Almost exactly a year ago, I met and talked with two of the astronauts currently en route to circumnavigate the moon. Victor Glover and Christina Koch had both just finished up there hours long training in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL). NBL is one of the many tools NASA and other space agencies use to train astronauts for spacewalks and simulate what life and operations will be like in a microgravity environment. This type of training has been part of NASA's program since the 1980's, with NBL being in use since 1995, with a full-size mock-up of the International Space Station submerged in it.
Victor Glover is the pilot for this mission, and one of the things about his NASA mission history that is really quite amazing is that he was also on the first SpaceX operational crewed mission, also known as SpaceX Crew-1. Unlike so many other astronauts I have met through my current job, he is someone who easily but respectfully commands a room. He is so down to earth and really someone who can explain complex tasks and mission parameters, making them simple and easy to understand (selling himself short of his accomplishments in doing so).
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Christina Koch is one of the two mission specialists for Artemis II with Canadian Space Agency Astronaut Jeremy Hansen. Their job for this mission will be to check out the Orion spacecraft's life support, test emergency systems, operate the docking hatch, conduct, and perform manual piloting demonstrations to prepare for future moon landings. Talking to her can be described pretty simply as an island girl. She is so laid back and confident in what she is going to do (not to mention wicked smart). What has always stood out to me about her is that she was 46 (now 47) when I met her, and she could easily have passed for someone a decade or two younger.
Below is the best photo of the two of them I have after their training, talking to my boss, Chairman Dr. Brian Babin. A really cool thing about this was how excited they were not for Artemis II but to see young people in our group who were so interested in NASA and space as a whole. They actually got in trouble with NASA for talking to us for so long and not finishing the rest of their debriefing like they were supposed to! I wish I had taken more of them, but I was just way too excited to hear from them talk about training and what they were expecting!
The following pictures I took do not do it justice, but they show the sheer scale of the pool and everything sunken in it that makes it the huge training tool it is. For whatever reason, I cannot get the slightly better videos I recorded to load.
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