NASA's Curious Universe
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NASA's official science podcast for curious beginners: hosts and NASA experts explore black holes, rocket launches, and life aboard the Space Station in vivid, natural-speed conversation. Real interview English — overlapping speakers, enthusiasm, follow-up questions — exactly the texture of exam dialogue sections.
Twenty-four American astronauts went to the moon between 1968 and 1972. In the next few years, we are going back. To get there, we’ll need a dedicated team, and a powerful new rocket. NASA’s Sharon Cobb and Abdiel Santos Galindo take us through the many, many steps involved in pr
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01You just really can't imagine everything that goes into preparing for a launch.
02T-minutes 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, and liftoff of space shuttle and lands.
03There are hundreds of people that are involved.
04There are people across the country that are responsible for various aspects of the launch.
05Houston now controlling.
06Atlantis begins its penultimate journey to shore off the International Space Station.
07We have to make sure that all the systems are running.
08We're looking at data that's coming from each one of those systems.
09We have thousands of sensors on the rocket.
10Atlantis now in the proper alignment for its 8.5-minute ride to orbit.
11I have been working on this project from almost the very beginning of it, and to see all these components come together and all these systems is just something that I cannot wait to see.
12And to be there on that day and to hear the rocket engines roar and to see it lift off of the pad will be something that I just dream about.
13I just can't wait.
14This is NASA's Curious Universe.
15Our universe is a wild and wonderful place.
16I'm Patti Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide.
17Teams across NASA are gearing up for a very exciting launch called Artemis 1.
18This launch will be the first in a series of Artemis missions, which will culminate in bringing humans back to the Moon for the first time since 1972.
19If everything goes according to plan, the first uncrewed test flight, Artemis 1, will take off later this year in 2021 out of Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
20The new rocket that will take us back to the Moon and beyond is called the Space Launch System, or SLS.
21But how exactly does such a complicated machine come together?
22It takes a lot of moving pieces and a team of people paying very close attention.
23I love to describe my job as being a rocket scientist, but I'm not exactly that.
24I have the privilege of getting to help with the design, development, production, manufacturing, and test of the Space Launch System.
25This is Sharon Cobb, who has been working on the Space Launch System for most of its development.
26And while visiting the Moon won't be a first for NASA, this rocket will have a lot of exciting new developments.
27The Space Launch System is the largest rocket that is currently being built, and it will allow us to carry humans to land on the Moon as well as going to Mars eventually.
28We've done incredible robotic missions on Mars, but we've never been able to send humans to Mars.
29So that's something that we're really looking forward to as an agency.
30Another one of the exciting things about the Artemis mission is that it'll be the first time that a female has landed on the Moon.
31It's going to be really exciting.
32Can you imagine being the first woman to step on the Moon?
33I think it'll be an exciting time for all those watching and for those young girls to see what they can also look forward to in their future.
34There are a lot of moving pieces, both literally and figuratively, that it takes to get humans into space.
35And the vehicles in the Space Launch System are a really important part of that equation.
36So the Artemis program has multiple components to it.
37It has both the rocket and the crew capsule Orion that will be sending humans into space.
38The rocket itself consists of multiple engines and boosters that will propel it off the launch pad and into the atmosphere.
39The first flight in 2021 will make its way to the Moon without any people on it.
40For the first Artemis mission, it'll take us about three to four days to get from launch to get the crew capsule into position and to do an orbital maneuver around the Moon.
41After that's complete, they'll return back to the Earth and we'll be looking for things like the reentry and how well those systems perform.
42And so we'll be doing a lot of tests, we'll have a lot of sensors on that first flight, getting ready for the next flight that'll have the crew on it.
43Team members from NASA centers across the country have been working on preparing this rocket at the same time.
44Sharon's team has been working out of Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
45The launch itself will take place at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where NASA's biggest missions usually come together and take off.
46My name is Abdiel Alexander Santos-Galindo and I am a ground integration engineer for the Exploration Ground Systems program at Kennedy Space Center.
47Artemis itself is the sister of Apollo, hence the name.
48The Apollo program had the opportunity of sending humans to the Moon, but we really didn't stay there.
49And so we said to ourselves that we definitely need to go back.
50But this time we have to go back and we have to stay because as humans, we kind of have this nature and this interest of just exploring.
51And so having the opportunity to go back to the Moon and kind of understand how to live and work there gives us the opportunity to then eventually explore the other locations such as Mars and beyond as a multi-planetary species in a sense.
52You need a lot of lift power to fulfill these dreams of interplanetary travel.
53The SLS rocket has to be groundbreaking in both its size and force in order to lift itself off the ground.
54Again, this is Sharon Cobb.
55This is an enormous rocket.
56The Space Launch System, when it is built and integrated, will be 322 feet tall.
57That's taller than the Statue of Liberty.
58So it's going to be a massive rocket and it has incredible power like we've never seen.
59One of the neat things about the Space Launch System is the fact that it will allow us to carry more cargo and more supplies to the Moon than anything else that's currently in existence.
60If you can imagine that you're going to be going on a very long journey, there's a lot of things you have to take with you.
61And so this rocket has more lift capability and more power than any other rocket that is currently being built.
62It's just going to give us a capability that will be able to help us explore for many years to come.
63Scientist Robert Goddard flew the first rocket almost 100 years ago, in 1926.
64That rocket didn't go very far, only about 12.5 meters into the air.
65But it paved the way for more experimentation.
66It wasn't until the Space Race in the 1950s and 60s that rockets sent some of the first objects and people into space.
67This was a time when computers weren't what we think of today.
68In fact, the term NASA computer often referred to people who were doing complicated math by hand.
69Each person played a specific and important role in getting the first humans into space and onto the Moon.
70Spaceflight technology has come leaps and bounds since then.
