NASA revealed Artemis II Heatshield Performance & Crew Astronauts Health! Are they really Good...

Main chute deployed. And we have three good main chutes. Houston, Integrity, Splashdown sending post-landing command now. Splashdown confirmed. Copy, Splashdown. Waiting on VLDR. Splashdown confirmed at 7.07 p.m. Central Time, 5.07 p.m. Pacific Time. The Artemis II astronauts are back on Earth, landing in the Pacific Ocean at 7.07 p.m. Central Time this evening. After NASA's record-setting mission that took them around the moon and brought them home. Good evening and welcome to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. I'm Rachel Kraft with NASA Communications. Several leaders to talk about the successful mission. They are Amit Shatria, Associate Administrator. Dr. Lori Glaze, Head of the Artemis Programs. Rick Henfling, Entry Flight Director. Howard Hugh, Orion Program Manager. And Sean Quinn, Exploration Ground Systems Program Manager. We'll hear briefly from them and then take questions from here in the room and on the phone. And with that, we'll start with Amit. Good evening. Yesterday when we were in this room, we told you that the crew put their lives behind our confidence. And they did. Yesterday in this room, we told you that today belongs to the engineers and technicians who touched this machine. And it does. And their work was good. Welders at Michoud shaped the heat shield and joined the rocket. Technicians at Kennedy packed parachutes, stacked the vehicles, stacked Orion, stacked SLS. Engineers in Brayman, Torino, and across the Alliance built the service module. Workers at Utah cast the boosters. Teams at Stennis fired the engines. Flight controllers in this building in Houston set console for ten days straight. It sat silent for six minutes while plasma took the signal. Navy divers pulled the crew out of the Pacific in an incredible way. The vehicle spoke for all of them. And at 25,000 feet per second, it said the work was good. As we say in our business, physics boats last. The families of the crew said this week there had been happiness and joy, but also anxiety, wanting to get their loved ones home safely. I was with them tonight. Four families sat through those six minutes, and their courage is the same as the crew that just came home. Yesterday, Flight Director Jeff Radigan said we had less than a degree of an angle to hit after a quarter of a million miles to the moon. And their team hit it. That is not luck. That is a thousand people doing their jobs. You all heard the crew's words during the mission. They were incredibly inspirational. They carried the torch from Apollo crew station and around the far side of the moon. Their words belong to them. We'll get to hear from them as soon as they're back here. But tonight belongs to the team that built the machine that they wrote. We talked a lot about what gets in our way. The impediment to action is where we find the way to get to action. What stands in the way becomes the way. This program faced every obstacle an institution could face. The team met each one with work, and tonight is the proof. But that work needs to continue. The path to the lunar surface is open, but the work ahead is greater than the work behind us. It always will be. 53 years ago, humanity left the moon. This time, we return to stay. Let us finish what they started. Let us focus on what was left undone. Let us not go to plant flags and leave, but to stay. With firmness in our purpose, with gratitude for the hands that built the machines, and with love for the ones that we carry with us. Welcome home, integrity. I'll hand it over to Dr. Glaze. Thank you so much, Amit. So, y'all, we did it. We sent four amazing people to the moon and safely returned them to Earth for the first time in more than 50 years. To the generation that now knows what we're capable of, welcome to our moonshot. I want to thank our entire team across this nation and around the world who gave every ounce of ingenuity and effort to make this possible. I am so proud of each and every one of you, what you have achieved over the last 10 days. NASA has shown that ambitious goals are worth pursuing and can inspire the world. We are so thrilled to have Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy back here on Earth and safely aboard the USS John P. Merriman. Our team is fired up, and this mission, as we've been talking about, is just the beginning. To all of our new followers out there, please stay tuned. This is the first mission, our first mission to the moon of many more to come. And we can't wait. Our teams are so ready to get to work on the next missions and explore the lunar surface and bring the world along with us. I'll pass it over to Rick. Thank you, Lori. Thank you all for your continued interest in this mission. What a truly spectacular day it was for NASA and all of our international partners. This crew has said time and again that they were going for all of humanity, and today we've fulfilled that objective by completing their journey and returning them safely to Earth. I've got a few stats for those who are interested, courtesy of the Flight Dynamics Officer in Mission Control. Integrity and her crew, four astronauts, flew 700,237 miles. We reached a peak velocity of 24,664 miles per hour. We hit our flight path angle target within 0.4%. We flew an entry range of 1,957 miles, and we landed within less than a mile of our target. What a tremendous day. Over to Howard. Thank you, Rick, and thank you to the flight control team. What an outstanding job. Wow, what a fantastic day. I mean, we dreamed as a team of reaching this day, and I appreciate Amit's comments. I mean, so many people have worked very hard tirelessly to get this day. I think this mission has been historic, and it has demonstrated new capabilities for Orion spacecraft. It has taken our crew farther than any crews that have ever gone to the moon and back safely. 