The Artemis II crew descends the ramp of a U.S. Navy ship in February after exiting a mockup of their Orion capsule in the Pacific Ocean and being flown by helicopter to the ship. Credit: NASA
The Artemis II mission now slated for as soon as February will mark the first time humans take the controls of a deep space vehicle in space since the Apollo missions ended in 1972.
When the Orion capsule launches, Victor Glover, the mission pilot, and Reid Wiseman, commander, will be at the controls.
“We’re going to disconnect from that [rocket] upper stage and then turn around,” Glover said in a press conference Wednesday. “We’re going to fly it by hand, and we’re going to make sure that the flying qualities of the Orion spacecraft are suitable for the more complex missions,” such as docking to a lunar lander.
NASA describes the piloting as a “proximity operations demonstration” to evaluate manual handling of the spacecraft. Unlike Apollo capsules, most of Orion’s piloting is handled by autonomous systems, but manual control is still available.
Glover is expected to use the spacecraft’s stick controls and video displays to assess the handling qualities, including the responsiveness of the thrusters and Orion’s stability in space. NASA will evaluate that data in the days after the test flights.
Glover and Reid, along with mission specialists Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, expect their mission to break some records, including the farthest that people have traveled from Earth and the fastest spacecraft reentry speed. However, they cautioned that would depend on when exactly Artemis II launches.
And Hansen said any records set by the mission likely won’t stand for long.
“We are up to something much, much bigger,” he said, adding, “We are not just thinking about Artemis II. We are trying to figure out how do we make this enterprise go faster. How do we evolve it? How do we iterate – if we’re really going to go back and establish a permanent presence on the lunar surface and then go to Mars?”
In the meantime, the crew continues to prepare by running simulations of its mission, Wiseman said.
“The biggest thing for us is continuing to hone the muscle between us and mission control, about how you bring minds together to solve the things that could potentially come up that we haven’t thought of,” he said. “We have this great group of simulation trainers who come up with these sorts of evil tests for us. And then we just have to see what we can create to come home, kind of Apollo 13-style.”
