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

On episode 394, NASA’s Artemis II Flight Director Jeff Radigan shares what it takes to lead the first human mission of the Artemis program around the Moon. This episode was recorded June 6, 2025.

Transcript

Dane Turner (Host)

Houston, We Have a Podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center. Episode 394, Artemis II: The Mission. I’m Dane Turner, 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 and more.

Artemis II, the first crewed space flight around the moon since the Apollo program is coming up soon. NASA astronauts, Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover and Mission Specialist Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, will be the first human passengers of the Orion spacecraft. They will launch aboard the Space Launch System rocket from Launch Complex 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. From there, they’ll take a nine day journey around the moon and back, testing their vehicle and performing science along the way.

The team in mission control here at the Johnson Space Center is preparing for the flight. And today we have NASA flight director, Jeff Radigan, call sign Resolute Flight and lead flight director for Artemis II on the show to tell us about the mission, his role, and what we can expect from this historic flight.

Let’s go!

 

 

<Intro Music>

 

 

Dane Turner

Jeff, thank you so much for coming on. Houston, we have a podcast today.

 

Jeff Radigan 

Hey, I’m happy to be here. It’s good to join you again.

 

Dane Turner 

So we got to talk to you previously, in spring of 2023, on episode 288 you were here with Zeb Scoville. I’d love to know what’s going on since then. You’re the lead flight director for Artemis II. What’s been going on as lead flight director for the last couple years?

 

Jeff Radigan

Well, it’s really been all Artemis II all the time for me, and ensuring that we get all the operations ready to go to fly and take the crew back to lunar space here for the first time in a long time.

 

Dane Turner

Fantastic. So what does a lead flight director do for a mission like this?

 

Jeff Radigan

So I spend a lot of my time ensuring that, number one, the crew gets what they need. The crew’s in training right now, and so they’re going through their classes, which is a mixture of classroom setting as well as a lot of hands on experience. Of course, we have the mock ups that they get suited up in, and they’re going through all the various nominal procedures for how to fly the mission, as well as their malfunction procedures. We obviously hope that never something goes wrong, but if it happens, the crew is ready to respond and ready to take the appropriate action to save themselves. So spend a lot of time ensuring that that occurs successfully. We’ve got a whole set of folks here that supports their training and as well as my flight control team. So we’re currently developing all the operations, products, all the procedures, flight rules, interface procedures, in order to go fly successfully.

 

Dane Turner

What does your day to day look like? That’s a lot of things going on. What does it look like when you go more granular.

 

Jeff Radigan

So, you know, in any given week, I spend probably half my time in meetings, and those are briefings from, you know, the way the systems work. In order to educate myself, of course, I have to be an expert on the vehicle as well, and so I spend a lot of my time learning from the folks that I have working for me, as well as then making decisions on what types of procedures we’re going to do, how we’re going to do operations, all the way down to the order of operations for how we’re going to configure the software, configure the switches, all the various parts of the vehicle. That takes about half my time, and that’s really in the development of operations and development of training category. Then I spend a fairly significant portion of my time just I think of it as strategic thinking, really working with the other flight directors to ensure that all the work that we have planned ahead of us is getting done on time. And of course, there’s always surprises right? The vehicle as it’s going through processing, we learn new things every day. We learn things that either work differently than we expected, or they don’t work as we expected, and we’ve got to figure out exactly what to do. So I’d say I spend about half my time getting ready to fly the mission with my team that’s really spent in meetings to figure out how we’re going to do things on the mission, whether it’s the nuances of the software, whether it’s the very specific way we’re going to configure the cabin and all the hardware for the crew, ensuring that we’ve got everything, all the i’s dotted, T’s crossed, and we’re really able to go fly the mission that takes about half my time In any given week, and then the rest of it is really spent a mixture of strategic preparation, trying to ensure that all the work that we’ve got ahead of us is getting distributed between all the various team members that we have, ensuring that we’ve got a good plan to get to our flight readiness reviews here in the fall timeframe for a spring launch of Artemis II and then in my spare time, I get to go fly a space station. Because, you know, we’re only really as good in the flight director office as last vehicle you’ve flown. So I get to take some shifts over in ISS and continue to actually fly in space while I prepare for Artemis.

 

Dane Turner

Oh, that’s so cool that you still get to fly the ISS.

 

Jeff Radigan 

I do.

 

Dane Turner 

So as we you said, we’re going to fly in spring of next year. So how is your job going to change as we get closer to that?

 

Jeff Radigan 

Right now, we’re doing what I will call developmental simulations. We’re getting in the simulator, but we’re not perfecting our operations. We’re trying things, you know, we we try certain cadences between myself and the Capcom and the crew. The Capcom, of course, is the person I have on my team that talks to the crew and, you know, figuring out exactly the style of calls, the timing and frequency there is part of what we’re working on. Once we have it all figured out, then we start, you know, looking for accuracy, right? We so we’re spending the time right now figuring out exactly the high level concepts, and then as we get into the fall time frame, then we start doing things to be as accurate and as quick as we can, right? We don’t try and be fast first, because that’s just a way to find out a lot of different ways that don’t work. Instead, we take the time to figure out what does work, and then we refine it, and we get better at it such that when we have a problem in flight, we’re able to respond in the appropriate amount of time, which is in most cases, pretty quickly.