252,756 miles, and that is a fantastic feat. We've got a lot more to do. And I'm so happy that we get to have this moment, but we're going to have a lot of these moments coming up. And I want to thank the entire Orion team. They have worked tirelessly. They've dedicated many hours. They've committed to excellence and innovated and attacked challenges that we've come up with for both our NASA team, our industry partners, and our European team as well. We did it together. We brought the crew home safely. They did a reserve round of applause. It was a terrific day for them as well. And I want to thank the crew. They have been a fantastic inspiration to our teams as well. You've heard their messages. We are so happy they're back on the ground. We can't wait to see them as well. And finally, you know, we've learned a lot from this mission. Number one was bringing the crews home safely, but it's also a test flight. And like Amit said, we have work ahead of us to be done. We're going to learn from this mission. We're going to look at the data, and we're going to move forward. This is the start of a new era of human space exploration. Thank you. Well, thank you, Howard. What an incredible end to an incredible mission. I've got to tell you, I think I'm trying to pick out the best thing that happened today, and I'll just say that we were sitting in the back room getting ready for this press conference, and Howard gets a call from Reid Weissman, the commander of Integrity. And it was so great to hear his voice and tell us that all the crew is okay and we can say that we did our mission, we accomplished what we set out to do. I'm very proud of the efforts of the Exploration Ground Systems team that supported both the launch and recovery operations alongside our Navy partners. All the hard work and dedication over the last couple of years paid off today, and the team did a great job. Our recovery teams are currently in the process of bringing Orion back on the well deck of the ship, and hopefully within about four or five hours it will be hard down in the back end of the USS Mertha. It's good to be NASA. It's good to be an American today. Thank you. All right. It's time now for questions. We'll start here in the room and take several from the phone. For those on the phone, you can press star 1 to get into the question queue, and please limit to one question if you can. Where we discovered a leakage through the system, I think we learned a lot about that. That is a new finding. Certainly we're going to go investigate that. We're going to look at that and move forward to make sure that we make some changes if necessary. We'll get all the data, and we'll go forward from there. I'll just say that this particular crew, you know, they've gotten to know each other so well, so each of them individually are just absolutely amazing individuals. But they, as a group, you could watch them, and what they brought as you watched them in Orion over the last ten days, operating just seamlessly between the four of them, just the teamwork, the camaraderie. I think they really brought an amazing sense of what we're trying to achieve with this mission. It's a mission for all humanity, a mission for all, and they really did represent that and tried to communicate that. I do know that our entire astronaut core is spectacular, and so I have no doubt that the next teams will also rise to that level. Jackie. Hi, all. Jackie Waddell, CNN. Congratulations. Question for Rick. I'm really anxious to hear what that blackout during reentry was like for you, and also just wanted to ask, you know, that splashdown target being less than a mile off is incredible. Can you walk us through if anything, you know, was outside of ordinary? I know we heard on comms there were some sensor issues just before entry interface. Just curious to hear more about that. Thanks. Sure. So, you know, blackout, there's really no beating around the bush with that. You know, it's a difficult time because the flight control team wants to see data. We want to look at the data. We want to be able to provide input to the flight crew on how to fly their spaceship. And when we don't have data, we're trying to figure out what to do with ourselves. But we knew when blackout was going to start. It started when we expected. We knew when it was going to end. It ended when we expected. And so that gave us the trust that the spaceship was flying itself correctly. As far as some of the cautions and things that came up on the way down, the prop cautions, we think that, again, that was learning of the spacecraft. Some of the limits are set a little bit tighter than we probably should have had them set. And we dispositioned those and moved on. As far as the comms post-landing, we don't quite know what was going on there, but we worked