LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Four astronauts are ready to ride a rocket toward the moon later today. The Artemis II mission is the first moonshot with a crew in more than 50 years. The astronauts are expected to go around the moon and then return to Earth in just under 10 days. For more on the mission, we've called retired NASA astronaut Leland Melvin. He flew two space shuttle missions, logging more than 565 hours in space. He later served as NASA associate administrator for education. Welcome to the program.
LELAND MELVIN: It's so exciting to be here, Leila, on this historic day.
FADEL: Yeah. We're excited to have you. So let's talk about what the goal is of Artemis II.
MELVIN: Well, the biggest goal is - you know, we're always guinea pigs when we fly in space as astronauts, and there's going to be some key scientific research objectives. One of them is human health and performance. You know, when we go to space, there's radiation. There's all kinds of things that can affect your immune system. So we're going to do this AVATAR - A Virtual Astronaut Tissue Analog Response - investigation, where we're actually flying stem cells on a chip so we can actually look at how microgravity and irradiation affect the cardiovascular and immune systems. And then there are other type of radiation monitoring. We're doing an immune system biomarker research. And also just looking out the window and taking pictures on the dark side of the moon, having astronaut eyes looking versus, you know, rovers and other things. You can sometimes see things that they don't see.
FADEL: And how will this mission benefit future space flights?
MELVIN: It is a critical stage because the first Artemis I mission was to see how the hardware functioned around the moon. And the second mission is primarily to see how the astronauts function in the life support system that's in the capsule, in the Orion capsule, in the ICPS, the - what is it? The interim cryogenic propulsion stage. So all of these things work together to ensure the safety of the astronads. But also, it's a building - stepping stone for us getting ready for Artemis III and Artemis IV, where we'll have people living and working on the moon eventually.
FADEL: So this mission will set a number of firsts - the first Black person to leave low Earth orbit, Victor Glover; the first woman, Christina Koch; and the first Canadian, Jeremy Hansen. Previous NASA missions involving the space shuttle also included Black, women and Canadian astronauts, but they never left low Earth orbit. What does their presence on this mission mean?
MELVIN: Leila, the presence of this amount of diversity on a lunar mission, you know, takes me back to when I was a kid, 5 years old, watching, you know, the first people going to the moon. And they were white male test pilots there with crew cuts. And I didn't really want to be an astronaut after seeing that, even though it was really cool and exciting and all of that. But it didn't make me want to apply to NASA.
But now, when kids and people see the possibility of themselves going - you know, some kids don't need to see that. They just need to see the mission. But some kids do. And we're bringing more people to the table and - 'cause representation does matter, and it's critically important that everyone feels like they can be part of the mission. And when I think about the bigger mission of us working and living together on, you know, our spaceship, planet Earth, it's critically important everyone feels like they have a contribution to make things better. And that's why missions like this are so important for bringing the universe together.
FADEL: And maybe bring that back down to Earth.
MELVIN: I'm hoping so. It's critically important.
FADEL: Leland Melvin is a retired NASA astronaut. Thank you so much for joining us.
MELVIN: Thank you, Leila.
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