 

Dane Turner

This is all really cool. And you you’ve worked really hard on the development of all of this stuff, and you’re very involved in the mission and training for the mission everything. How did you get to this point at NASA? Did you start as a flight controller? Did you have… what was your path to get to this point?

 

Jeff Radigan

Well, I came to NASA, oh, geez, it’s been 20 years now. So it’s been a while. Came down and started as a flight controller working space station power systems. And I did that for a few years. I tell people, I came here at the right time, and I got lucky when I showed up that, you know, return to flight for the space shuttle had just occurred, and the next series of missions for the International Space Station was putting the solar rays up, you know, solar rays three through eight. And so I got to be a part of that. And there actually ended up being a number of folks in my group at the time who were waiting for return to flight, and then they were going to go on to different things. So I went from new guy to old hand real fast. And I got to work, I think, 17 missions in a row. It was great for my career. My wife still, I think, holds it against me that we didn’t take many vacations, but, you know, we were working a lot of lot of station assembly missions. And so that was a very busy and fun time for me.

 

After that, I slowed down a little bit and went off and worked some of the commercial cargo and Commercial Crew flights. And so I was one of our safety folks in operations, working with the SpaceX team, and it was orbital time now it’s Northrup Grumman for their cargo vehicles coming to the space station. And was able to work through that with those folks for a couple years, as well as then working on commercial crew. And so I did some of the contractual evaluations and the source board things, all of the I call them fun in quotes, types of things that we do around here with contracts. But it was good experience for me. It was a way to understand exactly how the government gets business done and what it takes to actually get a program off the ground. And I did that back in 2013.

 

And then 2014 I got selected to be a flight director. And so that’s what I’ve been doing for the last, oh, geez, over a decade now. And so did a fair amount of ISS work when I first got selected to be a flight director, you know, flying the space station, and then, you know, being in charge of an increment, which is what we call a, you know, three to six month time period on the International Space Station, did a number of space walks. The AMS EVAs were kind of the highlights of my career there, the work that was done to go repair the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer that had a series of space walks that were pretty, pretty intense and intimidating. We were cutting into small metal wires and tubes and trying to ensure that we weren’t tearing the space suit as we did it, which was, which was a challenge, but we were able to accomplish that pretty well, and that was a lot of fun. So really, at that point, then I started transitioning Artemis, and it would have been back, you know, somewhere around 2018, 2019 that I started working Artemis one, and we were able to fly Artemis I successfully, which was a great time. And now here we are ready to fly Artemis II.

 

Dane Turner

Incredible and we’re very excited about Artemis II. So let’s start talking about some details of the mission. So why are we going back to the moon?

 

Jeff Radigan

You know, I think there’s a couple of reasons we go back to the moon, you know, the first of which humanity is a species of explorers. We like to go find what’s new. There’s still great things to discover on the surface of the moon and below the surface. And, you know, getting back there, I think it’s just in our nature. I think it’s something that humanity does. We go and explore. And this is, you. The next great place to do that. It’s our closest celestial body. And the sooner we can go, get back there and continue to explore the surface of the moon, I think we’ll all be better off for it, just as a species. And the second is the resources that are there, right there’s resources on the surface of the moon that don’t exist here on planet Earth naturally. And so we’re able to go, you know, “Mine the Moon” is a great slogan, but it’s, it’s a real thing, right? In terms of going and finding resources to help all the people that we have here on Earth do that.

 

And finally, I’m add another, another reason, you know, going back to the Moon for the science benefits and and learning from the surface of the Moon. It tells us things that we can’t figure out from what we have on Earth. Right? The Earth’s surface is constantly changing due to all the tectonic plate movement that has happened. The surface of the Earth has, you know, been torn up and re, re established a number of different times since the Moon was created and the Earth was was created, and you don’t have that on the Moon, right? We can learn a great deal about the history of the Earth from the history of the moon, and that’s something that’s not available to us here, so it’s another thing that we can go learn. And I know there’s a number of different scientists that are really excited to go figure out what we can get from the Moon for the history of both the Earth and the Moon.

 

Dane Turner

I can’t wait to see more geologists on the moon. I think that’s gonna be so cool. So Artemis I launched back in November of 2022 and it was an uncrewed flyby of the Moon. What did we learn from Artemis I? And how will Artemis II be different?

 

Jeff Radigan 

The first thing I think we learned from Artemis I was that we have a very capable rocket in the Space Launch System. It performed exactly as we designed it to it was a very clean launch, and that was a great, a great achievement here for the agency, you know, secondly, we started flying Orion. And, you know, I would say Orion was about 70% complete compared to what it is for Artemis II. We had all of our propulsion system, navigation system, the pressure shell, really, everything except the ECLS and crew systems that we were able to check out over that, you know, long duration mission.