around it. We had comms with the recovery team, and we safely handed over the mission authority at the right time. Okay. Josh. Hi. Josh Denner, Space.com. Really excited to hear that the crew is doing well. I'm interested. You know, we saw Victor sitting on the edge of that helicopter once they landed on the ship, and it was great to see them all, you know, walk across the deck. They were set to do an emergency egress test with a ladder, a backpack, you know. I'm wondering if they've performed that yet, how soon they will be performing it, and if they have, how it went. I'm not familiar with an emergency egress test post-landing. Given that this was a test mission, the number one goal was to get the flight crew out of the spaceship as fast as we could, and we weren't looking at any post-landing objectives. Back when we were back on the launch pad, we did, during the CDDT, we did an emergency egress. Yeah, but we'll check on it for you. Eric Berger, Ars Technica. Congratulations on making what I know is really hard look easy. It was a beautiful mission. Amit, you said the work ahead is greater than the work behind us. Can you talk about, as sort of NASA rises to these far greater challenges in Artemis 3, Artemis 4, and building the Moon base, how important it is for you and the agency flying humans from deep space again sort of to be at an operational cadence? This has to be pretty uplifting to the workforce to put the 50 years of not being back to the Moon behind us. Yeah, it's huge. Flight cadence and iteration is the key to reliability and safety. We were waiting to fly this mission for several years. A lot of that was because of the issues we saw during Artemis 1 and making sure we did that the right way, and we tried to make sure the machine was perfect before we flew it. But the real way to do that is keep iterating, keep flying, keep learning, keep getting data in the flight environment. So that piece of how we're going to change the architecture and demanding that higher cadence is going to be, I would say, mandatory for us to be successful. We need that muscle memory to exist. We need the data to keep coming in, and we need to be able to quickly iterate and change the machine as we learn from it. Everything we learned from Artemis 2 we're going to get right after, but I would say it's essential. The architects of Apollo, Dilruth, Von Braun, Siemens, Miller, what they really wanted to do when they were given the challenge of expanding the range of action to the moon was to learn to live and work in space for a long time. They wanted to do that first. I talked a little bit about this with Rob earlier. I think, you know, and, of course, because of the nature of the environment they were in, you know, they were in a race. They achieved their objectives. They were geopolitical as well as technological. But once it was done, it was done. And I think the foundation they wanted to build on is what we went to afterwards. So we wanted to, you know, investigate reusability with shuttle. We did that. We wanted to learn to live in space for a long time with station. We've got to that point now, 25 years of occupation. Now it's interesting. I think where we are with the program is kind of where they wanted us to be before they decided to go do that, to actually enable a sustainable presence to learn how to live and work there for a long time. Can you talk about what the last 13 minutes were like? There had to have been some anxiety. And what was the moment where you could finally relax? And when did you start celebrating in Mission Control? Well, certainly there's anxiety. If you didn't have anxiety bringing this spacecraft home, you probably didn't have a pulse. You know, we were – I have a lot of trust in my team. We've got – all flight controllers in the room on entry day went through a rigorous training process, and they are the system experts on their respective part of the spacecraft. And so while there's anxiety, there's a lot of confidence because the team is there to do a job, and we've trained well, and we executed well. We gathered a lot of data already. Certainly you saw there were aircraft that were positioned in order to do some imagery and collect data. So we've got some of those data that can be analyzed in the coming days and weeks. We also had divers below the surface that took imaging of the heat shield before it was brought onto the MRFA so that we could understand exactly what state it's in after it landed. And so we've already – I think we've already begun the data gathering piece of it. I'm sure there will be more assessments once we get on the ship. And then, Howard, why don't you talk kind of what the next steps are? Yeah, we already have two of our heat shield experts on board the ship. And so when we get the crew module into the well deck, we'll do some inspections right off the bat. Like Lori said, we've got underwater divers that are taking pictures. And then after that, once we've inspected that on the ship, we'll transfer it back to Kennedy Space Center. We'll have an opportunity to look in detail and do scans of the heat shield, and we'll have a lot of good data from that. We also captured a lot of great imagery. Obviously, we haven't had time to digest all that data, but we will in the next several days and make sure we understand if there's anything that happened that was