They grew up watching moon missions. Finally, they get to launch one.
What the first crewed moon launch in 50 years means to the NASA staff inspired by Apollo.
Shawn Quinn was four years old when Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969. What he saw on the tiny TV set in his parents’ living room—the Saturn V rocket rising from its launchpad, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bounding around the lunar surface, NBC News anchor John Chancellor’s coverage of the epoch-defining event—set him on a path. During snowy winter days of his childhood in upstate New York, he’d zip into his snowmobile suit, slide his arms through the straps of his backpack, and venture out into the great beyond—the yard of his family home—pretending to be an astronaut. “The only thing I ever wanted to do was work for NASA, build big rockets, and go to the moon,” Quinn says.
But one part of the dream has always remained elusive: sending humans back to the moon. Until now.
Tonight, NASA intends to launch Artemis II from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, sending a team of four astronauts to slingshot around the moon on a 10-day journey that will be the farthest humans have ever traveled in space. The mission is a prelude to Artemis IV and V, currently slated for 2028, when the space agency plans to land humans on the lunar surface for the first time since the Apollo program ended in 1972.
For Quinn and the other employees who were inspired to work at NASA because of Apollo, the timing is particularly significant: It’s happening in the later part of their careers. Many are now serving in leadership positions for the Artemis program. Charlie Blackwell-Thompson remembers her second-grade teacher wheeling out a TV cart in her classroom to watch coverage of one of the later moon landings. “It is the very threads of that Apollo program that started weaving the path that led me to where I am today,” says Blackwell-Thompson, who now serves as NASA’s first female launch director. “I’m part of that generation that was so inspired by what NASA was doing.”
Brent Gaddes, an engineer at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, who serves as lead engineer for the Orion stage adapter, was about the same age as Quinn during the first moon landing. “I remember seeing later missions on grainy black-and-white TV screens, and I was always fascinated with the space program,” he says. All three began working at NASA in the 1980s. None of them ever left.
While Blackwell-Thompson and Gaddes don’t have plans to retire, Quinn, the manager of exploration ground systems handling launch and recovery of the Artemis II crew, plans to depart shortly after the astronauts make their return. “This will be my last mission,” Quinn says, which makes the moment both historic and personally significant: It’s the capstone of his career, a long-held wish finally fulfilled. Over the years, “the moon was a kind of a splinter in the mind’s eye,” Quinn admits. “That dream was still in my bones … I never lost hope.”
The Artemis era begins
How many of the thousands of people who have worked for NASA in the five decades since the final Apollo mission were inspired by watching the lunar landings as children? According to Dennis Dillman, who retired last year as chief engineer for earth sciences projects at Goddard Space Flight Center, it was a lot. “About half of us were like me,” he says. “We grew up being space geeks, watching every minute of the Apollo that we could.” Dillman remembers clipping articles about astronauts out of his hometown paper, the Wichita Eagle, and checking out every space book in his local library. Somehow, he jokes, he always managed to get sick on the day of the lunar landings, meaning he could stay home and watch them on TV. “My mom, bless her heart,” Dillman says. “I think she knew.”
As the cohort that grew up watching the Apollo missions approach retirement age, they’re sure to make up a smaller share of NASA’s employees. But they are not the only generation that is deeply influenced by the space agency’s earlier lunar explorations. Among the younger NASA scientists and engineers working on Artemis are those who are carrying on a passion kindled by their parents and teachers.
Noah Petro—a planetary geologist at Goddard—was born in 1978, six years after the last Apollo mission. It wasn’t until a visit to the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Long Island, New York, when Petro was around seven or eight that his father revealed something life-changing. Petro remembers his dad, Denis Petro, pointing to part of a display of the portable life support system backpacks that the Apollo astronauts wore and saying, “See that thing there? I built that.”