 

Dane Turner 

What’s ECLS?

 

Jeff Radigan 

Oh, sorry. ECLS is Environmental Control and Life Support. We abbreviate that to ECLS. And so Artemis I, then we, you know, it’s one thing to say that we know how to navigate around the moon, and it’s a definite, you know, it’s a different thing to do it, because all of our tools are new. And, you know, we had a good check out of those, we learned some things. Of course, the moon is not perfectly spherical. It does have a little bit of a bulge, just like the Earth does when you’re in low Earth orbit. That doesn’t really matter too much, right? It’s all kind of in the noise. Turns out, when you’re flying as far past the moon, as we did for our Artemis I, that bulge can really interfere with your navigation systems. And so we actually were looking at our targeting systems, and had to recalibrate them just based on the geometry of the moon on Artemis I. And that was a great learning experience, especially as we go and do additional missions, you know, around the moon and even further past the moon, it’s something that now we know we need to account for. And was one thing we learned on Artemis I.

 

Dane Turner 

I had no idea, not only the Moon bulge like that, but that you had to account for, for that as you’re flying past, especially as far out as as we’re flying, you know, didn’t realize, you know, that was going to affect things. So that’s really cool. So Artemis II will be the first flight of the Orion spacecraft with humans. And I know it’s extensive, but can you give us a rundown of the sort of planning that goes into the first space flight with crew?

 

Jeff Radigan

Humans are difficult… is maybe the way I would start. If you think about all the things that you need to live in your day, whether it’s from getting up and using the restroom, whether it’s from finding, you know, some water to brush your teeth. They just add a lot more complexity to all of the systems on the spacecraft, which is a great thing, because we want to fly the crew. We want these these explorers, to go out there, but accounting for them from an engineering perspective is always a challenge, and so those are the things that we’re having to ensure that we get right on on the spacecraft. You know, the toilet is always a question I get in every scenario. And so, you know, we’re making sure that that works correctly. And then, of course, you have to vent the urine overboard, and then you have to account for that in your guidance systems to ensure that you’re not actually changing the trajectory and changing the the direction that the spacecraft is going too much. It will change it some. We just need to make sure we don’t do it too much. And so these are the new complicating factors that we have to add for Artemis II, the crew needs to breathe oxygen. And of course, we flew oxygen tanks on Artemis I to show that we could. But now, of course, they’re breathing the oxygen down. They’re exhaling CO2, and we have to vent that CO2 overboard, which, again, of course, you know, changes, it puts a force on the vehicle and changes your trajectory. And so we have to account for those. And so it’s just really a number of different complicating factors that we have on the spacecraft that we’re adding for Artemis II.

 

Dane Turner

It’s incredible to learn about all of the different forces that are you’re having to account for between the jettisoning of waste products, and then the bulging of the moon and all that thing, all those things that you know, every uh, illustration of the mission I’ve seen just says, Oh, you’re going to burn for the moon, and it’s just going to fly around and out. And you’re not going to need to do a whole lot to correct but it sounds like there’s going to be a lot, actually, to making sure you’re flying where you’re supposed to be.

 

Jeff Radigan

Absolutely. We actually play in six correction burns on the outbound leg, and then six correction burns on the return leg. And so we don’t put those on the pretty graphics, because otherwise it would just be correction burns everywhere. We put TLI, and then it looks like a nice arc around the moon. And we talk about the pictures we’re going to take when the crew gets on the crew gets on the far side, which will all be great things. But meanwhile, back here in Mission Control, we’re figuring out how to make sure we stay on the straight and narrow free return trajectory. Just means you’re going to come back and you’re going to hit the Earth. It doesn’t mean you’re going to land where you want. And so we need to we try and ensure both those things.

 

Dane Turner 

Well, let’s talk our way through so we can get to that point and learn about where all those burns are going to be. So on launch day, crew is going to suit up in their Orion Crew Survival System suits, which are the OCSS suits, and then they’re going to board the Orion spacecraft they’re going to launch and then they’re going to orbit the Earth twice before they burn for the moon. What are you doing during this whole sequence of events?

 

Jeff Radigan

So we’ve designed the Artemis II mission to really pass through a series of gates to ensure that we’re able to continue to support the crew as they go further and further from Earth. So we start in a low earth orbit, which allows us to ensure that our environmental control systems are working as we intended. Of course, we’ve done extensive ground testing. We have every reason to believe that they’re going to be successful, but there’s nothing like ensuring that that’s occurring on orbit before we continue to take the crew further from the earth. So the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to change going to check those out. We’re also going to prime the propulsion systems on Orion to ensure that those work. Of course, the Orion spacecraft will still be on the upper stage of SLS, the interim, cryogenic propulsion stage, the ICPS, but we will prime the prop system, the propellant system, on Orion to ensure that it’s ready to go and that we have functionality before we leave low Earth orbit. So that’s really what we’re focused on in that first, we’ll call it 70 to 90 minutes, is ensuring that the spacecraft’s ready to go into a higher orbit, that we’re ready to send the crew further beyond Earth, flying the space station and flying some of the more recent commercial missions you think about, you know, it’s 90 minutes to get home, you know, roughly from low earth orbit, from, really, anywhere you are, you can, you can get back in an hour and a half. Now we’re gonna, you know, we’re gonna push the crew a day from Earth. And so step one is, let’s get through that first checkout orbit. Let’s do the checkouts we need to be confident to keep going. And then we’ll go put the crew in what we call the high Earth orbit, which is a 24 hour orbit, which is gonna mean they’re on their way, and they will not be back for at least a day.

