the water vapor and the carbon dioxide is the lowest and we’ll watch that Amine Swingbed and the life support system do its job under these extreme conditions before we ever send them to the Moon. We’ll have done it on the ground before, but we’ll do it in space as well just to be double sure. The other thing that we’re going to do on Artemis II in that two-day orbit is we’ll do a proximity operations demonstration, also known as a prox-ops demo. And we’re going to use the upper stage of the Space Launch System rocket as our prox-ops target, so whenever we rendezvous with an object, before we dock with it, there’s a period called proximity operations which is not far field, like I can’t even see the object yet, it’s near field, it’s in view and I haven’t physically made it to it yet, so we’re in that near field proximity operations time frame. We’ll separate the Orion spacecraft from the upper stage. It’ll go into, effectively the upper stage will effectively go into a dormant state and the astronauts will separate out about a football field length away, about 300 feet. We’ll turn Orion around, and they’ll be looking at it out the windows and out the centerline camera, and they’ll approach it as if they were approaching for a docking through a series of braking gates, and they’ll come up to about 250 feet and slow down and brake. And then they’ll come in to about 100 feet and they’ll slow down and brake, and then they’ll come up to about 30 feet away from that dormant upper stage, and then they’ll do a handling qualities demonstration. They’ll actually get to fly the Orion spacecraft relative to something else in space as if they were going to dock manually and they’ll assess the overall performance of the spacecraft and when they’re ready and before the upper stage becomes active again during about a two-hour period, they’ll back Orion away and then they’ll turn and separate and the upper stage will go its way. It’ll be disposed of in the Atlantic Ocean and Orion will come around at the end of that two-day period and we’ll have this handling qualities demonstrations through the prox-ops demo. We’ll have checked out our life support system, and then we’ll send our astronauts on the way to the Moon on a free-return trajectory through a mission continuation burn and we’ll fire up Orion’s service module main engine and send our astronauts on a four, four and a half day long journey out to the Moon, and when they get to the far side of the Moon, our Artemis Generation as they swing around the Moon, will get their first Earthrise moment. It’ll be the first one since the 1970s where our astronauts will witness Earthrise from behind the Moon, and that’ll be a moment that I think will be shared globally, I hope, on that flight with that crew. But the biggest moment for me is always on human spaceflight missions getting your crew home safely and that is the thing that I look forward to the most. Flight testing hardware is great. Launching is great, but physically shaking the hands of the astronauts after they’ve come back and you accomplished the mission, that has by far been the highlight of my career and I can’t wait to do it again on Artemis II when we get our crew back after that one.

Host: That’s going to be a big moment, Mike, getting astronauts returning from the far side of the Moon, entering into a lunar orbit. Now this all sets up for eventual boots on the Moon, right? So, how are Artemis I and II getting us ready for that moment, boots on the Moon once again?

Mike Sarafin: I think we’ve talked about kind of at the macro perspective through our prior discussion, it’s really getting our teams ready, getting our launch team, our flight team, our recovery team ready to accomplish that job for more complex missions. It’s a classic build up approach where you build up incrementally, complexity and capability while simultaneously buying down risk as you go across each of these mission phases. We’re also checking out our spacecraft and we’re also checking out our rocket and our ground systems and our space network and our Deep Space Network and our Mission Control Center and our Launch Control Center and our engineering teams. We’re also checking our engineering and our math on this and making sure that our models are correct and that our uncertainties are what we think they are and we’re going to doublecheck our work. We’re going to have lessons learned along the way, and we’re going to do it better every single mission and that’s how we’re going to prepare for boots on the Moon on Artemis III.

Host: So, it’s coming up pretty soon, Mike. You know, where 2021 is going to be a big year for these next steps for getting humans to that point, right? — boots on the Moon, first woman and next man. What do we have to look forward to, to prepare for the next — for the first Artemis mission? What’s coming up?

