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.