Liz Wheeler

And then to your point, we're preparing crew 12 ahead of schedule and we're preparing our Artemis 2 mission.

Okay, so these are all great questions.

So first, there is a big difference between the missions that we've all been watching take place over the last, call it, five years.

You see a SpaceX Falcon 9 and Dragon send four astronauts to the International Space Station almost every six months.

They do it so often that it looks easy and it looks routine.

It's still extremely hard.

You're taking a Falcon 9 rocket, about 1.8 million pounds of thrust in a controlled explosion, and accelerating those four astronauts to 17,500 miles an hour, and you're sending them to the International Space Station.

That's hard.

You want to know what's harder?

is 8.8 million pounds of thrust accelerating four astronauts to nearly 25,000 miles per hour, because now you have to get to near-Earth escape velocity, which is what's essential if you're going to send astronauts to the moon or past the moon, where you need to exceed Earth escape velocity to do missions in the future to Mars.

So that's what we're talking about coming up with Artemis II.

This is a whole other caliber of rocket,

It's going to have two solid rocket boosters, throwback from the shuttle era.

Even the center core, you know, looks like the shuttle main fuel tank.

It's got shuttle main engines on it.

It's liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen.

And it is going to accelerate the, you know, those brave crew, Artemis II astronauts farther into space than we ever sent anyone before.

And this is step one on a journey to put astronauts back on the moon.

So this will be the most powerful rocket that humans have ever traveled on.

So it is more powerful than the shuttle.