“That was jaw-dropping to me,” Petro says. His dad was a neurologist. But he’d worked as an engineer at NASA building part of the suit for the astronauts before Noah was born. Learning that his dad had worked on Apollo played a role in Noah’s becoming a lunar geologist for NASA. Now part of the team of scientists advising on experimentation and data collection for Artemis II, he will serve as the lead project scientist for the first lunar landing of this new era.
Petro’s excitement about this moment is palpable, and it’s hardly just for personal reasons. After devoting his career to study of the lunar crust, he’ll have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study new samples collected by Artemis astronauts.
But he’s also thinking of all the people worldwide, who will, like him, be witness to something they’ve never seen before. “Something like 75 percent of the human population was not around in 1972,” Petro says. “So for a lot of us—for me, for my children—this will be the first time this has happened,” he says.
“And for a lot of people, it will be the last time as well.” Many may not be alive to see the next lunar landing, in 2028. When Petro thinks of his dad, now in his 80s, and the role he played in helping him find his own path, it makes him emotional. “I’m very grateful that my dad will be able to see Artemis II happen,” he says.
Unfinished business
Apollo 17, in 1972, was the program’s last mission. But there were actually plans for three more expeditions—through Apollo 20—to land on the moon. The program was ultimately scaled down because of budget cuts during the Nixon administration and leadership’s decision to prioritize other projects. For lunar scientists and space exploration enthusiasts, the cancellations amounted to missed opportunities.
If it’s successful, the Artemis program has a chance to have an even bigger impact than Apollo. “The whole notion is that Artemis is sustainable,” Petro says, referencing NASA’s plans for a long-term human presence on the moon, including an eventual moon base. “Artemis is building upon what we did in Apollo,” Blackwell-Thompson says, “but then taking it to the next step, where you have a sustained presence on the moon.” That will set the stage for humans exploring deeper into the cosmos, starting with Mars.
For thousands of current and past NASA employees, the importance of this moment can’t be overstated. “We’re entering a brand-new era,” says James Green, who watched Apollo 11 land the same year he graduated from high school, and then served as NASA’s chief scientist until his retirement in 2022. “We need to know what’s out there to preserve life on Earth. And one of the key things we need to do is to have access to the moon.”
Green views this moment as not just a return, but the culmination of decades of work. “If we’re going to survive for long periods of time, we will have to be a multi-planet species,” he says. “This is going to be a historic moment.”
Back to the moon—and beyond
In January, Shawn Quinn and his wife, Jackie (she recently retired from NASA after sending an instrument, whose development she’d led, on a lunar mission), went to the first rollout of Artemis II's SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft and snapped a few selfies with the two towering behind them. In late February, NASA had to roll the SLS back to the Vehicle Assembly Building to deal with a problem with the upper stage’s helium system, pushing the launch window back to April.
Jackie intends to bring their whole family—her and Shawn’s daughters and their partners, and Shawn’s parents—to the launch. Because of her own career at NASA, and the fact that she also finished her career with a lunar mission, she understands better than most how significant this moment is. “There are so many people that worked on that vehicle and have put hours and hours, and days and days, into it. They have so much pride invested in it,” she says. “They’re all going to the moon with it.”
In recent weeks, as he’s driven home from work each day, Quinn has been thinking about the astronauts he and his colleagues are sending to do a lap around the moon: Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialists Christina Hammock Koch and Jeremy Hansen. In addition to the larger significance of this moment, NASA employees know that no mission that involves sending humans into space is entirely risk free. The memories of the Challenger and Columbia disasters are a stark reminder of what is at stake.
Quinn thinks about the trust the Artemis crew has placed in his team and the others supporting the mission. He also thinks about all the men and women like him who supported the Apollo missions behind the scenes. He feels closer to them than ever before. “I can feel the intensity that the Apollo generation felt when they were getting ready for those first launches,” he says. And he still has the same sense of awe that captured him as a child.
And so he goes to and from work each day, thinking of this last, important mission: get this crew off to the moon and safely back home. Then his work for NASA will be done. “I can’t think of a more meaningful way to end a career,” he says.
