{"id":10489,"date":"2023-04-04T01:33:24","date_gmt":"2023-04-03T17:33:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/artemis-2-commander-chats-with-spaceflight-now\/"},"modified":"2023-04-04T01:33:24","modified_gmt":"2023-04-03T17:33:24","slug":"artemis-2-commander-chats-with-spaceflight-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/artemis-2-commander-chats-with-spaceflight-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Artemis 2 commander chats with Spaceflight Now"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/2u4qRNFeQhM\" width=\"678\" height=\"381\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Reid Wiseman, a veteran U.S. Navy test pilot and former chief of NASA\u2019s astronaut corps, will lead the four-person crew assigned to the Artemis 2 mission to carry people to the vicinity of the moon for the first time in more than 50 years.<\/p>\n<p>In a joint interview with Spaceflight Now and Space.com, Wiseman said Monday he views the crew\u2019s job as making sure NASA\u2019s Orion spacecraft is ready for more demanding missions later this decade to support moon landings and assembly of a space station called the Gateway in lunar orbit.<\/p>\n<p>Artemis 2 will be the first piloted flight of NASA\u2019s Artemis program, which aims to land astronauts on the lunar surface later this decade as a stepping stone before eventual human missions to Mars.<\/p>\n<p>Under NASA\u2019s Artemis architecture, astronauts on moon landing missions will take off from Earth atop NASA\u2019s Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket, fly into an an elongated halo-like orbit around the moon on an Orion capsule, then link up with a human-rated lander for the trip to and from the lunar surface. The astronauts will then return to Earth in the Orion spacecraft.<\/p>\n<p>Before attempting a lunar landing, NASA will send an Orion spacecraft with four astronauts on a voyage around the far side of the moon on Artemis 2, a roughly 10-day mission planned to blast off no earlier than November 2024. NASA announced the crew members for Artemis 2 Monday in Houston.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cArtemis 2 is all about Artemis. It is not about Artemis 2,\u201d Wiseman said. \u201cIt is going out and checking out SLS and Orion, making sure Orion is as ready as it possibly can to do a crewed landing or to start assembling Gateway, or whatever the agency needs us to go do next, but it is looking at those next crews and how can we best posture Orion for them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>NASA\u2019s current plans call for launching the Artemis 3 mission no earlier than late 2025, but NASA\u2019s inspector general has said that schedule is likely to face delays because the human-rated moon landing vehicle and new spacesuits won\u2019t be ready by then. SpaceX has a contract with SpaceX to develop a derivative of the company\u2019s privately-owned Starship rocket as a human-rated lander, and with Axiom Space to develop new spacesuits designed with life support capabilities and flexibility for astronauts walking on the moon.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_61618\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-61618\" style=\"width: 1200px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-61618\" src=\"http:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/20230403wiseman3.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1200\" height=\"900\" srcset=\"https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/20230403wiseman3.jpg 1200w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/20230403wiseman3-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/20230403wiseman3-678x509.jpg 678w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/20230403wiseman3-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/20230403wiseman3-326x245.jpg 326w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/20230403wiseman3-80x60.jpg 80w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\"><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-61618\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Reid Wiseman speaks with reporters Monday after NASA announced him as commander of the Artemis 2 mission. Credit: Isis Valencia \/ Spaceflight Now<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>NASA and its international partners \u2014 primarily Canada, the European Space Agency, and Japan \u2014 also plan to construct a space station called Gateway in orbit round the moon. The Gateway will be about one-sixth the size of the International Space Station in low Earth orbit.<\/p>\n<p>Wiseman, 47, is a native of Baltimore who earned engineering degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Johns Hopkins University. He logged more than 500 aircraft carrier landings in his Navy career as an F-14 and F\/A-18 fighter pilot, and graduated from U.S. Naval Test Pilot School before joining NASA\u2019a astronaut corps in 2009. Wiseman, a father of two daughters,&nbsp;flew to the International Space Station as a flight engineer on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2014, spending 165 days in orbit and venturing outside the complex for two spacewalks.<\/p>\n<p>On Artemis 2, Wiseman and his three crewmates will strap into seats aboard NASA\u2019s Orion spacecraft on top of the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) SLS moon rocket. The huge launcher will blast off from pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida with 8.8 million pounds of thrust \u2014 more power than any human-rated rocket in history \u2014 from two solid rocket boosters and four hydrogen-fueled main engines.