anomalous. But we're very excited. The team is very excited to get that data from both the imagery and seeing it live in person. Well, the top priority is going to be to get them promptly back to their families here in Houston. As far as the specifics, I'm sure each of the crew members has something special planned with their families, and that will be the priority is for them to take some time and spend with their loved ones. Yeah, I'm not sure we answered it, but we do anticipate them arriving back here in Houston 12 to 24 hours after splashdown. So that will be between 7 in the morning and 7 in the evening tomorrow. Yeah, we will have what we call a quick initial 30-day report that we will put together. Every team will be doing their due diligence and analyzing all the data we have. The crew module will get transported back to Kennedy Space Center. Sean's team, Exploration Ground Systems, is going to decontaminate the vehicle in terms of the propulsion system has hydrazine, and so we'll be working through that. In the meantime, we'll be pulling hardware off the boat in parallel with other activities, and when we get back to Kennedy Space Center, we've got about 286 components we're going to reuse in future missions already. And then we're going to decide, going to look at other components and determine if we can reuse those as well. A lot of work, not only on the hardware flow, but also all the analysis of the data we're going to need going forward to learn from this mission and carry forward for Artemis III and beyond. For Artemis III, the docking system we get to do with Blue Origin and or SpaceX, at what point would that system be sort of in place on the new capsule? And I guess for Amit, how are your crew contractors progressing towards having something that can actually go up there on your timeline? Okay, I'll start with our docking system. Our docking system is ready to go. It's already been qualified. We've already got the flight unit at the Kennedy Space Center. Later this summer, we'll integrate it on top of the crew module. And we've done a lot of testing already, so the final part is actually the mechanical mating of the docking hatch, or I'm sorry, the docking mechanism itself. And so we have a standard way of doing dockings in space that we expect Blue Origin and SpaceX to work with us on and accomplish that mission. Yeah, and as far as the other part, I think we're in a massive test campaign. We've got a huge test coming up of the Blue Origin Mark I lander, which will be the kind of smaller version of the lander they want to use to attempt the landing missions. There's going to be a test flight of that this year. We also have the test of the Block III starship and Super Heavy, which is coming up hopefully in a few weeks here. So, you know, every day and every day in this program, we're going to be testing big machines, and we're just going to keep getting side by side with them to help them make progress. As a little boy, you were inspired by Star Wars. I wondered if today is better for you than Star Wars. And for future space travelers looking back at today, what should they see as being the significance? Thank you. Wow. You might be watching my old interviews or something, but I would say a thousand, I don't know what the number is, thousands of times better. You know, I would say that I shared a moment with my father. He took me to see Star Wars. He's not alive today. I wish he was, because that little kid who saw and was inspired by the stars, and now we're able to send our crew out to the stars, the farthest that any humans have been. I mean, I can't even express just how I feel and the goosebumps I have. And I would say that for all the kids out there, I mean, just pursue the dreams. I can't say any better than the crew. You know, I tell my kids also, pursue what you're passionate about. And my passion is the space program. My passion is NASA. And I was able to accomplish that today and hopefully many more days going forward. But you have an opportunity to do what you are passionate about. And hopefully those kids who are in love with human spaceflight, in love with going to the stars, will be inspired by us, especially by our crews, and come join NASA. Come work for us. We've got a lot of missions ahead. For which the communications blackout lasted six minutes, was Apollo 13, if I am not mistaken. Today's lasted six minutes, around six minutes. Does that say anything about the design of the ship or what is the reason behind that? And also, very quickly, can we see a Hispanic in one of the next missions of Artemis? Thank you very much. As far as the duration of the blackout, a lot of that, that's just dictated by the physics of the approach trajectory. The Orion spacecraft, when you get enveloped by plasma that's thousands of degrees, the radio frequency of the antennas just can't shoot through that. On the space shuttle, we were lucky. We had the tail and we had an antenna up on the tail. And it took us a while to figure that out. That was a way to keep calm. For Orion, it was six minutes, but it was predicted. And it played out exactly as we predicted. So that just gave us confidence that it was flying the way it was supposed to. The whole flight operations team has been exceedingly busy throughout the course of this mission in preparation for this mission. I imagine there will be a