Suggested Searches

Artemis Recovery

Season 1Episode 210Aug 27, 2021

NASA’s Artemis I recovery director Melissa Jones shares what it will take to fetch the Orion spacecraft from the Pacific Ocean at the end of the mission around the Moon. HWHAP Episode 210.

Artemis Recovery

Artemis Recovery

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 210, NASA’s Artemis I recovery director Melissa Jones shares what it will take to fetch the Orion spacecraft from the Pacific Ocean at the end of the mission around the Moon. This episode was recorded on July 6, 2021.

HWHAP Logo 2021

Transcript

Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, we have a podcast! Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, episode 210, “Artemis Recovery.” I’m Gary Jordan, and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts, all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human spaceflight. On the last Artemis episode, we discussed what happens in mission control for the Artemis I mission, which will test the Space Launch System rocket and an uncrewed Orion capsule in a mission around the Moon. When it comes screaming back into the Earth’s atmosphere at 25,000 miles per hour, it will land in the Pacific Ocean, where a team dedicated to locating and recovering the Orion capsule will be waiting. On this episode, we’re diving deep into what it takes to go fetch a spacecraft after landing in the ocean. Joining us is Melissa Jones, Artemis I recovery director based at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. She goes into the assets, timing, coordination, and teams that will recover a capsule coming from the Moon. So, let’s get right into it. Enjoy.

[ Music]

Host: Melissa Jones, thanks so much for coming on Houston We Have a Podcast today.

Melissa Jones: Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

Host: Hey, you’ve been doing a lot of work to get ready for Artemis recovery. How’s it feel to have that position, being in charge of such an important part of this mission?

Melissa Jones: Oh, it’s a real honor to be in charge of recovery operations and get to work with the integrated team. It’s, it’s a thrill.

Host: Very good. And it seems like you’re the perfect person for the job. You have some experience with ground and mission operations and with the shuttle program, and that’s sort of where I wanted to start at, Melissa, is just understanding your background and what you have been doing, really, to prepare for this mission. So, tell us a little bit about yourself, a little bit about, starting I guess with your education.

Melissa Jones: OK. Great. So, actually, I grew up in this area at Kennedy Space Center, just north of Kennedy Space Center, and both my parents and my grandparents all worked in some aspect of the space program, from a security guard at the space center to expendable launch vehicles, and my mom was actually a NASA quality inspector on the Space Shuttle Program. So, I kind of grew up in that environment where it seemed like walking out to your front yard was really natural to see a launch go off, not really realizing when I was younger that this was very unique situation that I lived in. And so, that kind of, I guess, gave me the space bug, and I went and got my bachelors of electrical engineering in Orlando at the University of Central Florida, and then followed that up with the same college with an engineering management masters degree at that same college, at UCF, really loved that place a lot, and it was close enough for me to intern at the space center in high school and in college. I worked in expendable launch vehicles as a co-op. When I graduated, I was fortunate enough to be hired for Return to Flight from the Columbia tragedy. They were hiring at the time, and I started in communications group. And then I moved to electric power, and then I moved to payloads. So, I worked a lot of the electrical systems, different electrical systems, in the shuttle before I got hired—that was with a contractor, United Space Alliance. And I got hired with NASA as an orbiter project engineer, which was just a thrill because basically I was responsible for getting the entire Endeavour space shuttle ready to fly from a technical perspective, that all the connectors were mated and the requirements were satisfied and all the paperwork was done, and I got to sit in the Firing Room on launch day, at the integration console, in the event that we had a problem. So, that was a really, just an amazing job in the Space Shuttle Program that I got to fly out. And then I moved to Commercial Crew [Program], where I was the ground and mission ops lead systems engineer, basically owned all the requirements for ground systems, ground operations, developed the, the documentation for that, that we imposed upon our partners who are now SpaceX and Boeing, and I got to work closely with them as they developed their systems before I moved over to the Artemis program, and I’m now the NASA recovery director for Exploration Ground Systems.

Host: Very good. You know, when you were pursuing, you said you got the space bug, and you went for electrical engineering, and then you got to have a taste of that in your experience with the shuttle after Return to Flight. You know, that kind of got me thinking: there’s a lot of different paths you can take if you get the space bug. Why did you choose electrical?

Melissa Jones: So, when I was in high school, I did a program at Kennedy Space Center called the, it’s called SHARP, Summer High School Apprenticeship Research Program, and I was hired to work in the International Space Station organization to develop some webpages for Flight 2A of the International Space Station, it was the Unity node. And when I went into engineering I wanted to be, I would say, the, the most hireable, if that’s the right term, and so I called my colleagues or the mentors that I had in the ISS program at the time, and they told me that at that point NASA really needed electrical engineers more than anything else, that there were a lot of aerospace and mechanical folks around but that electrical was kind of a gap right now. And so, that’s actually why I went into electrical. I actually am more proficient in mechanical type of operations, but I wanted to be marketable.

Host: You know, it’s, I think you have a very unique experience because as you mentioned a lot of your family was in the space program, and it seems like even from a very early age you just knew this is what you wanted to do. Your, your education, your life, really, has been in Florida. I mean it seems like this is your home. Spaceflight and Florida, this is, this is where you’re meant to be.

Melissa Jones: That’s absolutely true, and it’s interesting because most people in Florida that I’ve talked to, and a lot of folks in the space program, they are not Florida natives, and they’re always surprised when I tell them my history.

Host: [Laughter] So, you must love it. You must love the heat. You must love the beach. You must love the warm weather, that kind of thing.

Melissa Jones: I love the beach. The heat and humidity are not always my favorite, but I definitely love the beach, and I love rockets. So, yeah, this is the place for me.

Host: Very good. I’m a Texas transplant, and yeah, I’m still getting used to the heat myself. I’m from the north. So, it’s something I think you never quite get used to.

Melissa Jones: I agree.

Host: [Laughter] All right, well, let’s talk about recovery. There’s a lot that goes into this. You have a little bit of experience, you mentioned shuttle, you mentioned Commercial Crew with the ground and mission operations. Now, we’re going to be switching gears over to Artemis. So, what’s unique about Artemis is that we’re landing in the ocean. So, there’s a lot that goes into that. So, if someone were to come up to you, Melissa, and ask, all right, what is the recovery operations and what all goes into that, Melissa, how would you start?

