This story is a collaboration between the College of Sciences and the College of Engineering.

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The four astronauts on NASA’s Artemis II mission traveled 252,756 miles away from Earth — the farthest any human has been from our planet. When Christina Koch looked out the window of the Orion spacecraft carrying her and her three crewmates, Earth looked like a speck smaller than her thumb. Back on that tiny dot in the universe, many people had worked together to make the trip possible, through an enormous feat of human ingenuity, engineering and collaboration.

Over 3,800 suppliers across 49 states had a hand in making Orion and Artemis II a reality. Engineers from 10 European countries contributed to the development of the European Service Module — provided by the European Space Agency (ESA) — which supplied Orion with power, propulsion and life support systems like oxygen and water. A team of more than 300 people monitored the Orion spacecraft from NASA’s Johnson Space Center during the 10-day voyage. European engineers and medical specialists also offered around-the-clock monitoring from ESA centers in Germany and the Netherlands and from the Johnson Space Center. 

“[A space mission] can’t work if the science doesn’t work and the instruments don’t work,” said Koch, a three-time NC State graduate who earned B.S. degrees in physics and electrical engineering and an M.S. in electrical engineering. “That’s the core of it all.”

Christina Koch: Astronaut, Engineer, Crewmate

Collaboration came into play aboard the spacecraft as well. Each of the four astronauts had a specialized job on the mission, but they all learned one another’s roles in the event they had to fill in for each other. 

“I learned the jobs of the pilot and the commander and the other mission specialists,” Koch said. “My job title was mission specialist, but we like to think that we were all crewmates … The most important job to me was crewmate.”

In her role as a mission specialist, Koch put her engineering skills to use. She famously fixed the spacecraft’s malfunctioning toilet with the help of the mission control team in Houston. But her primary technical roles included manning the displays and controls when they burned the engines to leave Earth, as well as the high-stakes job of being the designated expert on operating the side hatch in emergency situations.

“I like to use my engineering and all my physics background that I got here [at NC State] to understand things.”

Opening and closing a hatch — the door from which astronauts enter and exit a spacecraft — is a delicate matter that requires intense preparation and precision. The astronauts on the Artemis II mission did not need to touch the hatch under normal circumstances, but were trained to operate it in case of an emergency. Had the Artemis II crew needed to make an emergency exit from Orion, Koch was prepared to activate self-contained pyrotechnic devices to release the latch pins and swiftly open the side hatch.

“I loved that job because I like to use my engineering and all my physics background that I got here [at NC State] to understand things,” Koch said. “And so it was a very cool and complicated job to have.”

Before she was an astronaut, Koch was an electrical engineer who developed instruments for space missions. During her stint at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, she got to see an instrument she worked on, the Jupiter Energetic Particle Detector Instruments (JEDI), launched into space on the 2011 Juno mission. JEDI, which is currently orbiting Jupiter, helps physicists understand how the energetic, charged particles around the planet produce its powerful aurora. 

“To me, that was a dream come true,” Koch said. “The cool thing about these instruments is that they are often just inventions. They’re novel. They’re literally coming up with new ways to measure things. And a lot of them are harebrained ideas that you’d think would never work, and [engineers] make them work.”

Astronauts as Both Scientists and Subjects

Koch had previously spent 328 days on the International Space Station, where she participated in the first all-female space walk. But the Artemis II mission marked the first time that she or any woman in history had left low Earth orbit. Orion is the first spacecraft with the capacity to carry humans on long-duration missions in deep space. The Artemis II crew was tasked with testing and confirming the systems necessary to make human exploration of deep space possible and safe.

“The other jobs we shared together were just to test out all the equipment in the spaceship,” Koch said. “It was just to be human, to just breathe and live and test out the life support system. We had to exercise and test that out, and just be some humans around the moon.” 

An organ-on-a-chip experiment was among the health studies the astronauts participated in. 

“One of the really neat experiments that we had was, we actually took our own platelets and made a tissue chip that represented our bodies as organisms and measured the space effects on that tissue chip, as a kind of a proxy for how our bodies are affected,” Koch said. “The idea there is we can test so many more people that may not fly, actually, in space by doing the same thing for them and flying different tissues. And our big thing with experimentation is, ‘What is your N [sample size]? How many people can you test?’ There’s not many astronauts that fly. So to get a bigger N, we’ve flown tissue chips.”

The study will inform NASA on the measures needed to ensure crew health on deep space missions in the future. The findings could lead to personalized medical kits for astronauts, as well as advancements in individualized medical treatments for people on Earth.

“The astronaut’s job is to be the test subject in many cases,” Koch said. “There’s a bit more of a responsibility to take care of yourself and make sure that you’re at peak performance so that all of these experiments can be valid.”

The Artemis II crew also documented their observations about the moon’s surface. In preparation for the mission, the crew received geology training in places with terrain similar to that of the moon, like Iceland. The observations help give scientists a basis for future research on the moon’s geological history. A deeper understanding of the moon could help us demystify Earth’s past and processes.   

“Some places that we saw on the far side of the moon have never actually been seen before with human eyes and the scientists had a lot of questions,” Koch said. “‘What did the colors exactly look like? What did some of the formations look like on this kind of full global moon scale?’ So we got to answer some of those questions, too. It was just the coolest set of jobs ever.” 

Koch took photos of the far side of the moon, using skills she picked up as a photographer for Technician during her time as a student.

“Something specific that I learned from my photography editor at Technician was to make sure that your pictures tell a story,” she said. “I think about that every single time I raise a camera to my eye, whether it’s taking pictures of the moon or my crewmates.”

The Future of the Space Program

The moon and Mars may hold answers to many questions that scientists have about our planet and our solar system. Through the Artemis program, NASA seeks to establish a human presence on both. The federal agency has named five Artemis missions, which will lay the foundations for a permanent lunar presence and future crewed missions to Mars.

Koch predicts that a mission to Mars isn’t too far off on the horizon. During her campus visit in August, a 6-year-old boy asked Koch what the space program will look like when he’s an adult.

“I think we’ll be planning a trip to Mars where we can maybe answer the question of, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’” Koch told him. “And we’ll hopefully also have a base where people are living permanently on the surface of the moon to do all the awesome science and technology there.”

She also shared with him and his fellow junior journalists — children from our local community who had a chance to speak with Koch — that space travel could soon become more accessible to the public. 

“We are seeing all kinds of different openings for space becoming a more commercial venture that can allow so many people who want to explore, people who are curious, people who have a dream to give back, to see science — they can all go,” she said. “Maybe artists, poets, writers — people that can bring back every single aspect of our society and see things from that new perspective.”