LEILA FADEL, HOST:
For more on the Artemis II mission, we turn to someone with star power. Suni Williams is a retired astronaut who was at NASA for 27 years. Her work helped pave the way for this mission. Good morning, Suni, Thanks for joining us here on MORNING EDITION.
SUNI WILLIAMS: Good morning, Leila. It's good to be with you guys.
FADEL: So you famously went on an eight-day mission in 2024 that turned into nine months on the International Space Station. And I feel like many of our listeners, like me, feel like they know you from watching your interviews from space at that time and after your return. Are there lessons from that mission that are being applied with this mission?
WILLIAMS: Oh, absolutely. You know, like, I think the legacy for, you know, Starliner - you know, hopefully, we're going to be flying that with humans again before too long to the space station. But the legacy really is how to do research and development on new spacecraft. You know, we as NASA haven't done that for a little while. And I think the lessons learned during our mission have carried over to Artemis and is hopefully, you know, making this mission more successful than it would've been.
So I absolutely am so proud of being part of the Starliner mission from that regard. It really woke up everybody and got everybody, you know, on key to be successful in future missions because that's what we're going to be doing for the next, you know, foreseeable future.
FADEL: And what will you be doing during the lunar flyby? Will you be watching?
WILLIAMS: Oh, absolutely. This is the coolest thing. Like, oh, my gosh. Like, you know, Brendan, he had all the numbers, thankfully. I'm not that smart.
FADEL: (Laughter).
WILLIAMS: But, you know, he knows exactly the distance where they'll be and the view that they'll have was one that we won't ever - we have never had before. And so we'll really be able look at the moon holistically, the whole thing, from that vantage point.
FADEL: Wow.
WILLIAMS: And be able to really look at, you know, the places where we might want to land in the future, what capabilities the moon has. So this is going to be really awesome. I'm just so excited for Reid, Victor, Christina and Jeremy.
FADEL: What's different when it comes to missions to the moon versus going to, say, the space station?
WILLIAMS: Yeah, well, the moon, you know, just like Victor described and, you know, Brendan described - you know, we've talked about it while we're on the space station even. Like, what would it be like to see the Earth getting smaller and smaller? And they've got that in the view in this mission. You know, the mission isn't so, so far away. It's not like going to Mars. It gives us - it's in our - Earth's backyard, right?
So it gives us an ability to test out all these systems sort of close by, generally when we have communications. When we're on the space station, we're, like, you know, just in the playground right next to the house. So (laughter), you know, we're right there. So it's easy. If we have any questions, we can ask and we can get answers, obviously, very quickly.
Same with the moon mission, but it takes a little more time to, you know, get back. Whereas when we're in low Earth orbit, if anything happened, we could get back in a matter of hours. So it just adds another amount of complexity that we have to get right. And I think that, like I said, is the biggest lessons from Starliner. We understand that we absolutely have to get all of this right when we put people into space.
FADEL: The last Apollo mission to the moon was in 1972. You were 7. What are your memories of that? And what does it mean to see people going back to the moon after more than 50 years?
WILLIAMS: So I was just a little child when we went to the moon. And, you know, I always thought, wow, that would be cool. Seems so impossible. And when we stopped going to the moon, you know, our focus, obviously, was on the space shuttle and the capabilities of that vehicle, which allowed us to build the space station.
So that, in my lifetime, has been the focus was using that spacecraft to do, you know, stuff like building the space station. But now having this - having done the space station and now being able to go back to the moon - you know, it's like, opens up your eyes to the next ideas of, like, building a space station on the moon and having, you know, a sustainable presence there.
FADEL: Retired NASA astronaut Suni Williams. Thank you, Suni.
WILLIAMS: Thank you so much.
(SOUNDBITE OF SINGER'S BEST'S "FLY ME TO THE MOON (KARAOKE VERSION ORIGINALLY PERFORMED BY FRANK SINATRA)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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