Melissa Jones: So, that’s a great question. It’s not, it’s not really a simple answer, but it’s very interesting. So, it’s unlike anything that I’ve ever done before, and I would say it’s unlike anything we’ve done since Apollo. So, what we do is we land in the water off the coast of California. It’s about 60-ish nautical miles off the coast of San Diego, and we work with the DOD, the Department of Defense, and the U.S. Navy, specifically, to use the assets that they have, meaning their small boats, their ships, their helicopters, to recover the capsule, just kind of like, exactly like they did in Apollo, just with newer ships and with the newer capsule.

Host: So, that’s it. The recovery operations, there’s a lot of DOD assets. So, really, when it comes to a spacecraft landing in the ocean, you got to think about, OK, what can we go get, what can we use to go grab it? You got ships. It sounds like you got helicopters that are, that are passing around. What about actually controlling the mission? Is this coming from the boat, or is this at one of the space centers?

Melissa Jones: That’s a good question. So, there is a point at which we hand over. So, you know, the Launch Control Center at Kennedy Space Center is responsible for launch countdown, and then after we clear the tower the Mission Control Center takes over at JSC, where you’re, where you’re located, and then once we splash down there is a transitional point where I get an official handover from the flight directors in the Mission Control Center, and the NASA recovery director takes responsibility for the capsule and the operations afterwards. We have, you know, the most visibility to see once the telemetry is shut down and we no longer have visibility to some of the, the actual systems onboard the capsule. We really have the best visibility where we’re at, and also, obviously, we need to do recovery. So, that’s the transition there. We use the Navy, we use a landing platform dock ship, LPD, and it basically has a well deck, it’s called a well deck, underneath the flight deck in the back of the ship, and it’s got a gate on the back of it that basically drops into the water, and the ship floods…the well deck floods with about seven feet of water at what we call the sill, the point that’s at the very aft of the ship, and it basically floods. I describe it like, it looks like a swimming pool. It’s a big square flooded swimming pool, and we attach lines to the capsule from the ship using the small boats that they basically take lines to the capsule and attach them, and then the ship drives forward, the LPD drives forward, and we use a winch in the well deck to bring the capsule in and set it down on a cradle. And then the ship pumps all the water out of the well deck. So, it’s kind of an interesting, that’s not how they did it in Apollo, in Apollo they used a crane and they craned it onto the ship. We actually use a well deck. And the Navy uses the well deck in that ship to launch their amphibious crafts, like with Marines and tanks and stuff on board. That’s how they transport them, and then they would launch them to, you know, different, different locations.

Host: I see, so this is really, that’s part of the recovery aspect. So, what goes out to actually attach the winches and these hooks? It sounds like there’s a series of cables. What actually goes out to go to the Orion capsule, which is floating in the ocean, and start attaching some of these elements?

Melissa Jones: That’s a good question. So, we have, they are, we call them LLAMAs, Line Load Attenuating Mechanism Assemblies—you know NASA, we have acronyms for everything. And basically, what it really is, simplified, is a giant fishing reel. It acts like a fishing reel. So, like if you catch a really big fish in the ocean and it’s really pulling on your line, what happens is, is the, the reel will let out line without the line breaking based on how big the fish is and how far it’s pulling, right? So, we have LLAMAs in the well deck. There are four of them in the well deck, and they have lines that run through them. And we throw those lines out the back of the ship to a small boat, and if you think of small boats, you know, they’re about the size of fishing boats, but the black inflatable Zodiac, we use those, and we also use something called RIBs, reinforced inflatable-hull boats. They’re gray, they’re about 11 meters long, and that’s what the DOD uses in the water for small boats. And so, we throw them the LLAMA line out the back of the ship, and they, you know, basically drive them over to where the capsule is. There’s hundreds of feet of line that we let out, and then they attach those lines to attach points. They basically fit, there’s an attach point, we call it a tow pin, but it fits into a hole on the capsule, and there are five different holes on the capsule, and that gives us several points of control as the LLAMA line through the tow pins attach to the capsule.

Host: OK. So, that is the, that is the recovery process. Where are you through this? Are you kind of watching from the boat? Are you in some sort of control center? Where are you?

Melissa Jones: I’m in the, the landing control, operations control center that’s actually in the ship. So, I have video, and I have comm—communications via radios—with various people in the helicopters and in the small boats and down in the well deck, but we run the integrated operations from, from the ship control center.

Host: I see. OK. Now, who are the key players in this that you are getting information from? What do you care about that’s all getting fed to you to make decisions and monitor everything?

Melissa Jones: Right. So, the first thing we care about is communication with the Mission Control Center at JSC, and the flight directors will tell us, this is the condition of the capsule. We can verify that the pyros are good. We know that there’s no leaking fuel. And the very first thing that’s important to the safety of the team and making sure the operations goes smoothly is that handover, and they give us a hazard, hazard assessment on what’s happening to the vehicle and what could impact recovery. And then I have operational folks, leads in each place. So we have an open water operational lead that’s out in the small boat, and we have an air ops lead, who is in the helicopters, and then we have another operational lead who is in the well deck. And those are the main three areas that we do operations is: helicopter, imagery and data gathering; and then we have, of course, the small boats that are doing all the movement of the lines and the hazard assessment of the capsule, is it sinking, is it OK, how do you plan for that; and then finally, when all the lines are attached, we have folks in the well deck who are responsible for that. And so, I’m getting communication from those three main areas back to the control center where I’m at, and then I talk to Houston in case there’s an issue where I need their help with something. So, those I would say are the big, the four big players for communication in the mission, and then of course, the DOD, right, those are the NASA folks that I’m communicating with, and then right beside me in the control center I have an interface with the ship so that they can talk directly to the captain, sitting next to me in the control center.

Host: OK. Very good. So, it sounds like, so, if I had to summarize, I’d say the communications with Johnson Space Center, they have really good data on the status of the capsule and everything so they can report that stuff to you, they can give you a trajectory so you kind of know where you’re going to be looking. The open water teams, you, you mentioned a small boat. They have that really important job of attaching some of these things to the capsule to actually reel it in, and the well deck folks are working that as well. The air folks, the folks in the, in the helicopters, I guess their responsibility is monitoring the situation, maybe getting visuals on the spacecraft in the, in the local area, is that their primary job?