little bit of breathing room now that the crew is back safely on Earth. But when do you kind of get the band back together to start prepping for Artemis III? And will it be the same complement of flight directors that we saw for Artemis II? Thank you. Well, you're right that the next mission is right around the corner. And we'll take the lessons learned from Artemis II. We learned a bunch on how to fly people in space, both from vehicle operations, but also from how to run a control room with a deep space mission. And when the time is right, we'll get back into flight-specific training. And we've got a core group of about 30 flight directors, and they're all extremely capable. And I think anybody who's assigned to that next mission is going to be as successful as the three of us, myself, Judd, and Jeff. How much of a boost is this to NASA's confidence in its wider mission to stay on the Moon? For the campaign, this is a huge step for us to build confidence, not just in our understanding of how this machine performs, but just that this organization can rise to the standard of qualifying a vehicle like this for crewed flight. I think that's huge. It took a lot of discipline and a lot of changes between Artemis I and now to get there, and the team really rose to the equation. These folks here, they did a tremendous job of instilling the amount of discipline and rigor and belief in the qualification standards to make sure this is going to work. And so to me, that was almost the biggest objective of this mission was to prove to ourselves that we could move to crewed flight but maintain the same level of risk knowledge and understanding but also really, really focus on what that looks like. To your point, when you fly the crew, when you fly any crew, you can be paralyzed. You can almost be paralyzed by risk because you become so close to them. You understand what's at stake. With the families, you understand what's at stake. But the crew knows this, and we have to do it too, but organizationally understand that what we do is we take calculated risks and that it's going to take risk to explore, but you have to make sure you find the right line between being paralyzed by it and being able to manage it and bound it the right way. I enjoyed seeing the flight controllers storm into a white flight control room, and I was just wondering, were those the controllers from the back room? Were there people who were off duty who just couldn't be away? And why was it important to open the room to them and to let more of the Houston workforce celebrate that moment? Thanks. That was anybody I made a call out to, anybody who had worked the mission, no matter what shift or what room you were sitting in, to come into the room and just soak in the moment with the rest of the operations team. They all deserved it. They worked tremendously hard, both pre-flight and during the mission, and it was a time for us to celebrate together before celebrating outside of that room. Okay, Michael. Hi, Michael Atkinson, Houston Public Media. Congratulations again. My question is also for Rick. I think that we asked the crew several times if they felt the weight of this moment, and I'm curious if you felt, or if your other flight directors felt the weight of this, that as you were going through all this, you're like, this is what Gene Kranz felt, this is what Chris Kraft felt. Did you ever feel that moment? There were a couple of times where you're just, you kind of, you have a lull in that shift, and you can kind of sit back in your seat and just look out the window. I do that at ISS a lot when I work down the hall working in Figure 1. You just enjoy the view. As I worked early in the mission on the planning shift, the moon was getting bigger and bigger, and it was fun to just sit and watch the moon get bigger, and then as we worked on the entry minus one day shift yesterday, and then on the entry shift, it was fun to watch the Earth get bigger, and it was fascinating to watch orbital mechanics take over, and in the last day when I took the console, I think we were, earlier this morning, I think we were over 50,000 miles away from Earth, and we made up that last 50,000 miles in the last eight hours, and yeah, it's a fun job to do. NASA showed one more time that space is a unifying force around the world with a crew that connected so well with people that doesn't matter which country. How important was, for anyone in the panel, how important was this mission for the agency and for the future of the Artemis program? I think it's the most important human spaceflight mission I think we've done in many decades in terms of what it meant historically, but also what it means for the future of the agency. We've talked before about, for many folks, this is the end of a long journey working on these machines, and for a lot of our workforce, it's just the beginning, but it is definitely an inflection point for all of us, so it's hard to understate just how incredibly valuable it is to the entire team. Being a guy from Kennedy Space Center, the launch was a pretty special day. To see all those umbilicals clear the vehicle and the vehicle clear the tower and have that rocket rise off the pad was absolutely amazing. All right. I know Victor always says touchdown, getting onto the water. For me, the greatest moment was the parachutes, the main chutes deploying. I