Iconic actor Tom Hanks, who once played a moon astronaut in film, met with 4 real-life astronauts on the verge of exploring lunar realms themselves.
“Apollo 13” actor Hanks touched down in Houston — where happily, he didn’t report an issue — to fulfill with the Artemis 2 crew. Those 4 astronauts posed with Hanks, in front of a mockup of the Orion spacecraft, between training for his or her round-the-moon mission no sooner than 2024, NASA officials reported on X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday (Nov. 18).
In space circles, Hanks is best known for enjoying NASA astronaut Jim Lovell, the real-life commander of Apollo 13, in a 1995 Hollywood hit. The movie showed how Mission Control, the astronauts’ families and the crew themselves got here together to unravel an emergency on the solution to the moon.
Hanks not only spoke with the Artemis 2 crew, but stopped by two sections of Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in any case: The freshly updated Apollo program mission control center that saw Apollo 13 and other missions go to the moon, together with the International Space Station’s Mission Control. Hanks even spoke with among the Expedition 70 astronauts on board the ISS, NASA reported.
NASA is now restarting human moon exploration with 4 astronauts that can circle the moon: NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen. NASA is leading a fast-growing coalition of international partners to lunar realms under the Artemis Accords, which also function a framework for peaceful space exploration norms.
Prior to meeting with Hanks, three of the Artemis 2 crew jetted to NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in Recent Orleans on Nov. 16. There, they reviewed the powerful core stage of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that can bring them to Earth orbit and eventually, on to the moon. The visit also marked the one-year anniversary of the launch of Artemis 1, an uncrewed mission that successfully tested SLS and the Orion spacecraft during its own mission late in 2022.
It has been a busy few months for the Artemis 2 crew since they were named in April at a ceremony at Ellington Field, nearby JSC. The quartet are working on learning more about Orion in addition to medical procedures, ahead of an expected recovery exercise at sea with NASA and the U.S. Navy.
Pieces of the Artemis 2 hardware are also under assembly at NASA centers across the U.S. At Michoud, the 4 RS-25 engines that can power the core stage were secured Oct. 6 after each was individually attached via “soft mates” on various dates in September.
“Engineers will perform testing on all the stage and its avionics and electrical systems, which act because the ‘brains’ of the rocket to assist control it during flight,” NASA officials wrote in October. Once testing is thru in a number of months, the core stage will make its solution to the launch site at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center via barge.
There may be other Artemis 2 construction work ongoing at KSC already. Pieces of the dual solid rocket boosters for Artemis 2 arrived by train in September and are being assembled, first starting with each booster’s aft assembly for steering the rockets during flight.
Artemis 2’s Orion accomplished its power-on test on Nov. 6 at KSC, following a vital mate between the American-made crew module and the European Service Module. The spacecraft will soon undergo a one- or two-week “closed-loop mission” test to simulate a mission, meaning “navigation, propulsion and other subsystems are reacting appropriately to take care of the mission course,” Dominique Siruguet, ESM assembly integration and verification engineer on the European Space Agency, said in a Nov. 6 statement.