Melissa Jones: Correct. They also are the first people to see the capsule as it comes back in using a temperature, like the FLIR (forward-looking infrared) cameras. So, they take off before, before splashdown and are looking for the capsule, because what they’re trying to do is get good imagery and data of the parachute opening. So, we see three good mains. We want to see all the jettison hardware that comes off the capsule, as much of that imagery as we can, and then after splashdown, they are the fastest and the first to make visual contact with the capsule, to make sure that the uprighting system is working. Basically, they can see anything from the air, and they can get there the fastest.

Host: And that’s important for you, because you’re on the boat, and you’re thinking, OK, when we get there, this is exactly what we can expect.

Melissa Jones: Correct. And we need to know, do we have an issue or continency we need to plan for? Does it look like the capsule is taking on water? Do we need to expedite the stuff that we were planning, you know, to do? Do we need to turn off systems early? Because, so, Artemis I, you know, as anything that NASA does, we are trying to gather, we want to be safe, right? So, we don’t have crew on this mission, and so we’re gathering some data. We call it flight test objectives, and that data is going to feed into crewed flight, which is the next mission. And so, in some cases, in this case for Artemis I, we’re going to let the capsule sit in the water and do some of its, work on some of its systems, like it’s cooling system that it would have post-flight for the astronauts, which is, emits ammonia. We’re going to let it sit there for in some cases a couple hours in this case, specifically this one flight test objective, to make sure that it, the systems are ready and the batteries and everything check out for the flight crew. So, if we had a problem with the capsule taking on water or if something didn’t look right, we have some flexibility to work with JSC and to get the capsule powered down early, to get things secured faster so that we can try to recover it faster. So, that’s one of the things the helicopter is looking at is does everything look like it’s working right? Did it land OK, is it in the upright position? All of those things.

Host: Yeah. So, to reiterate, the hope, the, the goal is to recover the capsule, you know, as quickly as possible, but you want to test out how well does this spacecraft hold up, you know, just floating in the ocean, should, should a situation arise where it does have to spend extra time. This is, this is why it’s a test objective.

Melissa Jones: Correct.

Host: OK, very cool. Now, you know, we’re going through the recovery process, we’re getting all the assets, a good picture of where all these things are and what their purposes are. Orion itself: what technology exists on the capsule that helps with the recovery process?

Melissa Jones: Good question. So, we’ve talked about a couple of the systems, but I’ll elaborate on them a little bit more. So, the CMUS system, stands for Crew Module Uprighting System, and they’re the big giant bags. In the case of Orion they’re orange; in Apollo, they were white. And they basically inflate on the top of the capsule. At least 50% of the time, we noticed in the Apollo program that the capsule wanted to flip upside down upon landing, and that could be for various reasons. It could be because of a sea state. It could be because the parachutes that have the air in them are kind of pulling the capsule to the side. But this system is embedded in the Orion capsule, and it initiates a couple of minutes after landing to inflate those big orange balls and turn the capsule in, to what we call Stable 1 position, which is like it’s supposed to be where the heat shield is touching the water and everything else is out of the water. And that’s imperative for us because we can’t recover a capsule if it’s upside down. Now, we do have a contingency system that will compensate for that called manual uprighting. If that system for some reason doesn’t work or the sea states are too high and we can’t get it to flip over, then we will attach salvage uprighting bags, the divers will, from the small boats who are in the water underneath it, however they need to do it, and then we will upright the capsule that way. But the CMUS system is a big deal, and it’s specifically on the crew module for that manual uprighting or for the capsule uprighting. Another thing we learned from the last mission, that is technology that was added to this capsule to help us, are those attach points I was talking about. Those attach points are critical to making sure that when we are towing the capsule and we get it in the well deck, that we can control it. If you will imagine, the crew module sits on top of the water in a well deck of a ship that’s kind of sloshing around, and we get some pretty big waves in the well deck, so it’s kind of like a big, I would say like surfboard, basically on top of the water, and it’s about 20+ thousand pounds, and it’s swinging from side to side. And so, when we attach those lines with those LLAMA fishing reel mechanisms I talked about before, we’ve really got to get control and keep control of the capsule. And so, those attach points that were added are absolutely critical that they are designed in a way that can handle all of those loads from that 20-pound capsule, 20,000 pounds plus capsule, moving back and forth. So, those two are really very important systems on the capsule for recovery.

Host: Very good. Now, is there also things to help with locating the capsule, you know, any GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) systems or lights to help you, you know, should you be landing at nighttime, anything like that?

Melissa Jones: Yeah, I believe for crewed missions there will be, so there’s a triband beacon, yes, that emits a tone on the 406 megahertz, and that’s one of the ways that we find the capsule if we need to. There also will be a beacon, I believe, on Artemis II, which is like a visual that you can see at night of the beacon, you know, a strobe on that, that goes off that we can visibly see. We actually tested that on our last underway test just to see what it looked like. So, we could, if the ship could see it and the helicopters could see it. And so, yes, there’s definitely ways that we have to track and find the capsule in the event that it comes down in a place that we’re not, recovery teams are not staged to be at.

Host: OK. Now, you mentioned, some of the things you mentioned when, when you were talking about some of these recovery items or assets on Orion itself, you said, you know, we learned this from the last mission. Are you referring to Exploration Flight Test #1?

Melissa Jones: Correct.

Host: And so, what did you learn?

Melissa Jones: So, we learned that the load that the capsule experiences where the lines attach, basically a lot of the stuff we’re doing now, we — are design improvements from that time. Because, we, the attach points were under-designed, and that’s not necessarily a negative thing, me saying they were under-designed. We didn’t understand the environment in the well deck. We were using the well deck like nobody had ever used the well deck before. We didn’t have a lot of instrumentation nor was there really a way to predict how the ship would move and the waves would be modeled. And so, we’ve actually fixed all of that since then. The flight program, the Orion capsule, they beefed up their attach points based on some instrumentation data that we got from that mission, and we have worked with an organization that works with the Navy a lot to model the well deck to better understand what the waves will do when the ship is moving. So, now we have what we call it a wave monitoring system that helps us predict how to move the ship or where the waves will be with the loads that we’ll see. So, that was a really big thing that we learned from EFT-1. We also learned that the, how important the heat shield was, and I believe that there were some changes on the heat shield design based on some of the data that they got post-mission of how that heat shield maybe held up, and they’ve made some improvements to that design, because as you know, when we reenter the atmosphere, you know, it’ll be like 5000 degrees, 25,000 miles an hour, that is, the thermal protection system is critical to protecting the astronauts on Artemis II and beyond.

