Interview With Astronaut Reid Wiseman As He Reflects On Apollo 8's 55th Anniversary
Artemis 2 NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman who commanded the first moon mission in half a century talks to Space.com about the parallels between the two moon efforts.
The 55th anniversary of Apollo 8's historical orbital mission in 1968.
The 55th anniversary of Apollo 8's historical orbital mission in 1968.
Transcript
00:00And we're speaking around the 55th anniversary of Apollo eight, which flew three astronauts around the moon in 1968.
00:07Artemis twos flyby is coming close to recreating that scenario.
00:11And so can you talk about the parallels between the two missions from your point of view?
00:16We see parallel. I wish Victor and Christina were in here because they would give you a far better answer.
00:22We see all those parallels. I let me let me give you two two sides of an answer.
00:27First, the parallel I most like to draw right now is that we are building on the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo era for sure.
00:36But when I look at what we're doing in Artemis, it feels to me in Artemis that we are more building on the International Space Station and a long term presence.
00:45I feel the International Space Station in everything we do. I feel the international community.
00:50I feel the way we do export control, the way we farm out hardware to different experts around the world.
00:55And we pull all of this together. We have an international crew. We don't really have that.
01:00Like before this decade is out, we are going to do this. We don't feel that space race necessarily as the crew.
01:06But we do feel a really robust international team everywhere we go.
01:10We try to highlight the Artemis Accords. I think we're up to 32 nations, maybe even 33 now.
01:14So I just feel like this to me feels like it's built on the International Space Station legacy of a little slower, methodical.
01:22We're here for the long term. However, the day we got announced when you were here, April 3rd, sitting on my couch later that day, completely exhausted.
01:31My cell phone rings. It's an unknown number. I thought it was a telemarketer and I picked it up all annoyed.
01:35It was Tom Stafford, you know, who flew Apollo 10, not eight, but 10.
01:39And he was so excited that we were heading back to the moon.
01:42And just to know that we are going to go out and try to wrap Apollo 7, 8 and a little bit of like 10 into one mission.
01:52It's just, you know, Victor walks around and says the moon is the mission.
01:57And he's right. Like we have got to get used to flying out into deep space.
02:00We've got to get out of low Earth orbit, start making it comfortable to go out to the moon.
02:04And that's what Artemis 2 is going to go do. And then Artemis 3 will do more than we could ever even dream of.
02:09So I love the parallels. I think Apollo 8, once we did Apollo 8, I think everybody in the United States knew we can land now.
02:16Like that was that mission meant so much to just go and go and the systems work.
02:22Holy smokes. We can fly around the moon. We can read from the book at Genesis on Christmas Eve on the far side of the moon.
02:28You know, it's just all that stuff is just amazing to me. So we do think about that legacy a lot.