NASA’s Artemis II mission sent four astronauts around the far side of the moon and back. These astronauts traveled farther from the Earth than any humans had before. The crew splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean.
Chris Schmidt, co-executive producer for NOVA on PBS, has been covering the story and joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to discuss the mission and the new documentary Return to the Moon from PBS and NOVA. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: I want to start off first, just talking about the emotion here, because you and I have connected a bit. We’re both huge fans of the space program and felt deeply connected to it. I got way more excited by Artemis than I thought I was going to. What about you?
Chris Schmidt: I think kind of the same thing. I looked at Artemis a little bit like, oh yeah, well, we’ve done that before. And it was only when I really got to understand the mission and the project that I started to get what made it special. But even so, you know, I watched all the space shuttle launches, obviously the Apollo missions, and watching the countdown and the launch of this ship. I mean, I got choked up. It’s still incredibly powerful to watch those things.
Rath: When they traversed, went out farther than anybody ever had before, that was amazing. But that’s sort of a nice way to launch into talking about this program and how it evolved over time. How did it get to be this amazing mission that we saw?
Schmidt: There was a plan to go back to the moon with, I think, the Constellation program, which was a different approach to revisiting the moon when that was canceled in 2010 under the Obama administration. And then there was a period of years where there didn’t seem to be any plan to go beyond Earth orbit. And there was, a lot of people who were kind of complaining about the Space Shuttle. [It] was like the ship to nowhere. You’ve got to get to low-Earth orbit, and you go back again. And the Artemis program came out of that desire to go back to the moon. And it was a bit of a rethink from the way the Constellation had been considered. And one of the big changes was that NASA decided, rather than do it as a NASA-only project, like Constellation had been planned to be, it was specifically going to try to be a public-private partnership, where there were going to be private companies supplying components like the lander and so forth. And of course also international cooperation. So I think that was the big shift. And once they decided they were gonna go back, it was really a matter of just trying to work out the kinks in the engineering.
Rath: Well, you mentioned how it is a public-private partnership. At the same time, though... [is] SpaceX is getting all the attention lately, with Starship and the heavy-lift rockets. And this was so much great NASA hardware. I know we’ve been waiting, like, on the Orion for a long time. Tell us about that. It really seemed to live up to the bill.
Schmidt: It really did. You know, we, NOVA, did a film several years ago called Rise of the Rockets. We were really trying to understand rockets in general, but you know, what was going on with SpaceX and with NASA. And at the time, you know, when SpaceX started landing their boosters — which was a really dramatic development — people were looking at Artemis and going, well, this thing’s kind of a dinosaur, right? Because you’re just going to send up this really big rocket, you’re going to throw it away, you are not going to land it. And I remember at the time there was kind of a rethink, at least in the way that NASA talked about the program with the public, which was, we’re going to leave low Earth orbit, we’re going to leave commercial satellites and commercial low Earth orbits stuff to the private companies. We’re going to aim for deep space. And that’s what the Artemis project is all about. And so things like being able to land back on Earth and all that kind of stuff, which is very costly when it comes to the weight that you carry and things like that. We’re not going to go with any of that. We’re going to focus on deep space. And so that’s how they differentiated themselves. And I think they’ve really remained true to that. You know, it is really expensive. They’ve got this great big rocket that doesn’t get reused. And they want to set up a cadence of launches of these things. I think eventually transitioning to rockets produced by SpaceX or Blue Origin or whoever comes along. So that they’re not completely dependent on NASA. And NASA can take that position as kind of the vanguard. We’re gonna blaze the trail, and hopefully the private sector will come in and follow behind us.
Rath: I know people who might have been critical of this or undersold it as like, we’re just doing what Apollo did before, but it’s not. I mean, this new rocket and what they achieved. Talk about that, where things got extended, what it meant to have that distance record, and I probably made it harder to figure out that return trajectory.
Schmidt: Right. Well, so first of all, there’s 25% more human beings on board, right? The Apollo had three, and this has four. And that’s not nothing. I was thinking about this earlier today. Like, what really is the difference? If you look at the Saturn V and look at the Artemis II, they’re about the same size. They’re disposable. In many ways, they look very similar. And if you don’t scratch under the surface, you don’t really see the differences. I think one of the differences is external. In other words, the boosters are different. The Apollo relied completely on a liquid-fueled first stage, and the Artemis is a combination of a liquid- fueled rocket and also two solid-fueled boosters, which is technology that came directly from the space shuttle program. But I actually think the real change is kind of a cultural change or an expectation change. Because if you remember Apollo, all of those astronauts were test pilots. I mean. Until Harrison Schmidt, all of them were really test pilots. I mean, they were expected to go right on the bleeding edge and to risk their lives. And what we saw over the Space Shuttle era and the Space Station era is that the astronauts who were test pilots or fighter pilots, they became kind of the minority. More and more mission specialists, scientists, and other people were going to space. And I think that the expectation for how safe and repeatable and precise spaceflight needs to be changed from the days of Apollo, where it was kind of hellbent, just get there, and then the mission is over. And so I think that when you look at the Artemis and you look at the delays in getting it off the ground the first time, the hydrogen leaks in this one going back into the vehicle assembly building and back and forth, I think what you’re seeing there is an expectation of increased precision, increased perfection, really, and decreased appetite for risk. And I think that’s necessary in reality because it doesn’t take a lot of failure for people to really sour on these things. So I do think that the big leap forward for NASA was to kind of make systems that feel a bit more reliable and routine than maybe the Apollo did.