 

Dane Turner 

Wow. So we go through the entire launch sequence, and Kennedy is in control of that, right?

 

Jeff Radigan 

Yeah. Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, our launch director will be running the show from KSC, and of course, we’ll be supporting here in Houston. We have a number of cases where we configure the vehicle at her direction, but we’ll support her and until actually we hit T-0, and then we’ll take over from here

 

Dane Turner

Awesome. When exactly in the the countdown, do you take over?

 

Jeff Radigan 

It’s actually when, when we hit T-0, right? Once the boosters are lit and and the SLS starts going into the air. That’s actually when we start flying from Houston.

 

Dane Turner

Oh, cool. So let’s talk about the Orion spacecraft. What are some of the primary features that that you want to talk about?

 

Jeff Radigan

So the ones we’re really checking out on Artemis II is we’ve got a whole set of displays and controls that the crew has. They’ve got rotational and translational hand controllers, basically ways that they can spin and then move the vehicle up, down, side to side, forward, back. And so we’re going to be checking those out. We’ve got a whole set of manual piloting tasks for the crew to do. Of course, they’ve been in the simulator non-stop, especially the pilots, they love to get in the simulator and fly the vehicle. And I’m sure they’ll be very happy when we actually get to the manual piloting parts of the mission, because I think that I wouldn’t say it excites them the most, but I know they’re excited about it. Let’s just say it that way. So, you know, we want to use the displays and controls. We want the crew to be able to pilot the vehicle. We want to check out, as I mentioned, all the various vehicle systems. We want to check out the communication systems and the video systems. Of course, we were using a number of different communication systems with the Orion spacecraft, both our TDRS satellite system, our constellation of low earth orbit, or I guess they’re actually in a medium Earth orbit satellite system. But while we’re under. Beneath them, we can use those to check out our data rates with the vehicle. And then, of course, we’re actually using the Deep Space Network that NASA has. Once the spacecraft gets far enough away from Earth that we’re unable to use TDRS, because we’re too high, we’re too far away, we have to transition over the Deep Space Network. And so we’ll be checking those out as well. And so the crew will be doing that. They’ll be stowing their suits, as you mentioned, since you know, those are really for a launch and entry, and then they’ll be configuring the cabin, which is, you know, a very small space. They’re gonna be putting the seats away. They’ll be getting the exercise device ready to go. They’ll be configuring the cabin and just ready to basically camp in a, I guess it’s a, maybe a medium sized tent for the next 10 days so,

 

Dane Turner

So we’re we’re talking about while they’re in the orbit of the Earth, they’ve reached orbit, they go around in 90 minutes for the first orbit, and then you adjust the the orbit to the 24 hour orbit, so that that’s what they’re doing in Those that amount of time, they’re preparing everything for their further journey?

 

Jeff Radigan

Yeah, they’re getting the cabin configured. After we do what we call the apogee raised burn, which is where we go from low Earth orbit to the higher earth orbit. We’re going to do a series of proximity operations. We’re actually going to fly the Orion spacecraft in tandem with the upper stage the ICPS, and so the crew, at that point, our two pilots are going to be sitting in the seats, they’ll have parts of their suit off and be ready to go and actually pilot Orion in a series of maneuvers to ensure that the vehicle performs the way we expect it will. One of the interesting things of space flight is you need a target that’s fairly close to you in order to confirm that your propulsion systems, that your guidance systems, that they all work as you expected. The margins are just too small to use something like, say, the Earth or the moon as we fly around those. We need something that’s a target that’s fairly close. And so the easiest thing to do in this case is to actually use the upper stage of the rocket that we just rode to orbit, and that burned us into the high Earth orbit. So the Orion will separate from the ICPS, and then it’ll turn around, and it’ll actually fly towards the ICPS and then fly around it in a way that we are able to then verify that our ground models and the way we think the Orion spacecraft is going to fly, and we’ll be able to compare it to the way it does. And what this does, it allows us to update for future missions, if there’s anything that we didn’t get quite right, which, you know, our GNC folks, they’re, they’re a four-nines community. They love to get everything to the .01% accuracy. I’m sure they’ll find something that we can do a little bit better, but it gives us that opportunity to have that data such that when we go dock spacecraft, whether we’re docking Orion to HLS in the lander by the moon or gateway, we’ll have high confidence that we’ll be able to do that successfully.

