Rick LaBrode has worked at NASA for 37 years, but he says America’s quest to return to the moon is by far the crowning moment of his career.
LaBrode is the senior flight director of Artemis 1, which is scheduled for launch later this month – the first time a capsule capable of carrying people has been sent to the moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972.
“This is more exciting than anything I’ve ever been a part of,” LaBrode told reporters at the US Space Agency’s Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas.
The 60-year-old confided to AFP that the eve of the launch will likely be one long night of anticipation – and little rest.
“I’ll be so excited. I’m not going to get much sleep, I’m sure,” he said in front of Mission Control’s iconic giant screen array.
Artemis 1, an unmanned test flight, will contain the first explosives for the massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which will be the most powerful in the world when it enters service.
It will propel the Orion crew capsule into orbit around the moon. The spacecraft will remain in space for 42 days before returning to Earth.
Starting in 2024, astronauts will travel aboard Orion for the same journey, and Americans won’t set foot on the moon again until the following year at the earliest.
For the duration of Artemis 1, a team of about a dozen NASA personnel will remain in Mission Control 24 hours a day. The center has been renovated and modernized for the occasion.
Teams have been rehearsing for this moment for three years.
“This is a whole new deal — a whole new rocket, a whole new spacecraft, a whole new control center,” said Brian Perry, the flight dynamics officer who will be in charge of Orion’s trajectory immediately after launch.
“I can tell you my heart will be tum tum, tum tum. But I will work hard to stay focused,” Perry, who has worked on numerous space shuttle flights over the years, told AFP, patting himself on the chest.
– moon pool –
Aside from the mission control upgrades for the mission, the whole Johnson Space Center is a little over the moon with Artemis.
A black curtain was erected in the center of the giant astronaut training tank — the largest indoor swimming pool in the world at more than 200 feet long, 100 feet wide and 40 feet deep.
On one side of the so-called Neutral Buoyancy Lab is a submerged model of the International Space Station.
On the other hand, the lunar environment is gradually being recreated at the bottom of the tank, with huge model rocks made by a company specializing in aquarium decoration.
“Only in the last few months have we started spreading the sand on the bottom of the pool. We just got this big rock two weeks ago,” said the lab’s deputy director, Lisa Shore. “It’s all very new to us and very evolving.”
In the water, astronauts can experience a feeling close to weightlessness. To train for eventual trips to the moon, simulations must replicate the moon’s one-sixth gravity.
From a room above the pool, the astronauts will be remotely controlled – with the four-second communication lag they will experience on the lunar surface.
Six have already completed an apprenticeship and six more will do so by the end of September. The latter group will wear the new space suits being manufactured by NASA for Artemis missions.
“The heyday of this facility was when we were still flying the space shuttle and assembling the space station,” said the lab’s office manager, John Haas.
Back then there were 400 training sessions with astronauts in full space suits each year, now there are about 150. But the Artemis program has brought a new urgency to the lab.
When AFP visited the facility, engineers and divers were testing how to pull a cart onto the moon.
– “New Golden Age” –
Each session in the pool can last up to six hours.
“It’s like running a marathon twice, but on your hands,” astronaut Victor Glover told AFP.
Glover returned to Earth last year after spending six months on the International Space Station. Now he works in a building dedicated to simulators of all kinds.
He said his job is to help “verify procedures and hardware” so that when NASA finally names the Artemis astronauts who will take part in manned missions to the moon (Glover himself could be on that list) , can be “ready for action”. “
Using virtual reality headsets, the astronauts can get used to walking in the dark at the moon’s south pole, where the missions will land.
The sun rarely rises above the horizon there, so there are always long dark shadows that obscure visibility.
The astronauts also have to get used to the new spacecraft such as the Orion capsule and the equipment on board.
In one of the simulators, sitting in the commander’s chair, personnel are being trained to dock with the future Gateway lunar space station.
Elsewhere at the space center, a replica of the Orion capsule is in service, measuring just 316 cubic feet (nine cubic meters) for four people.
“They do a lot of emergency exit training here,” Debbie Korth, deputy director of the Orion program, told AFP.
Korth, who has been working on Orion for more than a decade, said everyone in Houston is looking forward to returning to the moon and to the future of NASA.
“Definitely, I feel like I’m entering a new golden age,” she said.
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