Host: Very, very true. Yeah, a lot learned from that flight test. I think that was in 2014.

Melissa Jones: Correct.

Host: So, definitely a lot of work has been, yeah. So, a lot of work has been done since then to prepare for this upcoming flight. Very, very good. Now, in terms of, you know, we’re still talking about the overall recovery, you know, where everyone is. Now, in terms of your role throughout the mission from, from preflight all the way up to when you’re finally deploying to go recovering the capsule, what is your role to say, you know, throughout these, throughout the steps to get ready for the flight that you’re participating in and say the recovery teams are ready for the mission.

Melissa Jones: That’s a good question. So, we do these big integrated tests with the Navy. They take about, I would say, eight months or so to plan, and they’re called underway recovery tests, or URTs. And those are our milestones to prove readiness for this mission. And everyone one of those URTs since EFT-1, which was in December of 2014, we’ve done URT-5, 6, 7, 8, and we’re getting ready to do our last one in September, URT-9. And what those URTs did was they basically incrementally proved that the improvements we’ve made on the newly designed hardware, the operations that we’ve changed, the timelines we’ve built, and the contingencies that we’ve, you know, planned for, that we have systematically a little bit at a time, proved that those are going to work. So, you have to have test data, right? And so, really, because of the way we do recovery and how we land and the fact that we use DOD assets for that, we have to plan these milestones, these tests, to go out and work with them to make sure that we’re ready to go. So, so as my job, part of my responsibility is making sure that those for nominal end of mission, meaning everything went where it was supposed to be and we’ve landed in the right place, we are tested and ready to go. Another aspect of my job is to plan for abort landings, which is off-nominal, and it’s not considered recovery. It’s considered, you know, emergency landings. We call it retrieval. And that’s what, I do that for launch. I sit on console for launch and work with the Navy SUPSALV, which is Supervisor of Salvage and Diving organization at D.C., to retrieve the capsule in case it doesn’t come down off the coast of San Diego. And that’s a whole other aspect of being ready. So, basically, I’m responsible for emergency landing responses and nominal end-of-mission landing responses.

Host: Got it. OK. Yeah, and we’ll get into the, a little bit of the contingency responses after we get through the, the nominal situation, nominal recovery, you know, what that’s going to look like. So, so you did all these, these tests, these URTs, recovery tests to verify, OK, you know, we are good. Now, you mentioned that you’ll be, it sounds like for launch you’ll actually be in Florida, because part of your job is to be ready in case of an abort scenario. It’s not going to land in the Pacific. It’ll land, well, I don’t know, it might land in the Pacific, but there’s scenarios where it could land in the Atlantic as well. So, your job in the launch timeframe is to be prepared in Florida for, for that. Is that right?

Melissa Jones: Correct.

Host: OK. And but, you know, in the meantime, through all these mission management meetings, when all the teams are getting together that says we are ready, you’re also, are you also looking after the assets in the Pacific saying, hey, recovery teams are good. We got the boats. We got the helicopters. Everything’s, you know, all the teams are ready and staged over there. We’re solid. We’re good to go.

Melissa Jones: Yes, absolutely. So, I will have a daily tag up with the Department of Defense and their team, and we’ll just talk about, you know, hey, is the ship good to go? Are all the systems green? You know, how are your folks looking? What’s the weather like out there? Do you have any concerns? And so, in addition to the NASA part of the team that I also lead, and that will feed into the landing and recovery team readiness in the MMT (Mission Management Team) process to fly.

Host: OK. So, at what point, so after launch, you know, you have that responsibility to make sure that you can recover the capsule, you know, in an off-nominal scenario, but at what point are you, is it far enough into the mission where you say, OK, now it’s time to go over to California and get set up for, for the recovery over in the Pacific? At what point do you leave Florida and go to the other side of the country?

Melissa Jones: Good question. So, about 20 days before splashdown, we start sending people out to California. It’s kind of a phased approach. So, we have trucks that head to California with some of our hardware on them. Most of our hardware is already out in California, but there are a couple things that we take with us that we use in the prelaunch timeframe. And so, those folks will get there. They will offload those trucks. They’ll make sure that the warehouse is ready to receive people and hardware, and then we call our shore team, our shore team lands at about splashdown minus 17 days, and they start interfacing and loading the ship. They load the ship with our cradle, with our LLAMAs, with our winch, with all of the hardware that we need to do recovery, and then about 12 days before splashdown, we actually go out to sea to do something we call just-in-time training. And what that is, is it’s the NASA team and the DOD team that has been tasked with this recovery, and we practice while, while the capsule is on orbit. And the reason we do that is because we are trying to protect for launch scrub. So, if we, let’s just say our last underway recovery test we had the ship that we thought was going to be the Artemis I ship, and we practiced with them, knowing that we’re going to fly Artemis I a couple months later, and then something happens in the last month or two of processing at the space center or we have a launch slip, and that ship, which is not ours, you know, full time, it’s just we get it for a month here and three weeks here, and we lose that ship because the launch scrub, there’s a problem, and we have to go fix it and figure it out. Then all that training we’ve done with that ship on the last underway recovery test really doesn’t help the, the recovery ship that’s going to be the Artemis I recovery ship. So, we’ve had to add some things to our baseline, and we call it just-in-time training. We wait until after the mission has launched, and we go out with the ship that’s been designated to be the recovery ship for the Navy, and we do three days of just-in-time training with them while the capsule is on orbit. And then we come back in, and we offload the fake capsule, so we have an empty cradle, and we give everybody a day off, and we wait for the MMT go to deploy recovery forces officially for recovery, and they help us understand everything is working nominally, where is it going to come down, what is the weather trending like. And we get that call at splashdown, six days before splashdown, and then we deploy everybody five days before splashdown, as long as everything is going the way it seems like it’s supposed be going. And again, every day we’re checking in with the MMT, right? So, let’s just say we’re out for just-in-time training, and it turns out that there’s a problem with the capsule, it’s coming back early or something like that, we will change what we need to change real time to accommodate those changes in the mission.

