• 2 months ago
Artemis 2 NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman who commanded the first moon mission in half a century talks to Space.com about the parallels between the two moon efforts.
The 55th anniversary of Apollo 8's historical orbital mission in 1968.
Transcript
00:00And we're speaking around the 55th anniversary of Apollo eight, which flew three astronauts around the moon in 1968.
00:07Artemis twos flyby is coming close to recreating that scenario.
00:11And so can you talk about the parallels between the two missions from your point of view?
00:16We see parallel. I wish Victor and Christina were in here because they would give you a far better answer.
00:22We see all those parallels. I let me let me give you two two sides of an answer.
00:27First, the parallel I most like to draw right now is that we are building on the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo era for sure.
00:36But when I look at what we're doing in Artemis, it feels to me in Artemis that we are more building on the International Space Station and a long term presence.
00:45I feel the International Space Station in everything we do. I feel the international community.
00:50I feel the way we do export control, the way we farm out hardware to different experts around the world.
00:55And we pull all of this together. We have an international crew. We don't really have that.
01:00Like before this decade is out, we are going to do this. We don't feel that space race necessarily as the crew.
01:06But we do feel a really robust international team everywhere we go.
01:10We try to highlight the Artemis Accords. I think we're up to 32 nations, maybe even 33 now.
01:14So I just feel like this to me feels like it's built on the International Space Station legacy of a little slower, methodical.
01:22We're here for the long term. However, the day we got announced when you were here, April 3rd, sitting on my couch later that day, completely exhausted.
01:31My cell phone rings. It's an unknown number. I thought it was a telemarketer and I picked it up all annoyed.
01:35It was Tom Stafford, you know, who flew Apollo 10, not eight, but 10.
01:39And he was so excited that we were heading back to the moon.
01:42And just to know that we are going to go out and try to wrap Apollo 7, 8 and a little bit of like 10 into one mission.
01:52It's just, you know, Victor walks around and says the moon is the mission.
01:57And he's right. Like we have got to get used to flying out into deep space.
02:00We've got to get out of low Earth orbit, start making it comfortable to go out to the moon.
02:04And that's what Artemis 2 is going to go do. And then Artemis 3 will do more than we could ever even dream of.
02:09So I love the parallels. I think Apollo 8, once we did Apollo 8, I think everybody in the United States knew we can land now.
02:16Like that was that mission meant so much to just go and go and the systems work.
02:22Holy smokes. We can fly around the moon. We can read from the book at Genesis on Christmas Eve on the far side of the moon.
02:28You know, it's just all that stuff is just amazing to me. So we do think about that legacy a lot.

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