 

Dane Turner

That’s really cool. So you’re, you’re going to fly around the the booster, not, not try and dock with anything yet.

 

Jeff Radigan

No, we’re not going to dock with it, but we are going to get pretty close. I mean, we’re close. I mean, we’re going to, we’re going to, while the crew is going to get the vehicle up within 10 meters of the upper stage. And so we’ve selected that distance because it gives us high confidence that one we’re able to get close, and we’re able to navigate successfully with with the upper stage. But then also, we don’t want to get too close. You know, we do passivate the upper stage, which means we bleed out all the propellant ahead of time, and we ensure that it’s not going to pose a risk to the crew, but we’ll still stay a little bit away from from the upper stage. We don’t want to cause a collision in space. That’s not, not our goal on Artemis II so we’re gonna fly pretty close, but, but not not get in and touch it or dock.

 

Dane Turner

Okay, cool.So they’re, they’re doing that 24 hour orbit. They’ve, they’ve done their, their different checkouts and everything. And then we get the trans lunar injection burn, or TLI burn. That’s our “Go for the Moon” moment, right?

 

Jeff Radigan 

It is. And you know, we’ll spend the time in the 24 hour orbit doing some of the longer checkouts we need. We can conform. We can confirm in that that first set of 90 minutes, that our CO₂ scrubbing is successful, that some of our water systems, our oxygen systems, are able to provide at least enough to get through 24 hours, while in that 24 hour orbit, we’re ensuring that we can do it for another nine days, right? That the spacecraft is going to be successful, it’s going to be able to support the crew all the way around the moon and back. And so that gives us enough time to really ensure that we’re ready to go for the moon. Because once you do, TLI, you’re on your way, there’s not really a lot of great options to come home early or in a different way. You’re truly committed for I won’t be back for nine days, and so I’ve got to be highly confident that we’re ready to go.

 

Dane Turner 

So can you take us through the flight around the moon?

 

Jeff Radigan

Sure. So the crew as we get into TLI, which, by the way, is also an interesting burn, because on a free return trajectory, it’s also your re-entry burn. So. As we’re as we’re getting ready to do that the crew is going to be set up and and ready to go. All of the burns are actually performed by the computer targeting system on board the Orion, with the crew following along and ensuring that we are where we should be in terms of software sequencing and and getting all of the parameters correct. So we have them following along, but then the computers actually perform the burn. The crew can manually do it if they need to, but of course, that’s kind of a backup option at this point, the computers are pretty accurate. So after we get through TLI, the crew is going to ride along, and we’ve got a number of things for them to do on the journey to the moon, whether it’s checking out some of the contingency operations we have on board, whether it’s, you know, I think we are going to have them configure for radiation shelter, if they were to need that in the future. We’re going to have them ensure that they can manually pilot the vehicle a little bit more. We’re then going to take a look at some of the cases where, if we were have a loss of cabin pressure and a depress how they would get back in their suits and ensure that we really, truly understand the cabin configuration, because we can test that on the ground here in 1g but there’s always some nuance of zero G that that trips you up and says, Okay, well, this could have been either a little bit more efficient, or we didn’t pack this this bag correctly. We need to do a little bit differently, and, you know, opportunities to learn that are few and far between. So we’re going to use the days to the moon on that, on those types of things.

 

Once we get about a day out from the moon, that’s really where the science starts. And so we have a number of different cameras that we’re flying on, on Artemis II. We’ve, we’ve, of course, got the NASA cameras, and then we’ve also got to set, I think National Geographic’s flying some of their cameras that we’re going to use to go take as much imagery as we can as we approach the moon. Now this is not going to be the approaches that you saw on some of the landing missions from Apollo. It’s been explained to me that if you hold the basketball in your hand out in front of you, that’s about the size that the crew is going to see the moon. And so, because we’re flying, you know, I think somewhere between five and 8000 nautical miles past the moon, that’s the size it’s going to be in the windows, which is a good size. It you can still pick out great detail. You can, of course, you know, using the basketball analogy, you can see the dimples on the basketball, and if you have a high powered camera, you can get great detail out of them. And so that’s what the crew is going to be doing, but just setting expectations, that’s what we’re going to see, because we’re going and we’re taking the crew further past the moon than anybody’s ever been so trying to continue to push the limits of what humanity’s able to do and set up for going even further in the future.

 

Dane Turner 

So that’s gonna be very different imagery from Artemis I, where we got very close to the moon.

 

Jeff Radigan 

Yeah, Artemis I, we were down 80 nautical miles off the surface of the moon, and this time, we’re gonna be up, as I said, in the 1000s of nautical miles. And so it’ll be a little bit different, but it actually gets for great pictures of the Moon and Earth together. That’s really the thing I’m interested in. We, you know, you can see, and we saw an Artemis I, right? You can see the Earth rise when you’re when you’re close and you’re flying past the moon. But, of course, the moon just kind of dominates the picture, and the earth is so small in between. Interestingly enough, as you go past the moon and the relative size of the two two bodies becomes some somewhat closer to equivalent. You get just some really good pictures of the moon and the earth. And they look not quite the same size, but pretty close. And it leads to some very interesting photography that that you can do. It’s gonna be real fun to see.