Host: I see. So, so the just-in-time training, that’s, you know, you’re out there pretty early, you’re doing this test. I’m assuming this is for the testing mission part of Artemis, right? Or will this be, this will be a normal practice to just go make sure everything is OK for, for Artemis I, II, and beyond, or is this really just a testing of those capabilities?

Melissa Jones: So, it actually serves a couple of purposes. In this case, it’s really to, to get the team, the integrated team, the NASA and Navy team all integrated, because we’ve, we’ve learned that through our testing that it takes about three days of actually working with the new ship, the new helicopters, and the new divers to really work out all the bugs. You have to remember that basically that team is a brand-new team every single time we go underway, and we do testing, and the consistency in the recovery operations is the NASA team. So, we always have a little bit of learning curve to overcome, and the DOD does an amazing job. They catch on very quickly to that. Now, going forward, it’s actually, it was an unintended benefit to doing just-in-time training for Artemis I like we did because Artemis II, which is our first crewed mission, is a much shorter flight. It’s about eight to ten days, if I recall. And because of that shortened flight, we will actually already be in the Pacific on a recovery ship. So if, God forbid, something happens and the astronauts have to come down in like an abort once around, they go around and they have to come down immediately, we will already be in the Pacific waiting for them based on how far away they land from us. So, it’s actually a real benefit, this just-in-time training addition is a real benefit for the Artemis II crews because of how short the mission is.

Host: And they have a similar mission profile where they’re going to be wrapping around the Moon.

Melissa Jones: Correct.

Host: Very good. So, you mentioned the deployment schedule. I think that’s, you get six days ahead of time, they say, OK, mission management team, everything looks good for the capsule. We’re ready to go home in a nominal scenario. You say, was it five days that everybody’s deployed, everyone is on the boats, the helicopters, everything, and five days out, they’re heading out to the ocean?

Melissa Jones: Yeah. And we do that because we are trying to protect for a weather alternate. So, you know, the weather is not always, even in shuttle, we had weather alternates at Dryden [Flight Research Center, now known as Armstrong Flight Research Center] and White Sands [Space Harbor].

Host: Yeah.

Melissa Jones: And so, we’ve done an analysis and determined that a weather system is typically 1000, the most, it’s about 1000 nautical miles. If you can get around 1000 nautical miles, you can probably avoid most, a high percentage of weather systems. And so, we deploy at, at splashdown minus five days so that we can get to 600 nautical miles out to sea, and we wait for the landing site actual location. Hey, we’re going to land at this latitude and this longitude, and that gives us two days to go farther out to sea or come back in to shore. And we made the decision, you know, if we were going to protect for a 1200 nautical mile weather alternate, we either needed to leave early, or we needed two ships, two teams, two sets of ground support equipment, and the decision that we made was to go out a couple days early so that we would have the flexibility of getting to anywhere within that 1200 nautical mile range to support a weather alternate for this mission.

Host: Ah-ha. Yep. So, it’s not just five days to get out to, you know, exactly where you’re expecting to be. You are thinking way ahead. You’re going to go out. You’re going to stage, and you have the ability to go really far in any direction if they pick an alternate landing site, and of course, one of the main things with any recovery is we are always looking at that weather, and especially in the ocean, that’s going to be pretty critical.

Melissa Jones: Absolutely.

Host: So, OK. So, you have all the different boats. You’ve named a couple of them. You have the actual boat that has the well deck. You’ve got the small boats. You’ve got the helicopters. You know, is it just one team, or is it kind of like the Kazakhstan teams that have a ballistic team somewhere else?

Melissa Jones: No, so there’s just, well I can speak for recovery. We really just have one recovery team that, that covers contingencies or nominal end of mission.

Host: Got it. OK. Yeah, and for, I guess, just the way the orbital mechanics work for – the Soyuz, if they have a ballistic reentry, they have that opportunity to have recovery teams posted in different locations. And especially with your five days out plan, and you’re covering really a wide area, that makes a lot of sense. Let’s go to the actual operations. So, five, five days out, where is the capsule in orbit at this time? Is it still around the Moon?

Melissa Jones: That’s a good question. I am not super savvy on orbital mechanics, but I believe we’re on our way back from the Moon. We get notification if there’s a problem, and then it takes at least 72 hours for them to come home.

Host: I see, OK. So, they have to, I know, I remember they have that burn around the Moon, and that burn is really the one that sends them on the trajectory to — enter through the Earth’s atmosphere. So, this seems like they’re giving you the go way ahead of time. What happens to the Orion at entry? What is the entry sequence that you’re going to be listening for on the boat and say, OK, everything seems to be going the way we’re expecting it to?

Melissa Jones: So, they do their final burn, their skip reentry, and we are listening to the, the Mission Control Center, and we’re expecting for 26 pieces of debris to jettison from the capsule. And they happen in sequential order. The forward bay cover comes off first. It’s a big ring that’s on the top of the capsule that protects all of the parachutes and the CMUS bags and all of those pieces of hardware from the conditions on orbit, and so that comes off first. It’s a pretty significant piece of hardware, and after that, another 25 pieces of hardware come off the capsule, and they’re as small as, like, mortar can lids, and they’re as big as main parachutes. And so, we’re listening for that sequence to be green, meaning that the Mission Control Center is observing that all of that hardware is being jettisoned at the time it’s supposed to be jettisoned, and those systems are operating nominally. Because we put together our footprint on the ground of where we can stage the ship and stage the small boats and fly the helicopters based on whether or not that jettison process is happening the way it’s supposed to. It’s a safety issue, right? So, they each have their footprints that they come down, how big they are, how much surface area, the wind, the weight, and the timing of jettison, creates these footprints of where this hardware, these 26 pieces of hardware are expected to fall. And we’re very careful to make sure that we are outside of those footprints, as long as they are nominal footprints. So, that’s a big part of the entry, descent, and landing process that we are listening for and trying to understand. And then, of course, the guys in helicopters are looking for three good mains [parachutes]. There’s all of these milestones that as the recovery team we can see that the MCC, the Mission Control Center, can’t see, and so we have all those in a procedure, and we call three good mains, we call splashdown, we call good CMUS bags, and those are all things that we’re looking for during the final entry, descent and landing process.

