NASA is counting down the hours before the first trip around the moon by astronauts since 1972. The mission of Artemis-2 begins with a ride to space aboard a rocket made here in Alabama. NASA has been building and testing spacecraft at the Marshall Space Center since the days of Project Apollo. Some of the engineers who made those trips possible are still in the Huntsville area and NASA knows it.
On the original rollout day for the Artemis two spacecraft, the four astronauts that make up the crew were at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to take questions from the press.
“But for this crew, we've been on this journey for about two and a half years, and we just we truly look at that and see teamwork,” said Artemis Commander Reed Weisman. He Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen of Canada will ride to Earth aboard NASA's newest rocket. It's called the Space Launch System, or SLS. It's designed, built, tested and managed at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. And that's not the only help the Artemis crew got.
“I've actually been very fortunate to become friends with Rusty Schweikert,” said Weisman before the moon mission. The Artemis crew member also flew aboard the International Space Station. “And Rusty gave me a bag of wisdom quotes from different cultures all over the world that I took to the space station.”
People who follow NASA might hear the name Rusty Schweikert and go, “whoa.” Everybody else might say “who,” It's okay, Schweikert flew on Apollo 9 1969. He and his crewmates sang “happy birthday” to NASA manager Christopher Kraft during their mission to test the bug like lunar lander that Neil Armstrong would use two missions later on Apollo 11. And that's not the only name that Reid Weisman dropped that day.
"And, I'm going to take that little bag of wisdom, but also in my heart and mind, the wisdom What we've learned from Charlie Duke and General Stafford and Dr Schmitt on what it meant to them.
And, if those names leave you scratching your head.
Astronaut Harrison Schmidt flew on Apollo 17 in 1972 if Artemis-2 is successful, the astronauts will be the first people to go to the moon since then. Charlie Duke made a lunar landing during Apollo 16.
“I'll just share my General Stafford story, which was the day we all got assigned to this mission publicly,” said Weisman.
Astronaut Tom Stafford flew Apollo 10. That was the dress rehearsal for Neil Armstrong's moon landing. Stafford's phone call was also the one that Artemis commander Reed Weisman says he almost didn't take.
“I was on my couch. I was getting ready to take a nap. It had been a long day with the media, and I almost hit the red hang up button, but I just figured I would answer it, I answer it. It was General Stafford ‘Reid, congratulations. We are so excited for you!’”
But there's one name from NASA's Apollo days that didn't come up during the Artemis press briefing while the astronauts talk to reporters, Craig Sumner is weaving stories for an audience of school kids from Louisville, Kentucky. He's in a white lab coat covered with embroidered NASA patches.
“What's the best part of your job?” asked one youngster.
“The people I worked with the enjoyment of the journey to develop new processes and new techniques, new software, lightweight materials. It's the journey on Apollo and on the space shuttle program, and even on Artemis,” responded Sumner.
Okay, so he’s is not your run of the mill, volunteer museum docent.
“I retired as the deputy project manager on the space shuttle external tank,,” said Sumner.(Then, I) went to private sector, and I was the director, Chief Engineer on the space shuttle propulsion elements, and a final taste on Artemis the Space Launch System.”
Sumner is a retired NASA engineer who got his start during Apollo. He built the lunar rovers during a college internship. Those with Sumner traded that job in the 1980s to work on propulsion for the space shuttle, including the big orange external fuel tank.
The Space Shuttle Program retired in 2011 and so did Sumner. But not for long.
“I was brought on board as a ‘SME,” a subject matter expert, to work on the thermal protection system and go test what we were going to go fly and make sure it performed and exceeded our expectations," he said.
And the term "SME" is not the only bit of NASA jargon you're going to hear during the story the space program was building its new moon rocket, and it needed somebody to work with the new guys. That's why they called Sumner.
“You can bring a lot of new ideas to the table, but if they aren't the right ones, you got to have somebody will stand up and say, We're not going down that road,” said Sumner. “We've already done that on the Apollo program or whatever, to make sure that we don't make the same mistake twice.”
That applies to the space shuttle as well.
Sumner worked on the shuttle's big external fuel tank. His team sprayed on the foam insulation that gave the tank its burnt orange color. That may not sound like a life or death job until February of 2003. A piece of foam insulation broke off Space Shuttle Columbia's fuel tank. It hit one of the shuttle's wings, broke a heat shield, and the spacecraft burned up during the return trip through Earth's atmosphere. Seven astronauts were killed.
“I think Jerry Smeltzer took an unforgivable hit on trying to redesign the bipod that allowed foam to come off and hit the orbiter and damage the leading edge,” Sumner said.
Jerry Smeltzer led the external tank team on Columbia's doomed mission. The “bipod” Sumner is referring to as the part of the tank where the foam broke loose. Smelter retired from NASA shortly after the accident.
“Jerry knew that we had a problem here again,” said Sumner. “You got into the center-to- center relationships where they had butt heads, and the funding was being controlled out of the Johnson Space Flight Center.”
Funding and politics are as much a part of Sumner's message to the new guys on Artemis as the nuts and bolts of building rockets, and he doesn't hold back on problems he sees with how Washington is handling NASA's new Artemis program.
“They agreed to a contract value, and then they said, well, we can't give you that much money,” Sumner recalled. “We're just going to give you this much. What can you do with it? And then you drag the entire army with you and increase the cost. You don't meet milestones, and you look like fools.”
Critics of the Space Launch System say it’s one hundred and forty percent over budget and costing taxpayers four billion dollars for each rocket.
“Part of that cheaper is better philosophy was put to the test during the unmanned flight of Artemis one, NASA is using as much hardware from the retired space shuttle as possible instead of the three liquid fueled engines like on the shuttle, NASA's new moon rocket uses four the shuttle's two solid rocket boosters in the external tank that Sumner worked on were made bigger and longer. Sumner says it was great working with the Artemis engineers, most of them anyway,
“The new guys were sponges. They wanted to absorb everything that you could give them in the shortest period of time, the old guys, unfortunately stayed too long.”
Okay, every talk Sumner gives at the US Space and Rocket Center ends with handing out trading cards for the youngsters. His picture is on one of them. Sumner focuses on the high points of his days at NASA during his talks, but there were the low points too. The story he told about external tank chief Jerry Smeltzer and the loss of space shuttle Columbia was just one as we wrapped up our interview, he recalled another.
“I got to sit down with Larry down in New Orleans one evening,” he said.
“Larry” is Lawrence Malloy. He was in charge of shuttle propulsion at the Marshall Space Flight Center in the mid 1980’s. He was also part of a launch decision one cold night that went down in NASA history.
“Larry shared with me what was going on from his knot hole. Larry knew that we had a problem. He didn't know it was going to be as catastrophic. I mean, he knew that it could grow or go to that," said
Sumner.
It did. 40 years ago aboard space shuttle Challenger.
That story, next time.
