Luca Parmitano

And so, you know, I was able to apply for test pilot school and go to test pilot school and...

be able to do that cutting edge development of stuff that hasn't been done before.

And that, to me, it was just fascinating to be able to bridge engineering and operations, knowing that I was bringing something to the fleet operators of that aircraft that was going to make things better, more survivable, and be able to employ their weapon system better.

And so doing that, the next thing that is an option is you go, wow, can I really have an opportunity to do that thing and go to space?

And in 2000, Doug Hurley got selected as an astronaut, and I had known him well from our fleet days and while we were at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station as test pilot, marine test pilots.

And at that point, I was like, well, it felt like chunky.

Maybe I've got a shot, too, you know?

And then the rest is history.

The old school way to come to NASA as a test pilot.

1993, I was flying F-18s out of El Toro.

And so I've been in this assistant to this chief astronaut job for exploration for almost eight years now.

And so I've been working everything exploration from Artemis 1 and its first flight to Artemis 2 and getting the crew on board and now taking this role for Artemis 3.

Just awesome to see how we are making those incremental steps and testing out our flight envelope and determining the system's capabilities and testing as much as we can so that when we have our next mission after this one, it has as much risk bought down and as much stuff proven for its capability that we can.

And so what I look forward to most is whatever we are able to put into this mission, getting it tested out and

And proven, flight proven, operations figured out, timelines, all that type of stuff so that we can then go on to Artemis IV, which would hopefully be our moon landing with confidence because of all the stuff we were able to prove out on our flight.

And certainly, the amount of training, Artemis II crew had three years to train.

They were the first one.

So we were figuring out training along the way.

They came back and said, hey, we can make this training more efficient.

And so there's a massive reduction in the amount of hours because they said, if we train this way,