Artemis II pilot describes landing in Orion: "From intense to pure elation" - Ars Technica

The crew of Artemis II spoke with the media on Thursday, six days after returning to Earth following their mission around the Moon. After a news conference, the astronauts gave a handful of interviews, and Ars was able to speak with Orion’s pilot, Victor Glover.

Glover and Ars first connected nearly a decade ago as part of our homage to Apollo, The Greatest Leap. Glover now stands at the vanguard of our modern Apollo program, named Artemis, which aims to return humans to the Moon and establish a semi-permanent base there.

Glover, an accomplished naval aviator, first went to space in November 2020 as the pilot on the first operational Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station. Two years after he landed back on Earth, Glover was assigned to the Artemis II mission and tasked with a majority of the test piloting of the Orion spacecraft during the outbound and return journey from the Moon.

We spoke mostly about that experience at NASA’s Johnson Space Center on Thursday afternoon. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ars: You flew Dragon with touchscreens and Orion with more traditional, hands-on controls. I’m pretty sure I know the answer, but which did you prefer?

Victor Glover: You know me. We talked about Dragon a lot before, and it’s a fantastic ship to get humans to the space station. But I was really thrilled to have a translational hand controller, a THC, on Orion.

Ars: How did Orion handle compared to the simulations you did on Earth?

Glover: The real vehicle had better springs. There was less pre-play, less wobble in the stick, so when I would move something, the thruster sounds we had in the sim? Totally wrong. It was more of a rumble like driving a pickup on a dirt road.

The SM (Service Module) was nice—we could tell it was pressurizing and thrusting. It felt responsive. I could feel the push, but also I could see it in the camera instantly that there was motion. The integrated system flew so much better than the sim. That team should be very proud.

The modelers, the flight controllers, they came up with something. And even though there were pleasant surprises, overall, the real thing is better than we simulated. And that’s part of what being a test pilot is: to verify and validate manufacturing processes, software development processes, and sometimes teams. And all three of those, in this case, crushed it.

Ars: What do you think the implications are for Artemis III and Artemis IV when there will be some pretty complex rendezvous and docking operations with a lander?

Glover: The Lunar Science team won’t like it when I say this, but it’s the truth. If we had launched, done the rendezvous and proximity operations demo, and then had to emergency de-orbit, I would have considered us a massive success. Because that may be the only chance we get to test this really important capability.

We don’t plan to manually dock. It’s a crew interrupt. Boeing CFT (the Starliner Crew Flight Test in 2024, during which Butch Wilmore had to take control of the spacecraft during an emergency) has shown us when these things might need to be done. And Butch held position manually. He had to use his eyeballs to correlate where he was and just hold position. That was a critical moment for them to breathe, and for the team to collect themselves, because if they had tried to retreat or tried to continue docking with ISS, both of those would have been catastrophic.

So this capability, to me, was a huge milestone—now Artemis II gets to pass the baton to III and IV, whatever they are, docking, proximity ops again, landing. Those crews will have the peace of mind that the Artemis II test pilot said it was good to go. An engineer said it was good to go, and an F-18 pilot said it was good to go. That, to me, is unreal. We got so much juice for the squeeze on that.

Ars: But you had some fun?

Glover: It was also a ton of fun, truly a test pilot’s dream. I mean, I feel bad. I got to fly Dragon as well. I got to manually pilot Dragon. We got to do a fly-around for the port relocation. It was the first time that software got used in space, and I did that. So I got to do a few touchscreen commands and listen, I prefer a stick-and-throttle over a touchscreen any day.