Just thought I’d share about the
first hours of the Artemis II mission,
because it is going to be such a
busy time frame for us as a crew.
So, day of launch, we’ve got a lot
of checks and medical things
and some briefings to get through in the morning
and then get suited up, get out to the pad,
we get strapped into the vehicle.
Once we launch, it’s about an eight-minute ride to orbit.
We’ll get rid of the SLS rocket, we’ll be done with that,
and we’ll be on top of our upper stage,
which will be taking care of the initial accelerations
that we need to execute the mission.
We have a bunch of checks we’re going to do.
Certainly, the vehicle, the solar panels,
the batteries are charging.
Life support system looks like it’s working.
Christina and I have a bunch of cabin configuration
to do in that first 45 minutes, checking out some systems,
like the water systems, getting the toilet commissioned,
getting out some of the electronics
and being able to power the devices.
All of that needs to be set up and plugged in.
We fly around the Earth halfway,
and if everything is good
at that halfway mark, and that’s
about 45 minutes into the mission,
then we burn the engines again,
accelerate, which will keep us in space.
If we don’t like what’s going on, that’s one of
the options where we could come back to Earth.
Ideally we’ll accelerate from that point,
and we’ll go out to a highly elliptical orbit.
The Space Station is at 400 km.
We’ll be going out to 60,000 km.
That gives us a day in space, before we
have the opportunity to come back to Earth.
But of course, we train for the unexpected
and make sure we have a good plan
to manage all of the potential systems
failures or systems that just don’t perform
how we thought they were going to.
And maybe we’re not 100% confident that we
can survive another eight days in the spacecraft.
Those are the types of things
that would cause us to come home.
If we don’t want to come home,
and if we get into that day long orbit,
we get off of the upper
stage of the rocket and we use it
as a simulated lunar lander,
and we fly around it
checking out the manual control systems,
characterizing how the vehicle flies.
But ensuring that we know how to dock
this vehicle manually in the future.
We can do everything but actually connect to it.
It’s about an 18-hour day.
And then we try and get a four-hour nap,
so we really hope that we will be able to fall
asleep amidst all that excitement of the day,
because then we have to get up,
and we come all the way down to about
200 km above the surface of the Earth.
And that is where we accelerate, and that
is what will send us on our way to the Moon.
Our job is to characterize this vehicle
and make sure it does everything
it was designed to do, that humans
can live and work on board it,
and hand the baton on to the Artemis III crew.