 

Dane Turner 

So when we get out past the moon, is there going to be a period where we lose communication with the capsule?

 

Jeff Radigan 

There will be, there’ll be short period of communication when the capsule is behind the moon due to the altitude that they are above the moon, it’s not actually that long. I think it’s a couple hours that we’re going to be out of communication with them. And it’s going to be, you know, an opportunity for the crew to continue to take photography of the moon. They’re going to, you know, I think, share their thoughts audibly in the recorders that we have running. I think one of the, one of the interesting things is, in talking to science community, they really want to hear what the crew has to say observations of the moon. There’s, there’s still parts of the moon that we haven’t seen with human eyes before. Obviously we have imagery of it, but some of the best information we got from the Apollo missions was just the crew’s description of what they could see. Because anytime you pass it through the imagery, through a, through a filter and through the computers, you lose some of the data. You lose some of the information, some of the shading, some of the things that that the cameras can’t pick up on that the human eye, since it’s the, you know, the most powerful you know, visual detection instrument that we have that can pick up on. And so the cruise observations of the moon is what I know the science community is very interested in hearing again.

 

Dane Turner 

And, you mentioned that we’re going to go further past the moon than anyone has before. How far out from the moon will we get on the other side?

 

Jeff Radigan 

It depends on the specific launch day, but it’s somewhere between five to 8000 nautical miles past the moon before we actually Isaac Newton takes takes over control, and then we start coming back, actually, towards the moon and towards the Earth.

 

Dane Turner 

So at that point, we’re coming back to the earth. And you said that the TLI burn is the reentry burn. So how does that work on coming back, and what will the crew be doing on the way back, if anything different from on the way there.

 

Jeff Radigan 

It’s similar to what they’ll be doing on the way there, although their focus is going to change from lunar imagery to what they need to prepare for, for reentry. Reentering from lunar space is, it’s a fairly lengthy process. There’s a number of parachutes that come off of the Orion spacecraft, and a number of things that of drogue chutes leading to, you know, pulling off the high bay cover, pulling off additional drogue chutes for the mains, and then the mains coming out. That’s a long process that the crew has to be prepared for. And so their focus is on re entry and also configuring the cabin. They need to take it back from a space fairing vehicle, the one that’s, you know, flying around the moon where they’ve got all their cameras out, they’ve got the seats away, they’ve got the exercise equipment out, you know, basically treating it as their apartment. Now they got to confu convert their apartment back to the car so that they can go park it on the ground, right? And so that’s a lot of the focus is ensuring that we get all of that ready to go. And it takes a little bit of time to do that. Now, I mentioned, TLI, is your reentry burn. We do, as I said earlier, have a couple of different correction burns. Those are small burns, but when you’re trying to hit a narrow corridor to come in just off the coast of San Diego, you need the correction burns to ensure that we’re able to hit that target successfully. Now we always could down mode and hit the big Pacific Ocean. It’s pretty easy to hit, but we want to do better than that. We want to hit just off the coast of San Diego make it easier to recover the crew.

 

Dane Turner 

So what will splashdown day actually look like for the crew? They’re coming back and they don’t have a reentry burn, or are they just going to come in and start going through the atmosphere?

 

Jeff Radigan 

So I would, I would say the reentry day actually starts the night before, when they get the cabin configured. We’re going to get the seats out, we’re going to get the crew ready to go. They’re not going to get in their suits quite yet, but, but the whole cabin is going to be ready, just because there are no options to delay reentry. There’s no options to delay if we’re not ready. You know, it’s a- it’s a ready or not. Here I come kind of scenario where we absolutely better be ready, because they’re going to reenter and that’s actually one of the major differences between flying around the moon and flying in low Earth orbit. Right when you go around the Earth every 90 minutes, and you’ve got a deorbit opportunity if you miss it, well, you know, it’s not great, but you’re going to come around the earth again in 90 more minutes, and you’re going to have, you know, another opportunity, whether it’s that day or another day in the future. Coming back from the moon, you’ve got one shot, and you better get it right, because you’re, you are coming into the atmosphere, and you have no other other opportunities. So we’re going to ensure that the crew is prepared that, you know, the night before that, they’ve reviewed all their procedures, they’ve got the vehicle ready to go. They’re going to wake up. They’re going to take care of all their, you know, their morning routine. They’re going to eat, eat breakfast, and then they’re going to get in their seats and be ready for reentry. We do have a small correction burn that morning that the crew will follow along in, you know, basically just ensuring that we hit the correct landing site. We do have the ability to move a few hundred nautical miles on the surface of the earth to avoid bad weather, if we need to, and so that we have that correction burn built into the plan. But then they’re gonna they’re gonna ride through separation of the crew module and the service module of Orion. We do a raise burn to actually move the crew module away from the service module to ensure that there’s no collision as they both enter the atmosphere, and that the crew module is free of that, and then they’re gonna hit the entry interface, EI, and go through the atmosphere. They will go through blackout, just like every vehicle does as it comes through the atmosphere in the first few minutes there. So we do expect to lose comm with them for a few minutes, and then when they come back out of out of blackout, all the parachutes will start unfurling, and that’ll lead to a soft landing in the Pacific Ocean.