<\/p>\n<p>The moon rocket will initially place the Orion spacecraft into an elliptical high-altitude orbit stretching some 46,000 miles (74,000 kilometers) from Earth at its farthest point, beyond the altitude of GPS navigation satellites or geostationary data relay spacecraft. After the Orion capsule deploys from the SLS moon rocket, Wiseman will take the controls of Orion to re-approach the SLS upper stage for a rendezvous and proximity operations demonstration, showing the ship\u2019s ability to maneuver around another spacecraft.<\/p>\n<p>Rendezvous operations will be required on future Artemis missions to dock with a moon landing craft and the Gateway space station in orbit around the moon.<\/p>\n<p>After a day of checkouts to make sure Orion\u2019s life support systems are functioning as designed, Orion\u2019s service module engine will ignite to propel the crew on a four-day outbound trek to the moon. The Artemis 2 crew will swing 6,400 miles (10,300 kilometers) beyond the far side of the moon, farther from Earth than any humans before.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_61615\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-61615\" style=\"width: 1200px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-61615\" src=\"http:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/20230403wiseman2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1200\" height=\"919\" srcset=\"https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/20230403wiseman2.jpg 1200w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/20230403wiseman2-300x230.jpg 300w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/20230403wiseman2-678x519.jpg 678w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/20230403wiseman2-768x588.jpg 768w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/20230403wiseman2-80x60.jpg 80w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\"><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-61615\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Reid Wiseman, commander of the Artemis 2 mission, in a ground training version of the Orion launch and entry pressure suit. Credit: NASA\/Robert Markowitz<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m looking forward to being those first humans that get to sit in Orion and really look at it, not from the perspective of can it get this job done, but can it get the whole job done?\u201d Wiseman said. \u201cI think we are really fired up for that because we know Artemis goes to the moon, and then humanity goes to Mars, and that gets us going.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Wiseman will be joined on Artemis 2 by pilot Victor Glover, also a veteran of one long-duration flight on the International Space Station. NASA astronaut Christina Koch, who holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, will be a mission specialist. Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, a spaceflight rookie, will be the fourth crew member on Artemis 2.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt will be amazing to manually fly, but it is very important to me that Victor flies, that Jeremy flies, and that Christina flies,\u201d Wiseman said. \u201cI want as many human hands on this vehicle as possible because this is not being built for a couple of test pilots. This vehicle is being built to send humanity to the moon and on to Mars, and that is the goal.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>No humans have flown to the moon since the last Apollo mission in December 1972.<\/p>\n<p>Artemis 2 follows NASA\u2019s Artemis 1 mission last year, an unpiloted 25-and-a-half day test flight that marked the first-ever launch of the SLS moon rocket, and the first time an Orion spacecraft flew into deep space.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI was nervous this morning for the announcement, so am I gonna be nervous for this mission? Absolutely,\u201d Wiseman said Monday. \u201cBut I always have found that that nervousness, that adrenaline, it brings you up and if it\u2019s managed, it allows you to focus. And just being with Christina, Victor Jeremy today, my crewmates, I already see how we manage each other\u2019s adrenaline a little bit, our stress a little bit.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI can\u2019t wait to go do this mission with those three, and then to talk to our flight controllers and mission control, our flight directors on the loops and our CAPCOMs (capsule communicators). It\u2019s gonna be an awesome team.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><b><i>Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\ufeff Reid Wiseman, a veteran U.S. Navy test pilot and former chief of NASA\u2019s astronaut corps, will lead the four-person crew assigned to the Artemis 2 mission to carry people to the vicinity of the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. In a joint interview with Spaceflight Now and Space.com, Wiseman [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[304,783,1668,584,1545,625,190,640],"class_list":["post-10489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-artemis","tag-artemis-2","tag-astronauts","tag-canada","tag-human-spaceflight","tag-moon","tag-nasa","tag-orion"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10489"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}