think seeing that, I was chanting, go, go, go, by myself. Somebody shot a video of that. I think I was going crazy, but I just kept saying that as the probes came out, but when the mains came out and they started slowly inflating, I mean, that was just a tremendous moment. Like I said, objective number one is get through home, and I know there's all kinds of things that can happen after that, but having those mains and getting the vehicle to 16 miles per hour from 24,600 miles per hour is pretty amazing, and getting those chutes down was a great moment. My question is about logistics. I'm thinking about all the moving parts it takes to bring food, power, telecom, and so forth on a complicated mission. What were some of the logistics lessons learned that might be useful to organizations back here on Earth? I think it's a good start. I mean, it's incredibly challenging to plan for a mission like this, even though Orion is a pretty big spacecraft, making sure we have everything we need. We think we count through contingencies. We lose systems sometimes. We worry about that. We want to make sure we have everything ready to go. I will tell you, though, that just having thought about this for a while, the logistics of flying a 10-day mission, even this far away, pales in comparison to the logistics of keeping crew on the space station constantly going, so I would say that a lot of our logistics learnings have been derived from that. That's not just consumables and water and gas, et cetera, but it's also thinking about the reliability of the systems and when they're going to fail. It's hard to predict sometimes how to do that, sparing the machine and making sure we have everything prepositioned in the event that we have failures. That comes from a lot of learning, both pre-flight and in-flight, but in-space logistics is going to be a huge challenge for us going forward as we really contemplate a moon base, but hopefully we'll be able to feed forward lessons from, obviously, this mission, but I think through Space Station together as we build that moon base. While we were following along, we had a lot of voices from the space industry, especially here in Houston, kind of chime in and express their support as well, and I know that a lot of those companies are working on specific NASA proposals or submissions, but in general, how would you say you'd like to see the industry kind of respond to the kind of achievement that NASA has done here in hopes of continuing the progress? I'll take the first stab on that one. How I'd like to see industry respond is to take this as not just the inspiration but the challenge. You've heard that we really want to speed up our cadence and be able to return our crew back to space within a year and to the surface of the moon in two years, in fact, hopefully land on the moon twice in 2028. In order to do that, we're not going to be able to do that alone. We need all of industry to work and come along with us and they need to accept that challenge and come with us and really start the production lines that are going to be required in order to achieve that goal. What you have done this week is remind the people of Earth that wonder is worth chasing, that curiosity is not a luxury. It is the most human thing we have. You didn't just test a spacecraft. You tested mankind's potential and carried all of us with you in the process. Every kid who looked up at the moon this week did it differently because of you. People who needed something to believe in found it in Matt's splashdown tonight. So thank you, not just for the data, not just for the mission, but for proving that the pursuit of what's possible is still alive and well. We are so grateful. Hello, congrats. Emily Martin from CDS Best Friends. Reid Wiseman addressed a shout-out to the ESM right after it separated from Orion, saying that it powered their journey on the moon with perfection. I was wondering what comments you might have on the performances of the ESM and on the future of that collaboration with Europe. Yeah, I would say that, you know, the European service module in general performed as expected. I know we learned a little bit about the pressurization system and we'll work on that. But overall, really great part of our spacecraft. Really appreciate our European partnership. We do have continued partnership with them for Artemis III, IV. We're building ESM-5 as well, and we'll continue to do that as we move forward. I'm just going to call out the one thing that I thought was truly unique about this mission. I mean, certainly there's a ton of new things that we've done with having our crew observe far side of the moon and being able to observe these features after the incredible training. But I'll tell you, the one thing that really stands out to me is being able to watch our crew observe an eclipse by having the moon passing between their spacecraft and the sun. That was a totally unique experience and something that I was so proud that we could all participate and travel along with them and experience that moment. All right, that's all the time we have today. Thank you very much to our participants today and to all of you for following along. You can find the latest information about our missions on nasa.gov and hopefully soon information about the expected arrival time of the crew back in Houston tomorrow. Thank you.