Artemis II: The Crew

(Excerpt from Houston We Have a Podcast, Episode 417: Artemis II: The Crew — hosts Nilufar Ramji and Jacob Pinter talk with the four Artemis II astronauts: Commander Reid Wiseman and Mission Specialist Christina Koch of NASA, pilot Victor Glover of NASA, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.)

Nilufar Ramji: Houston We Have a Podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center. Episode 417: Artemis II: The Crew. I'm Nilufar Ramji, and I'll be one of your hosts today.

In November of 2022 the Space Launch System rocket launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida with the Orion capsule atop for a 25 day uncrewed test flight around the moon. It was a great success, and just months after its return, NASA announced the crew of the next mission going to the moon, Artemis II.

Jacob Pinter: Artemis II will take four astronauts on a 10 day mission around the moon. They are NASA astronauts, Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and Mission Specialist Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. They'll test the Orion spacecraft and all of its systems in preparation for later Artemis missions, where crew members will be landing on the moon.

Nilufar Ramji: Jacob and I got to speak to the crew last fall ahead of their mission, to talk about how they got to where they are and what going to the moon means to them. Ready for lift off!

<Intro Music>

Nilufar Ramji: Welcome back to Houston We Have a Podcast. We're so happy to have you here and we wanted to jump right in to get to know all of you as much as possible. So y'all have some deep roots with each other going back to the selection as astronaut candidates. Reid and Jeremy, y'all were in the Astronaut Group 20, AKA The Chumps in 2009. And Victor and Christina, you were both in Astronaut Group 21, the 8-Balls in 2013. So first off, tell us a little bit about what your first impressions were of each other. I'll open it up.

Reid Wiseman: Well, Jeremy asked me to move in with him when I was looking for a place to live when we first got here, and I was like, there is no way I'm moving in with that guy. Like, we'll never graduate from our astronaut candidate, period. So I said no, and I rented a little apartment down by Kemah, Texas for our transition here with my family. And I look back and really regret that. I think we would have had a lot of fun if I said yes to that request.

Jeremy Hansen: Yeah, you should regret that life choice.

Nilufar Ramji: Anything to counter that, Jeremy?

Jeremy Hansen: Not really. No. I'll leave it at that. You got enough from that snippet.

Christina Koch: I think, for me, first impression, was coming off of a very long road trip from Montana to be here in the heat of summer where my air conditioner on my car broke. I remember meeting Victor and his family and his four daughters, who were very young at the time, and them just being so gracious and kind. But my biggest memory of Victor from our astronaut candidate years was something he said to our entire class to start us out on the right foot and set the stage for what I think was a really successful training period. And he said our goal as a class is to cross the finish line together, and I will never forget that.

Victor Glover: Wow. I'm gonna need a minute.

Jacob Pinter: You looked really concerned.

Victor Glover: I said a lot during that time. You know it's you were asking about first impressions. And I cannot remember a first but I have several, like significant impressions from Christina in that time — for example, you'll hear me say Nana Notes, referring to the best notes ever. She took the best notes, and really made sure that all of us knew the same thing, so we would all graduate together. And it just became a term for writing the right things down. But the biggest impression Christina made on me during astronaut candidate training — we were having a conversation about what it was like to transition here from our previous lives. And I just remember a moment in this conversation where I felt like, oh, you think this place is like the military, it's not. And she's like, wait, you think this place is like the civilian world, it's not. And so I just remember feeling like, okay, that's cool. We're both in a culture that's new to us, and that was a very important part of my transition to NASA.

Nilufar Ramji: Seems like it was a big bond forming experience. So tell me how that's carried into being the Artemis II crew.

Jeremy Hansen: Well, I feel a bit guilty for not giving an impression on Reid, so maybe please go ahead first. But I think it ties into this question as well — something that just carried forward. And I think people probably pick up on this from Reid themselves very quickly, but it's just very easy and natural to have a friendship with someone like Reid, and that just translated through our entire time here at NASA as part of this crew. It's just easy, and you never feel like you have to be someone else.

Reid Wiseman: Honestly, I'd say it's a lot of work when you take four professionals — we're all very senior astronauts here at NASA and with the Canadian Space Agency — and it definitely takes a lot of work. So we have really committed to getting to know one another, not just on a topical level, like really digging in, what makes each one of us tick, what kind of sets us off, what gets us motivated, how we respond to emergencies, but also just how we respond to group living. It has been a tremendous amount of work, but the cool thing for this crew is just how much effort we have been willing to put into it, and that is going to serve us really well when we got to spend 10 days together in the Integrity spacecraft going around the moon.

Jacob Pinter: Do you remember one moment when you realized, like, we have fused into one unit, one team, one something…

Christina Koch: I have one. We did a National Outdoor Leadership School kind of training. It's also called NOLS, something that the Astronaut Office has used for many years to train expeditionary behavior skills. We did sort of a mini version of it, and we did a two day backpacking trip — just us crew and our NOLS instructor. So six of us and our NOLS instructor, and there was a moment, since we were alone that whole time, when we came back, and they actually had a drone fly in over us to film our return from the backcountry into the front country and coming back to the wider group that we were with. It was a geology trip, so a huge group of instructors and things like that. And I think that transition taught us the real stark difference between the six of us when we're gelling together as a crew and when we're on the outside of that, which often in our role, we're performing training in front of other people.