This year’s SXSW featured a plethora of riveting panels from famous casts to famous musicians, and for a moment it seemed as if every celebrity in the world was in the Lone Star State. As if the festival couldn’t get any more exciting, NASA decided to hold a keynote session with the astronauts who will be embarking on NASA’s first attempt at landing on the Moon since 1972. After the successful Artemis I Flight Test in 2022, NASA plans to head into space later this year with the Artemis II Mission, and the astronauts came to Texas to talk about it. Astronauts and panelists Christina Koch, Jeremy Hansen, and Reid Wiseman spoke in detail about preparing for the upcoming mission and NASA’s latest goals for space travel.
Get To Know The Panelists
One thing this panel made clear right away is that these astronauts (save for one) are no strangers to space travel. Koch spent a record-breaking 328 days aboard the International Space Station back in 2020 and Wiseman previously spent 165 days on the ISS back in 2014. The crew’s pilot, Victor Glover, who unfortunately couldn’t make it to the panel, spent 168 days aboard the ISS during NASA and SpaceX’s 2020 Crew-1 Mission. However this will be Canadian Astronaut Jeremy Hansen’s first time going into space, and he is thrilled, “So I’m pretty pumped.” The Astronaut cheered.
As moderator Courtney Beasley said, “So now we know the crew, let’s get to know a little more about the mission.”
The Artemis II Mission Broken Down
Artemis II is a 9-day mission that will take the four astronauts from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the Moon. Upon a successful launch, the Orion spacecraft will orbit Earth for 90 minutes while the astronauts confirm everything is working correctly, “And if everything looks good,” Wiseman states, “We’re gonna burn an apogee raise burn that’s gonna take us out for our second orbit of Earth.” As the crew goes through the 24-hour-long second orbit, they will be moving even further away from Earth, “The point of that entire orbit is to check out all of the systems for the first human flight on the Orion spacecraft–how is our environmental control system working, how is the life support system working, and how are we doing?” Wiseman explains.
If anything happens during those two orbits the mission is cut short and the astronauts are returned back to Earth. However, if everything goes smoothly, the spacecraft is then pushed out to the far side of the Moon on a four-day travel. Using the Moon’s gravity, the spacecraft will wrap around and start heading back to planet Earth, “We will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere just off the coast of San Diego, California, and we will be doing 39 times the speed of sound when we hit the atmosphere.” This mission is, as Wiseman says, the first step in traveling to Mars, “We’ve been working on the International Space Station for the last 25 years, we know how to live and work off of our planet, and now let’s go extrapolate that out to the Moon and then let’s push onto Mars.”
Design NASA’s Newest Zero G Indicator Mascot
NASA is launching more than just spacecrafts! As the panel continued, the astronauts shared a pre-recorded video of Pilot Glover teasing an exciting opportunity, “We have a really cool surprise for you today,” Glover said to the camera, before encouraging the crew members to “share the news” with us. While the actual panel did take its time with revealing what it was, I’ll save you the anticipation. NASA is launching a nationwide competition to design your own plushie Zero Gravity Indicator that will be the Artemis II Mission’s mascot, getting to join the astronauts in space. Now, if you’re anything like me, you probably have no idea what that means, so I’ll let the experts explain.
“Something that we need to understand as a crew when we are flying a rocket to space is when you are under G forces and when you reach microgravity, and so what we’re looking for help with is developing a Zero Gravity Indicator.” Wiseman explains, “It could be many different forms, but you could think of it like a stuffed animal that’s on a string. And so, when we’re being pushed by the rocket we’ll see that mascot for our mission is being held down by the forces produced by the rocket–but when we get to microgravity when the engines cut off at the right time, we’ll start to see this floating around…We should fly close to nine minutes to orbit, if we see it floating at minute four we know there’s a problem. So it’s a really useful indicator.”
To help “inspire” the audience, the crew wanted to share some of their previous ZGI’s and the personal stories attached to them. Koch started off by sharing that the ZGI she used on her previous mission, a plush pair of large 8-balls, “My classmate [and I] were inducted in 2013 as astronauts, and his class of astronauts, the one that came before us (they were called The Chumps) they named us The Eight Balls.” Making their ZGI an homage to their original name. Wiseman held up his ZGI, a plush of a little giraffe named Giraffity, “This was the first gift my mom ever gave to my firstborn daughter.” Wiseman explains, “So this was very sentimental, and my Russian commander had already flown in space before so he knew I had two young daughters and he said ‘Why don’t you supply the Weightless Indicator.’”
Having that attachment to back home really helped both the astronauts when they were isolated for long periods. Wiseman also explained how throughout your entire journey, but specifically the ride up to space, this one item becomes the teams mascot, “This little guy spent every day with me in my crew quarters, it was a connection back home to my kids, it was floating around, but what I didn’t realize on the way uphill when you’re on power in a rocket…you are really looking at this thing the entire time. Even though you have all these fancy gauges, this stuffed animal on a string tells everything you need to know about your performance.” And now the public has the opportunity to submit their own plush ideas and be just as much a part of the journey as they are.
Combining Space & AI
Given the recent boom in AI, it’s no surprise the crew touched on NASA’s future plans for utilizing AI as a tool in space travel. To start it off, Koch touched on the difficulties of applying AI to what they currently do, “It would be hard to design something less applicable in some ways than what we do in human space flight because we do these huge one-off missions. Whereas AI oftentimes does its best work when it can be trained on lots and lots of data that can be applied to the problem set.” In other words, there simply isn’t enough data for AI to assist in literal space travel. We as humans only have a small amount of experience to build off of, so creating an AI based on that limited knowledge wouldn’t necessarily be beneficial.
However, Koch thinks AI could be useful in other ways, “For example, for ISS, we send thousands and thousands of commands. So there’s a place where we have a ton of training data, and if we were to just utilize that space of all the commanding that’s ever been done and sort of pile on when have there been anomalies? When have there been command errors? When has something not gone as expected and almost have that assistant that can be predictive.” Another use for AI could be in robotics, “If we’re able to off-load [decision-making] or make some of our robotics have our decision-making to pick up the interesting rock, to know to hike in that direction, to say that looks cool over there. And to avoid that back-and-forth that we currently have to do now where humans on the ground, based on just pictures or imagery have to make some of the decisions and then guide the robotics to do the full thing.” From the sounds of it, AI is just at the beginning, but its impact could be revolutionary for space travel.
Throughout the hour-long conversation, the crew spoke about how they prepare for each mission, the things they’re looking forward to most, and the meticulous planning and training they’ve endured to be ready. It was absolutely incredible, and I can’t wait to see them land!