Host: Got it. OK. That is critical information that you need for the – as, as the recovery teams. Now, in terms of visual assets that you have to watch, you know, you’re getting a lot of data, it sounds like, through mission control. That’s great. Do you have cameras that are trained on any of this so you can monitor, you can actually physically see the three good mains, you know, and you’re getting some of that visual data fed to you?

Melissa Jones: Yes, absolutely. So, there are a lot of assets that we use. Now, one of the assets is the WB-57, and that’s something that is really controlled out of JSC, and they get to really, really high altitude. And so, we basically, in order for this to safe, we bucketize our air assets in altitudes. And so, once we get to, I want to say it’s 25,000 feet, the helicopters that are currently airborne will take over, you know, that’s their air space. So, the WB-57 is getting imagery of the entry, sending that back to JSC. Helicopters will take over. We have these state-of-the-art five-axial gimbal systems that are attached to the helicopters, and they compensate for a rotation and vibration and all of that kind of stuff, and they’re very long-range cameras. And that is taking imagery the whole time. We have one on each helicopter. We have two helicopters, two gimbal systems. In addition to that, we have, the helicopter itself has a system on the front of it called MTS (Multi-Spectral Targeting System). I’m trying to remember what that stands for, but I think it’s a thermal system. And that is actually how, what typically makes first contact, seeing the heat off the capsule coming back to the atmosphere, that’s what typically finds the capsule first, was the MTS system that’s actually physically on the military helicopters. And we get video from that. And then we have folks on board who have FLIR cameras, the thermal imaging cameras, the hand-held cameras, and they’re taking pictures as well. And then, on the ship, we have 17 cameras installed on the exterior of the ship and in the well deck. So, we basically document every aspect that we can with multiple different assets.

Host: Very cool. Now, how much are, you know, the folks at home going to get to see? You have a lot of visual assets, but what are, you know, there’s a lot of people that are going to be looking forward to this mission and want to see the capsule coming down. What are they going to get to see? What’s getting routed to TV?

Melissa Jones: Great question. So, I’m not clear on which of the assets get routed, but we do have a new system on the ship that we just tried out that worked very well on our last underway test, and it is near real-time imagery. It’s a satellite system that we install onboard that the DOD has approved, and I think it’s the helicopter gimbal data, the imagery; I’m not sure which of the cameras we have piped into it, but there will be a feed that is piped to KSC and JSC of near real-time data and imagery of the recovery operation.

Host: Very cool. So, you got all these, you got so many good views. You got high-altitude planes. You got the, you got the cameras on the boats, cameras on the helicopters, lots of things pointing at, pointing at the capsule and awaiting its recovery. So, when it actually, you know, you got three good mains, when it actually splashes down in the ocean, then, I guess that’s when you say, you know, you listen for the, OK, we have a good splashdown. You have a good, I think it’s CMUS is the inflatables that you were talking about. At what point do you say, OK, let’s go grab it?

Melissa Jones: So, once we land and we get, and we let those flight test objectives for the first two hours, you know, the capsule stays powered up, and it floats around. And it’s emitting ammonia, right? Ammonia is venting to do this thermal test. And so, after the first two hours, and that test is over, then Mission Control Center will power the vehicle down. And then they’ll do a handover to the NASA recovery director, and we stay away from the capsule while it’s venting, because ammonia is hazardous to people. So, the divers can’t, you know, they’re basically hanging out in the water. They’re recovering the jettisoned hardware. We’re trying to get the parachutes. We’re trying to get the forward bay cover. So, they have other things they’re doing, but the capsule is really hanging out, and the ship is doing circles around the capsule and just trying to stay in good communication with the small boats who are monitoring via binoculars how the capsule is doing. And so, after those first two hours, then we do our next data gathering, which is imagery. Because now we can touch the capsule. We can do our haz[ard] assessments of the capsule. So, the divers will approach the capsule, and they’ll do sniff checks to make sure that there’s no ammonia present, no hydrazine present, and that they are safe to be close to the capsule without PPE (personal protective equipment). And then they basically document everything with imagery before we touch it. So, they do surface imagery, above the surface, around the capsule, and then they actually get in the water with waterproof cameras and go underneath the capsule and document the entire heat shield. Because we have to make sure that if any damage is done to the heat shield or seen on the heat shield, that we know whether or not it happened during reentry and splashdown or it happened in the well deck when we’re trying to set the capsule into the cradle, because that is going to help our supersmart TPS engineers, thermal protection system engineers, understand if their design worked like they needed it to and if it will protect the astronauts for the next mission. So, so that right there, if you talk, just the waiting for the thermal protection, for the ammonia boilers to stop and to get all of the imagery of the thermal protection system, that’s about a three-and-a-half-hour process. Once that’s done, we will deploy the lines out the back of the ship, and we will do our approach and slowly bring the capsule in to the well deck. Because remember, Artemis I is about protecting the hardware. It’s not about speed. If we had astronauts inside, we would be moving much, much faster. So, all, the whole process from splashdown to getting the capsule in the cradle with a dry well deck, is about five hours.

Host: OK. Yeah. And a lot of that is for the testing purposes and to your point, you know, slow and steady on this go around with the uncrewed capsule. Now, you mentioned crew. It sounds like for a crewed mission what you would do is, it sounds like you would bring it in to the well deck a little bit faster. So, we’re not talking about opening the hatches and then jumping into the ocean in a nominal scenario. It sounds like you’re bringing them into the well deck. You’re going to lift them up, and then you take them out. Is that right?

Melissa Jones: Actually, for crew we have, we’re going to get them out in the open water.

Host: Interesting.