71And with all that development over time, scientists working on the Space Launch System didn't have to start entirely from scratch.
72Building this rocket was an opportunity to build on the foundation of the space shuttle program.
73We had a lot of really capable equipment that we used on the space shuttle program.
74The engines, the boosters, the solid rocket boosters that we flew, those were all very capable pieces of equipment that we could reuse.
75But there were also some other pieces of equipment that needed to have more capability.
76And that was our first step was to try to marry all those really critical components of the rocket together and design the new ones that we had to.
77And then get those into production so that we could test them.
78At the end of the day, we are a government agency, so we want to make sure that everybody is participating on America's rocket.
79Abdi El and his team at Kennedy are in the process of taking all the parts of the rockets and assembling them into one huge machine.
80The parts have come from all across the country, with different teams designing and building different pieces.
81Teams across NASA are equipped not only with different specialists to create these parts, they also have different facilities to make and test them.
82But the physical space you need to compile the whole rocket is only found in one place.
83Down at Kennedy, there's a huge building called the Vehicle Assembly Building, or VAB.
84So the Vehicle Assembly Building was built during the Apollo program.
85So back in the 60s, maybe a little bit earlier than that.
86Every vehicle that NASA has made pretty much from the Apollo era forward.
87So we're talking about the Saturn V, the one that took astronauts to the moon, the space shuttle that did over 100 missions and built our International Space Station.
88And now the SLS rocket or the Space Launch System have all been assembled there.
89It's a really, really, really big building.
90It is a fascinating piece of landmark.
91I tend to call it the Cathedral of Space Exploration.
92It's this massive facility that has all the capabilities to kind of put together a rocket like a big Lego piece, and that's kind of the cool part of the job.
93And then test out some of the equipment and roll it out to the pad.
94The VAB covers eight acres of land and stands at 525 feet tall.
95There's an American flag painted on the outside that is 209 feet tall and 110 feet wide.
96Each star on the flag is six feet across.
97For me, it has been the most amazing thing that you get to see at NASA, even as you're driving there.
98Florida is a pretty flat state.
99So when you're driving over to Kennedy Space Center, you really don't see a lot of things other than just wilderness and all the natural environments that are surrounding the space center.
100But you do get to see this one teeny small little building on the far horizon that's like a white building.
101You can kind of discern a little logo on it.
102And as you get closer and closer to it, you see how ginormous this vehicle assembly building is.
103So when you walk in there, you kind of lose perspective of how big things are and the size of everything.
104I mean, even for me, who I've been doing this job for a couple of years already, you get the chance to see everything at a completely different scale.
105So it's like you've all of a sudden become a minifigure and you're living in a Lego world and a Lego environment with all these pieces around you as they get assembled to launch into space.
106As you might imagine, putting a rocket together in just the right order with just the right pieces can take time.
107The first equipments, the first major equipments, I guess, which we would call the solid rocket boosters or the white tanks that are on the side of the vehicle itself, they were received, oh my, I think it was late or mid last year.
108It's been a year since we started stacking and preparing these rockets and these vehicles.
109And that doesn't include the preparation that went beforehand on the actual additional elements that are already at the Kennedy Space Center in preparation.
110It's very impressive to see the amount of work that goes behind the scene into getting these rockets done and ready for launch.
111And it's something that a lot of people maybe not necessarily see because they kind of just see the end product.
112Another vital aspect of rocket assembly is testing.
113The pieces of this rocket are huge and the power they emit is enormous.
114So it's important to make sure they're all working together the way we want them to.
115Sharon's team at Marshall has done a lot of this important work on their portions of the rocket before it gets sent off for assembly.
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306This is NASA's Curious Universe.
307This episode was written and produced by Christina Dana.
308Our executive producer is Katie Atkinson.
309The Curious Universe team includes Maddie Arnold, Kate Steiner, and Michaela Sosby, with support from Emma Edmond and Priya Mittal.
310Our theme song was composed by Matt Russo and Andrew Santaguida of System Sounds.
311Special thanks to Daryl Nail, Tracy McMahon, Antonia Jaramillo-Bortero, Brittany Thorpe, Madison Tuttle, and NASA's Kennedy Space Center.
312If you liked this episode, please let us know by leaving us a review, tweeting about the show at NASA, and sharing NASA's Curious Universe with a friend.
313Still curious about NASA?
314You can send us questions about this episode or a previous one, and we'll try to track down the answers.
315You can email a voice recording or send a written note to NASA-CuriousUniverse at mail.nasa.gov.
316Go to nasa.gov slash curious universe for more information.
317So we're talking about The Crawler, which I know that we had a podcast on that recently, so I invite the viewers to kind of take a look at that and learn more about it.
318Perfect.
319I could not have scripted a better call out to The Crawler's episode, so thank you so much for that.
320I got you.
321Don't worry.
322Hey there, NASA superfans.
323I hope you enjoyed this episode of Curious Universe on the Artemis program.
324If you're fascinated by the idea of humans traveling through space and curious about how all of that works, I think you'll love Houston.
325We have a podcast, the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
326I'm Gary Jordan.
327I host the show.
328Each week, we take a deep dive into unique and interesting topics, mostly around human spaceflight.
329On Friday, August 20th, we'll have an episode where we sit down with a few of the flight directors that will be controlling the Artemis 1 mission, the uncrewed test flight of the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule.
330They share their perspective of Artemis 1 from inside mission control in Houston, and they describe the important things to consider at each step before deciding to give a go-to proceed during the flight around the moon.
331We also did a special recording of this episode on video, so check out our episode webpage for a link to watch that.
332Listen to Houston We Have a Podcast on your favorite podcast app, or find us and other podcasts at nasa.gov slash podcasts.
333Thank you.
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