Astronaut Anne McClain will be on NASA's next Artemis mission which aims to put humans on the moon again and eventually d establish a base there. In an interview, she delivered his impressions of the evolution of spaceships and spoke at length about SpaceX's Dragon capsule.
Anne McClain is one of the NASA astronauts selected to participate in the Artemis program. It has three main missions. First, there will be Artemis 1, an unmanned mission around the Moon scheduled for July 2021. Next will come the Artemis 2 mission, carrying astronauts around the moon (August 2023) and Artemis 3 which will bring humans to land on the lunar surface (2024).
During an interview on January 2, 2020, she spoke about the evolution of technology used for spacecraft. Before joining this program, Anne McClain had indeed stayed on board the International Space Station (ISS) from December 2018 to June 2019. As part of this expedition, she piloted one of the Russian Soyuz capsules. However, the astronauts have also been traveling for a few months with another vessel:the SpaceX Dragon capsule.
Anne McClain has not yet had the opportunity to pilot this new capsule. However, she was able to observe it and work on it when it was docked to the ISS. The astronaut said he was happy to pilot a Soyuz spacecraft, but immediately understood by observing the Dragon capsule that technology has greatly evolved.
Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken are the first two astronauts to have led the SpaceX capsule. According to them, this ship is really different from the others, in particular by the omnipresence of touch screens . Incidentally, Anne McClain worked with the duo to advise SpaceX early on regarding cockpit controls. According to her, flexibility is one of the most important features for a spaceship. In the event of the unexpected, the tools that astronauts have at their disposal must indeed be flexible and not limited. Even if many scenarios are thought out upstream on the ground, something can always happen and having options is then more than necessary.
Anne McClain also spoke about the growing importance of the private sector in aerospace. For the astronaut, this makes no difference. She believes that the most important thing is not the companies behind the ships themselves, but rather the people who work on them. Talent is all over the place within the commercial industry today and apparently NASA wanted things to go that way. In addition, the US Space Agency works closely with these companies . For Anne McClain, there is no doubt that trust reigns.