 

Dane Turner 

And what is reentry day look like for your team at Mission Control?

 

Jeff Radigan

So we actually have a couple of different teams that we run. We actually have a flight director who’s in charge of reentry. It’s actually Rick Henfling will be the flight director on console, and so I’ll hand over to him. I’ll get the crew ready for entry, and then my team will step off console. I don’t expect to leave the building. I’m going to be there until the crew gets down. Of course I want, I want to see him on the ground, but Rick and his team will take over. And, you know, they have a number of folks that are specifically trained on reentry, right? Because, as I mentioned, there’s, there’s no margin for error. So we have a whole team that trains on the types of malfunctions that can happen during reentry. Of course, you’ve got negative pressure relief valves that occur as the vehicle comes back into the atmosphere, if it’s higher pressure than the atmosphere around it, they’ll start venting. And we have all the various types of things that could go wrong on entry that could cause the crew to have to actually actuate the parachutes, as I mentioned, the computer runs the vehicle. But if anything were to go wrong there, and we need the crew to step in, that’s where Rick and his team will either command from the ground some of those responses, or, well, you know, they’ll call the crew and say, “Hey, we need you guys to to, you know, flip switch XYZ, and ensure that we’re able to get the parachutes out successfully.” So that’s what it’ll look like. It’s, it’s always, you know, we, we have vehicles coming in from the ISS all the time. I don’t think it ever gets calm. It’s always one of those, you know, operations that gets your heart pumping, and we all kind of hold our breath until we see the parachutes out and the crew hitting the water at a reasonable speed. And so that’s, that’s what I’ll be doing. I’ll be sitting and watching Rick and his team do it, but we’ll be, we’ll be ready for it.

 

Dane Turner 

Is there a moment in the mission that you’re most looking forward to?

 

Jeff Radigan

I think there’s a lot of moments I’m really looking forward to, and I have a tough time picking one. Launch, of course, will be very, very exciting. Going through the prox-ops demo as we fly around the ICPS is something I’m really looking forward to. Prior to that, when you deploy the solar arrays, that’s another moment where we hold our breaths. You know, the solar arrays that are flying on Orion have been well tested. They flat on them, flown on a number of different satellites, but that’s one of those things where we don’t really have any good options if the solar array doesn’t deploy. And so it’s one of those things that absolutely has to happen. And so those are ones that you look at, and you’re you’re just hoping it all works out, which, again, we have full confidence it will. But all the confidence in the world doesn’t, doesn’t buy you anything until it actually occurs. Of course, I’m looking to TLI, you know, looking forward to sending the crew to the moon. I think if I had to guess, I would, I would probably tell you that’s the moment that the crew is looking forward to the most. Of course, three of them have flown in space before, and they’ve completed a number of orbits around the Earth, but going to the moon, I think that’s the one that I think they’re most interested in, and then seeing the moon up close, relatively close, will be fun. The moment that those guys become the furthest past the moon of any humans before, that’ll be a fun milestone to track. And then I think probably finally after that, just just seeing the crew get get on the deck of the ship, after we’ve recovered them safely, that’ll be a it’ll be a fun moment.

 

Dane Turner 

There’s so many exciting milestones coming up. You did mention that there’s one unflown member of the crew, and that’d be our Canadian astronaut. Can you describe the international component of this mission?

 

Jeff Radigan 

You know, working with our international partners is a great way for us to keep the space community together. And you know, it’s interesting and fun to see what what our international partners can bring to the table. Of course, you know, Jeremy is, is a Canadian astronaut, and so we’re working heavily with the Canadian Space Agency to support him on the flight. The service module of Orion was built by the European Space Agency, and so, you know, in hand in hand with NASA. And so that, of course, was produced over in Europe, and then brought over here and made it to the rest of the Orion spacecraft. And so I think there’s another case where we get more resources, we get more people, we get a large community that wants to fly in space, and as long as we can keep our focus on what unites us, which is trying to put people back around the moon, we’re all just better off for it.

 

Dane Turner 

And we’re recording this in June of 2025; what’s left to go before launch next year.