Melissa Jones: So, it’s much faster — yeah. So, it’s a nominal, it’s, it’s not a contingency. It’s considered nominal, and we have something called a stabilization collar, and it’s this inflatable collar that we attach to the outside of the capsule, and we open the hatch. And you could actually, we’ve put multiple people on it, it’s very, very sturdy, and you can stand on it and open the hatch, and then the divers can go in and help the crew out, or the crew can come out on their own, and there’s a big raft. They can, they sit in, it’s kind of a stable raft. We call it a front porch, actually. It is probably the biggest high-tech, multi-tech raft you’ve ever seen before. It’s really amazing, and it’s really just a place for us to put them in case we need to do any kind of medical triage, or they just need a stable platform. Otherwise, or we helo (helicopter) lift them, right? So, there’s two ways, once the astronauts are out of the capsule there’s two ways to get to the ship. You can get to the ship on helicopter by being lifted off the front porch into a helicopter, or you can get in a small boat, and the small boat will take you to the ship, and you can basically climb up a rope ladder in the side port location to get onto the ship. And then we take them to med[ical] bay for their evaluation. That doesn’t always mean that there’s something wrong with them, but we always take them straight to med bay so that they can be evaluated.

Host: Got it, OK. Now for the uncrewed mission, back to Artemis I for a second. Once you have the, the capsule in the well deck, you got it secured, you’re ready to go, then where do the recovery teams go and where is the capsule going after a successful recovery?

Melissa Jones: So, we come back to Naval Base San Diego, and we offload the capsule. We take it to a place on the base called the mole pier, it’s basically a pier at the end of the base, because the vehicle is still at flight pressure for its, like its hazardous systems, like ammonia and hydrazine, and so the Navy has an 800 foot clear that we have to observe around the capsule, meaning ship, personnel, any nonessential personnel are not allowed in that clear. And so, they take us to a place on the base that’s not as busy, and that’s where we do, we call it pre-transportation processing. So, what that means is only work that needs to be done to make sure that the capsule can be safely transported home is done. We don’t do extra testing, sampling, anything like that on base because the goal is to get the capsule home as quick as possible, because parts of this capsule, Artemis I capsule, is going to be reused for Artemis II, like a lot of the avionics. So, we only are trying to get it in a configuration where it’s safe to transport across the country. And once all the pre-transportation processing requirements are fulfilled, which is about 40 hours, and we work 12-hour shifts so it’s just a couple of days, we put it on a flatbed truck, and we connect, inside of a recovery transportation fixture, and we connect a purge to it, and we connect a system that monitors temperature and flow rate for hazards, like hydrazine leaking, anything like that, and basically, we have a team that drives with it back across the country.

Host: To Florida?

Melissa Jones: Yes. To Florida.

Host: Very cool. All right, yeah, and that is the recovery operations for Artemis I. Are we missing anything for a nominal recovery?

Melissa Jones: Nope.

Host: Perfect.

Melissa Jones: That’s it.

Host: We covered it. Awesome. Now, let’s go to contingency for a second. So, one of the, one of the parts you mentioned was even, even before launch, you’re not over in California quite yet, you are watching from, from Florida, and you’re tracking a bunch of assets for, for a contingency. Now, what are the assets for a contingency recovery operation that you are prepared to deploy should, should there be an abort scenario?

Melissa Jones: Good question. So, there’s an organization that we work with at D.C. called SUPSALV, that’s the U.S. Navy Supervisor of Salvage and Diving, and we have worked with them to create a database or a system as a tool that uses the satellite that can see all of the ships in the world that they’re tracking. They have, it’s about 2,200 ships that are commercial ships and military ships that include big cranes, cargo carriers, different things like that. And we work with them, and on, on launch day, if we have an abort, let’s just say it aborts into the Atlantic, the CM (command module) does, we work with SUPSALV through communications from the Firing Room to determine what are the closest ships that have the capability that we need to get the capsule out of the water, and they have all the information on country of origin, how big the crane is, do they have a medical doctor on board? All of that stuff. That’s the tool that they’ve put together for us. And so, we call them, and we say, hey, we have had an abort. This is the latitude and longitude. We need a retrieval plan. Can you please put together a plan for what ships in the area that you think would be the best ships to help us? And that’s how we work that for an abort.

Host: Got it. So, really, you’re talking with this group that is looking at assets, it sounds like, you know, the Atlantic is one area, but it sounds like you contract these, these things all over the world and say these are the best boats that if it were to land in this area that would have the right tools, the equipment, the personnel, sounds like medical personnel, especially for a crew, that they could deploy and help, help out our crew members. It sounds like it’s just this, the organization that does it.

Melissa Jones: Correct. And it is global.

Host: It’s global, yeah.

Melissa Jones: So, that’s a lot of — yeah, it’s global. So, it’s a lot of flexibility in case it lands. It’s just a, the, you know, two seconds of exposure that they have to the Indian Ocean, and they land in the Indian Ocean. We will have access to assets in those areas to retrieve the capsule and the crew.

Host: And you’d really leave it up to them to figure out, OK, now, now there’s the best boat that can actually retrieve the capsule. What’s the plan for getting the crew, you know, to whatever medical facility that’s necessary or to get the capsule back home, that would be part of your, your plan that you’re going to be working with these folks.

Melissa Jones: Yeah, for the capsule, yes. For the crew, we use the Department of Defense for rescue, and that’s a whole other can. Yeah. So, we would, we basically would rescue divers will actually jump out of airplanes, C-17s, C-130s, or helicopters, depending on where we land, and they’re medically trained, and they’re actually the ones that, you know, get to the astronauts typically first, and then we expect these, we call them ships of opportunity, these commercial vessels, or military vessels, depending on what’s in the area, to pick them up. So, it’s a whole, there’s a whole addition to the con ops if you’re talking crew. I was really specifically talking about an uncrewed mission where we don’t have to hurry, and we can take our time and we really are just trying to get the capsule back. We use these cargo vessels for retrieval.

Host: Got it, yeah. And that’s what you would do. You would find the right ship of opportunity and, you know, you’d, you’d have some sort of plan to sort of slowly make its way, I guess, the ultimate goal is to get that capsule back to Florida, but it sounds like you’re already thinking ahead to crew.

Melissa Jones: Correct.

