Nilofer Ramji

So you came to the agency, both of you came into spaceflight, came in as astronauts with several hundred, if not thousands of flight hours under your belt.

So do you recall a moment in your early years, maybe when you were growing up or as you were going through your education, where that interest in flight was sparked?

Yeah.

What?

We're finding this out right now.

What a story.

And now you are standing here on the heels of Artemis III.

You talk about, Randy, you had mentioned test pilots is the old school way to get in to be an astronaut.

So just to contextualize for our audience, you used to manually pilot the space shuttle.

Now we have vehicles that are more autonomous.

We're going to Artemis III.

It's going to be manual piloting because we have to demonstrate the docking capabilities of these human landing systems.

So it's actually very serendipitous that we have test pilots that are going to be supporting Artemis III.

You've flown your respective missions to the International Space Stations, and those skills will apply to your upcoming assignment.

So what are you most looking forward to with Artemis III?

Yeah, and so many things that you can learn and train future crew for as well.

So lots of documentation and lots of heavily choreographed and dynamic events.

Yeah, so increasing efficiencies, but also this is exactly what test missions, test flights do for us, right?

So between the spacewalks both of y'all have conducted and the support that you've done from the ground, you are seasoned astronauts.

And your upcoming assignments, as I mentioned, will involve a series of highly choreographed and dynamic events.