Mike Sarafin: It’s going to be fast paced, the coming days and weeks. It’s a steady cadence of activities. As I mentioned earlier, our launch teams, our flight teams, our recovery teams, our engineering teams are actively training for the mission. The Mission Management Team will join some of those integrated simulations where we’ll simulate mission phases and those key decision points. We’re also preparing final preparations for our flight hardware at the Kennedy Space Center. We’ll get into integrated assembly of the rocket and the spacecraft. We’re going to stack all of the boosters. We’ve already started stacking the boosters at the Kennedy Space Center. We will finish stacking the boosters. The core stage will arrive from the test site at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and it’ll be offloaded from a barge and it’ll enter the Vehicle Assembly Building and the 212-foot-long core stage will be lifted and put into place and assembled as part of the core element of the propulsion system on the rocket. We’ve already built the upper stage, the interim cryo propulsion stage and we need to stack that on top of the Space Launch System rocket. And then our Orion spacecraft is ready. It’s at the Kennedy Space Center and it will be stacked on top of the rocket as well. We’ll go through a series of what I’ll call nonrecurring tests. They won’t be done every single mission because this is the first build and we need to gain additional understanding of the structural mode, so we’ll do integrated modal tests in the Vehicle Assembly Building. We’ll do some dedicated systems checks that are unique to this first build in the Vehicle Assembly Building, and then we’re going to roll it all out to the launch pad on the mobile launcher and that’s going to be a moment that I don’t think folks will appreciate until it happens, seeing the over-30-story tall rocket with the spacecraft sitting on it rolling toward the launch pad for a wet dress rehearsal, just about two months before we fly, and fully loading it with the full cryo load of liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen on the launch pad, demonstrating our ability to fuel the rocket and de-tank, should we need to do that, and then rolling it back to the Vehicle Assembly Building for some final readiness checks. And then we’ll go through our Flight Readiness Review process and that is a thorough wire brushing of are we ready to fly, is the design certified, are all the teams ready, is the ground system ready, is the launch vehicle ready, is the spacecraft ready? We will ask all those questions to ourselves and then we’ll decide whether or not to accept the risk, and when we’re ready and we understand what risk we’re getting ourselves into, that’s when we’re ready for the mission. So, there’s a lot of stuff ahead of us. There’s probably 10,000 items to be worked out and we’ve got a great team that’s off working it right now and it’s all going to come to a head here in mid to late ’21, and I can’t wait for it.

Host: What an exciting time, Mike, and it’s all for, you know, returning to the Moon, first woman, next man, but then the idea here is set up for a sustained presence on the Moon, right? We’re not just returning, touch and going, and coming back. There’s a lot of value to what we want to accomplish on the Moon. And we’ll end with this, Mike. To you, why do you think it’s important to return to the Moon and continue exploring the lunar surface?

Mike Sarafin: Yeah. Returning to the Moon, it’s more than planting a flag or a specific objective. It is literally testing yourself and testing your nation’s ability and testing the best and the brightest that you’ve got out there. And leaders are always testing themselves. Great leaders are always testing themselves and leaders are always on the frontier. And the Moon and beyond, that’s the frontier, and we want to be on the frontier. So, by going there, we’re going to learn stuff. We’re going to learn what we’re capable of. We’re going to learn scientific evidence about the history of the Earth and the history of the universe and we’re just going to learn about ourselves. We’re going to learn about what it’s like to be a human experiencing that, and we’ve got a few of those folks around from the Apollo generation and we’re going to have a few more, and that’s exciting to know that somebody’s going to be around to tell you what it was like to fly by the Moon or land on the Moon and to share more than a picture or share more than telemetered data with the ground. They’re going to tell us a story. They’re going to tell us what it felt like. They’re going to tell us what they experienced and every single one of the Apollo astronauts that I’ve ever had the opportunity to talk to, they were a changed person from their experience flying to the Moon, and we’re going to have more of that. That’s exciting, and we’re going to build partnerships. We’re going to build partnerships with the commercial industry, and we’re going to build partnerships with our international friends and colleagues, and that kind of stuff, you never know what rewards those are going to reap over time and it’s not something you can really put a finger on or put a dollar value on, but there’s real value there, and that’s why we should go and that’s why we should go sustainably.

Host: Engaging the world and sharing such a unique and incredible experience, it’s all coming up here real soon. Mike Sarafin, beautiful words. What a great way to end. Thanks so much for going through all the intricate details here of these upcoming Artemis missions. You know, just thinking through every moment of the mission, it’s just — we used the word exciting a lot today, but it is just that. It’s very — it’s a very exciting time and it’s something that we can engage in very, very soon. Mike Sarafin, thanks again for coming on.

Mike Sarafin: Thank you. It’s a real honor and privilege to be a part of such a talented team. Thank you.

Host: Hey, thanks for sticking around. I was talking with Mike a little bit after this podcast and just — we were both sharing our excitement for what’s coming up and I told him, I was saying, this is definitely going to be one of those episodes that I think people are going to reference quite a bit. If you listen to the whole thing, you know Mike went into a lot of detail about the upcoming Artemis missions, so if you’re ever curious about whenever these missions start coming up, if you’re ever curious about what exactly is going to happen, just reference this episode and Mike will go ahead and walk you through it. I definitely learned something today. I hope you did as well. You can find us and other NASA podcasts at NASA.gov/podcast. This episode is going to be part of our Artemis collection. You can either search us on any of your search engines that you prefer, Houston We Have A Podcast/Artemis-episodes. There it is. We also have a collection on our homepage. Just search Houston We Have A Podcast and it’ll be easy for you to find. You can engage with us, we’re on the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Engage with us by using the hashtag #AskNASA on your favorite platform to submit an idea for the show or ask a question, just make sure to mention that it’s for us at Houston We Have A Podcast. This episode was recorded on December 15th, 2020. Thanks again to Alex Perryman, Pat Ryan, Norah Moran, Belinda Pulido, Jennifer Hernandez, Beth Weissinger, and Kathryn Hambleton. Thanks again. A big thanks to Mike Sarafin for taking the time to come on the show and for helping me to write a lot of this episode. 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.