in the coming days.
>> Thank you so much.
>>> Nasa's historic artemis 1
mission is set to splash down
off the coast of baja,
California, when it returns to
Earth come.
The uncrewed spacecraft took a
25-day trip around the moon as a
test run for future flights with
astronauts on board.
The Orion capsule flew 80 miles
above the moon's service as it
passed by.
Let's bring in former nasa
administrator under the trump
administration and former
congressman.
Thank you so much for joining
us.
Good to see you.
Can you give us a sense why this
dry run when a future trip to
the moon is so valuable.
>> It's hugely valuable.
This is a first step in our
eventual journey to Mars.
With he go to the moon to learn
how to live and work on another
world for long periods of time.
When you go to Mars, you have to
be willing to stay.
A lot of people don't realize
Earth and Mars, we're on the
same side of the sun every 26
months.
You have to be willing to stay.
We need a place to learn to live
and work for long periods of
time.
Moon is that destination.
Tomorrow is a really big day and
a lot of things are going to be
tested.
We're going to learn a lot of
things.
We all have our fingers crossed.
Reentering the Earth's
atmosphere is not easy,
especially the way they are
doing it now, which has never
been done before.
>> What are we going to learn
about this reentry?
What are the things we can glean
from it?
>> So this is called a skip
reentry, which is -- think of
skipping a rock.
So the Orion crew capsule will
come back at 20,000 miles per
hour.
It's going to reenter the
atmosphere, heat up to about
half the temperature of the sun.
During that time the heat shield
will a plate, meaning it will
shed material.
At one point the capsule will
roll 180 degrees and go back up
out into space.
Because it's going to need more
time to cool.
Then it will reenter a second
time and land precisely 50 miles
off the coast of San Diego.
>> Wow.
>> So this has not been done
before.
It's very exciting.
I know everybody -- brilliant
folks at nasa.
Make no mistake.
This is still a daunting
challenge, and they're up for
it.
>> What is the difference in the
space of time?
Is it a matter of minutes,
hours?
>> We're talking about a matter
of minutes.
We're going to go down range.
It depends on a lot of factors.
But the reason to do this skip
reentry is to try to, as
precisely as possible, nail your
intended point of landing and of
course nail the time of the
landing.
If you can do that it requires a
lot less assets to go capture
the astronauts once they're in
the water.
If you go back to Apollo, we had
Navy assets all over the ocean
not knowing precisely where they
were going to land.
We have computing capacity,
flight control computers.
A lot of things exist today that
didn't exist back then.
We will precisely nail the time
and the place of the landing.
>> These are huge ventures.
Time invested and a lot of
money.
So artemis in fact, went over
budget, right, and past its
initial deadline.
Why have nasa do this instead of
private space companies who have
their own deep pockets?
>> So the answer is we need to
use the best of everything
America has to offer.
So when we go to the moon, yes,
we're using hardware that's been
in development over a decade
now, which is good.
But we will also use commercial
systems where nasa is buying a
service.
For example, the landing system
for the moon will be a service
provided by a commercial
provider, which we didn't have
the luxury of back in the 1960s
either.
So what we are doing now is
trying to take the best of
everything America has to offer,
both what the government has
been doing over a decade and
what commercial has been doing
in fact, just recently.
We're trying to put them all
together in an open architecture
system.
The way we do restaurant view
and proximity, or I should say
docking, environmental control
and life support systems, data,
avionics, communications, all of
that in this architecture is
open.
We can have international
partners.
What we have now is the broadest
coalition in the history of
humanity to not only go back to
the moon but eventually onto
Mars where there is a very real
possibility we could find life.
>> Jim Bryden stein, where will
you be tomorrow with this
reentry?
Watching on a special monitor or
television or what's going on?
>> So I am the former nasa
administrator, which means I
have no responsibility here
whatsoever, which in some ways
is a great relief to me.
I'll be watching on TV with
great anticipation like
everybody else.
This has been a project that's
been under way multiple
administrations going back to
George W. Bush and of course
Barack Obama and Donald Trump
and now Joe Biden.
This is the kind of thing we can
achieve when we have apolitical
bipartisan support for a program
over many decades.