It’s been a busy year, thus far. We didn’t have any downtime after the splashdown and success of Artemis II. During the mission, the crew conducted a full operational checkout of the Environmental Control and Life Support System, confirming stable performance of oxygen generation, carbon dioxide removal, humidity control, and trace contaminant management under real mission loads. They also demonstrated the proof‑of‑concept exercise hardware designed to maintain musculoskeletal and cardiovascular conditioning during transit, generating data that will shape future countermeasure systems and protocols. Artemis II further delivered critical engineering insight through the lunar‑return re‑entry, where the heat shield’s ablative performance and structural response were measured across thousands of sensors, data that now anchors our modifications for the next heatshield and gives key performance data needed for our certification pathway.
As we prepare for Artemis III, the first crewed docking missions with the new lunar landers, our focus is on integrating human factors and human systems requirements into key areas to guarantee the performance and success leading up to the lunar landing. This includes refining prebreath protocols and DCS mitigation strategies for the new suit and vehicle pressure regimes, advancing metabolic modeling for the xEMU architecture, and developing robust approaches to lunar dust expos …