INTERVIEW WITH VICTOR GLOVER, AMERICAN BAD-ASS: Artemis II pilot talks about what it was really like to fly and land in Orion.

The Lunar Science team won’t like it when I say this, but it’s the truth. If we had launched, done the rendezvous and proximity operations demo, and then had to emergency de-orbit, I would have considered us a massive success. Because that may be the only chance we get to test this really important capability.

We don’t plan to manually dock. It’s a crew interrupt. Boeing CFT (the Starliner Crew Flight Test in 2024, during which Butch Wilmore had to take control of the spacecraft during an emergency) has shown us when these things might need to be done. And Butch held position manually. He had to use his eyeballs to correlate where he was and just hold position. That was a critical moment for them to breathe, and for the team to collect themselves, because if they had tried to retreat or tried to continue docking with ISS, both of those would have been catastrophic.

So this capability, to me, was a huge milestone—now Artemis II gets to pass the baton to III and IV, whatever they are, docking, proximity ops again, landing. Those crews will have the peace of mind that the Artemis II test pilot said it was good to go. An engineer said it was good to go, and an F-18 pilot said it was good to go. That, to me, is unreal. We got so much juice for the squeeze on that.

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