 

Jeff Radigan 

So let’s see we’re about. I hope we’re six months away from flight. We’ll see how well that prediction holds up here. But we really have processing of the Orion spacecraft. It’s over in the processing facility at KSC for all of the propulsion systems so it’s being loaded with all the propulsion of fuel and oxidizer that it’s going to need to to fly and reenter and then fly around the moon. A lot of that is some some very nasty stuff. It’s great, great working in space, but it’s, it’s chemicals that aren’t great here on Earth, and so it takes a little bit of while to do it takes a little while to do that safely. We need a specialized facility to load all the fuel and oxidizer into the vehicle and then keep it safely for the next six months as we do the rest of the processing. The rocket is stacked in the Vehicle Assembly Building at KSC, and once Orion gets done processing, it’ll join that stack and get on top of the mobile launcher. We expect that to happen, you know, in the middle of the fall time. Then we have a number of different tests that we do. We’re going to roll out the the mobile launcher with SLS and Orion on it to the pad. We’re gonna make sure that all of the interfaces check out correctly, because this is, again, the first time that we’re loading a crew. And so, you know, we’ve demonstrated all of these piece parts individually. Now it’s time to put them all together and really ensure that we’re ready to go for launch.

 

Once that occurs, that we’ll have our final flight readiness review that I expect will happen over in KSC, where we all look around and we just really ask ourselves, Is there anything that we missed? Is there anything that we should have done that we didn’t do, or anything that we have to do, or are we actually ready to go fly this mission? And that’s always a very lively meeting. I will tell you that no matter how hard you work, there’s always something that comes up last minute and something we need to go address. But I have every confidence that the team will be able to do that, and we’ll have a successful flight readiness review, and then we’ll get ready for launch, and it’ll take take us a couple weeks to do that. We’ve got to load all of the liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen at Kennedy Space Center. We’ve got to get all of the satellites and all the communication systems set up here at Johnson Space Center. And once we have that, then we’ll just wait for the open of the launch window. There are only certain days of the year, just based on, you know, performance of the rocket that we can and geometry of where the moon is that we can launch. And so we get a couple of weeks every month that we’re able to launch Artemis II, and so we’ll just wait for one of those days to come around and go through the launch countdown. If you look at Artemis I, it did take us a few opportunities to get off the ground. I think we’ve learned about the rocket and the SLS through Artemis I, so hopefully it doesn’t take us quite as long this time, but I’m confident that we’ll launch when we’re ready, and we’ll have a successful launch when we do that.

 

Dane Turner 

Really cool. So what excites you most about the future of human spaceflight and mission operations over the next decade?

 

Jeff Radigan 

I think if we look at what has happened in low Earth orbit over the last couple couple decades and to where it’s gone from you know, one mission every few months to now we have, you know, one mission a month where we’ve, you know, continuously manned to the International Space Station for the last 25 years. There’s, there’s been somebody in space. As we start doing that, it excites me to move that to the surface of the moon, right? We’re going to move the goal posts. We’re going to move to where, you know, something that only happens once every 50 years now happens every once, every two years, once every year, and then a continuous presence on the moon is really what we’re looking for. And I truly think that will happen, you know, in the near future. And I’m really looking forward to that occurring, because it, it lends a sense to the normalcy of space flight. If you if you look back, you know, I can only imagine what the science fiction writers in the early 90s would think of there’s always somebody in space for real, right? They talked about and wrote about things that they could barely conceive. And here we are doing it. And I look forward for the next generation to think that living on the Moon is normal. I look forward to, you know, my kids and grandkids thinking that that’s just another thing that humanity does.

 

Dane Turner 

Do you have a message you want to share with the teams ahead of launch?

 

Jeff Radigan

The message I share with my team constantly is, you know, it’s really twofold. One, we have to do everything to be successful, everything we can. This is really, you know, a once in a career opportunity. You only get to be the first so many times, and it’s our turn, right? This is the first crewed mission back to lunar space, and so it’s really incumbent upon us to take that responsibility seriously. We’re having fun with it. Don’t get me wrong, everybody’s really having fun with it. Engineers love doing things for the first time. It really gets us going, but we have to take it seriously and understand that that’s our responsibility and that that’s a big ask that the agency in the nation has given to us, and we need to treat it with the reverence it deserves. And so I give them, you know, that message. But then also, you know, and Reid and I were talking about this the other day, enjoy it, right? You savor every minute of it. This is again, you only get to do it once, so, so enjoy it. Work hard and enjoy it.

 

Dane Turner 

That’s a great way to wrap things up. Jeff, thank you so much for coming on Houston We Have a Podcast today.

 

Jeff Radigan 

It was my pleasure.

 

Dane Turner 

Thanks for sticking around. I hope you learned something new today.

You can check out the latest from around the agency at nasa.gov and you can find out more about the Artemis II mission at nasa.gov/artemis.

Our full collection of episodes and all the other wonderful podcasts around the agency can be found at nasa.gov/podcasts. On social media, we’re on the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, X, and Instagram. If you have any questions for us or suggestions for future episodes, email us at nasa-houstonpodcast@mail.nasa.gov.

This interview was recorded on June 6, 2025.

I, Dane Turner, produce the show. Our audio engineers are Will Flato and Daniel Tohill. And our social media is managed by Dominique Crespo. Houston We Have a Podcast was created and is supervised by Gary Jordan. Special, thanks to Courtney Beasley and Shaneequa Vareen for helping us plan and set up this interview. And of course, thanks again to Jeff Radigan for taking the time to come on the show.

Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on, and tell us what you think of this podcast.

We’ll be back next week.