Host: Very cool. OK. Well, that’s, we went over a lot today, Melissa. I know there’s, there’s a lot of stuff that’s going to be coming up to actually get us ready for Artemis I. Now, one of the things actually, before I get to that, is once the capsule actually gets to Florida, you know, it sounds like the ultimate goal is to get it back, it sounds like there might be some assets on board, but then also some data that you really want to get back. Is that part of the reason why the recovery operations and the ultimate delivery back to Kennedy Space Center facilities with the experts there, that’s why that’s so important, is you have some important stuff on that capsule?

Melissa Jones: That’s correct. There’s, in addition to the payloads that we’re carrying that are going to help us better understand how the deep space environment impacts crew, all of the instrumentation data on how the vehicle’s heat shield performs is all, none of its telemetered to the ground, it’s all localized telemetry. And so, we have to get the capsule back to KSC, so that can be downloaded. We need the avionics off, and so, yeah, there’s limited time between the Artemis I and the Artemis II mission, so we need to absorb all the data that we can possibly absorb from how the Artemis I capsule performed so that we are ready to safely fly a crew on Artemis II.

Host: Very good. Now, you already mentioned a couple of these, especially the, I think it’s Underway Recovery Test was one of them, but in terms of the recovery teams and in terms of, you know, it sounds like you’ve done a lot of work so far, what’s left for you and for your teams to make sure that you’re ready for Artemis I?

Melissa Jones: That’s a good question. So, we have one more Underway Recovery Test, it’s Underway Recovery Test 9, and that’s what we call our mission certification. So, if you are going to be on the Artemis I recovery team for NASA, you are required to be on the ship for URT-9, and that’s where we do all of our final runs, we call it our full mission profile, and that’s everything from launching weather balloons on the ship, deploying small boats, attaching lines to the capsule, talking to Houston. So, it’s the whole shebang. It’s from cradle to grave, the entire operation, and we do that three times, two at night, one during the day, just to make sure that if we happen to land at night, which is not the current plan, we can accommodate that, and we do comm[unication] checks, we do all kinds of stuff with the MMT. And that last URT-9, which is in September, is jam-packed full of eight days of operations, testing, training. We’re getting training runs for our well deck crew. And so, that’s the really big milestone that’s left for us. All of our hardware is basically certified and ready to go, and it’s been tested. Our procedures are put together. Our contingencies are written. And so, that’s the last big milestone to saying, yes, verily, the NASA recovery team is ready to recover Artemis I.

Host: Perfect, and you mentioned this right beforehand, but, you know, all of this, we discussed a lot today, Melissa, we talked about the whole, you know, where all these assets are, all the different planning, and now, you know, for Artemis I, you’re really going to be executing the mission. Really, what is the purpose here for Artemis I? Because ultimately the whole goal here is to put, you know, humans on this capsule and perform this mission. We talked about Artemis II. That’s going to be the human element, adding this, but really, from, from your perspective on the recovery operations, what is valuable about Artemis I that’s really going to help you build that confidence for Artemis II and recovering crew?

Melissa Jones: Great question. So, really, I would say the main thing about Artemis I is preserving the flight hardware and getting back a capsule that we can do testing on, that we can take samples of, and to really understand how the skip reentry maneuver, the heating on the capsule, the parachutes, how does all of that work and did it work nominally for us to really get comfortable that the design that we have that we’re going to put crew in next is safe? In addition to that, the recovery stuff, the operations, every time we go we learn something new. We do something faster. We learn something more efficient, and really, the goal is to get crew out as quickly and safely as possible into med bay. And so, we, every time we go out and do these tests, we refine that process. And then after Artemis I, when the main objective is no longer making sure we’re very careful with the capsule, we will refine, and we will start working our operations as quickly as we can, and we’ll do it over and over and over again. So, really, Artemis I is the foundation and the building block to ensuring that we can safely and successfully fly crew on Artemis II.

Host: You know, I’m going to pull back even more, Melissa, because, you know, what we’re talking about here is, is the operations for recovering, getting ready to recover crew that are coming from the Moon, that’s the time period we’re in right now. We got Commercial Crew flying to low-Earth orbit. We’re talking about commercialization of low-Earth orbit, and now we’re focusing on the Moon, and it’s right around the corner. You know, we’re talking about the operations coming up here very soon to prepare for this whole new world. How’s it feel to be such a huge integral part of getting humans back to the Moon in this new sustainable program, Artemis?

Melissa Jones: Man, it’s really exciting if you think about it. We have never gone this far into space before, even with Apollo. We’re going farther than we’ve ever gone before, and to be a part of that, to be the NASA recovery director that actually recovers crew from the first crewed mission landing in the water that we’ve done since the 1960s is just, it’s mind boggling to think about what a historical job I have, and it’s very exciting.

Host: It’s very cool. A lot of people contributing to this, to this effort, and it’s all coming up here very soon. Melissa Jones, thank you so much for coming on Houston We Have a Podcast. We went over so much today. I feel pretty confident, you know, about my knowledge, but I know there’s a lot more to do, and I wish you the best, and also to your teams to get us ready for Artemis I. Thanks for coming on.

Melissa Jones: Thanks for having me.

[ Music]

Host: Hey, thanks for sticking around! I hope you learned something today. I certainly learned a lot from Melissa Jones, and it was awesome to have her on. For a lot of the latest updates for Artemis I and really the Artemis program, if you want to learn more about that, go to nasa.gov/artemis for the latest. We’re at NASA.gov/podcasts, and you can find us as well as a variety of other shows, really across the agency that are talking about a variety of things, but on Houston We Have a Podcast we have a collection of Artemis episodes. If you’re curious on where that it, just type in, Houston We Have a Podcast/Artemis episodes. Go search that, and the collection should show up right at the top. You can chat with us on social media. We’re on the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If you have a question for us or you’d like to submit an idea for the show, use the hashtag #AskNASA on your favorite platform, and just make sure to mention it’s for us at Houston We Have a Podcast. This episode was recorded on July 6, 2021. Thanks to Alex Perryman, Pat Ryan, Norah Moran, Belinda Pulido, Jennifer Hernandez, Kathryn Hambleton, and Madison Tuttle. And of course, thanks again to Melissa Jones for taking the time to come on the show. Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on and tell us what you think of our podcast. We’ll be back next week!