HWHAP Ep394 Artemis II The Mission
JSC · 2025-07-25
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 f