About a week ago, NASA launched four astronauts into outer space for a 10-day lunar flyby mission that marks the closest humans have come to the moon in more than 50 years. And for one engineer back on the ground in Mission Control, the agency’s historic Artemis II flight was also the culmination of a lifetime of work and passion for space exploration that began in a Kenai Peninsula classroom.
For Dr. Tess Caswell, “shoot for the stars” was never just an aspirational metaphor. It was an action plan. The Soldotna-grown engineer and NASA communications lead says her passion for space exploration started out early, and strong – in her fifth-grade classroom at Kalifornsky Beach Elementary School.
“My teacher that year had a huge poster of the Space Shuttle orbiting the Earth that covered one of the walls in that classroom,” she said. “And I remember just being completely captivated by that image, and it just really lit my imagination on fire.”
Then NASA came to her school for an assembly to promote the shuttle and early space station programs. Armed with support from her parents, Caswell attended NASA’s legendary Space Camp at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center. She volunteered at fundraisers with the Challenger Learning Center of Alaska in exchange for the ear of visiting astronauts. The educational space learning center in Kenai closed last year due to financial trouble. And when Soldotna High School didn’t offer an aerospace elective class, she took it online.
Caswell went on to get a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which is home to the only university-owned rocket launching facility in the world. From there, she obtained a master’s degree and a Ph.D., both in geological sciences, from Brown University.
“It is exploration for the sake of exploration, that really fuels my passion for space, and I think that comes from growing up in Alaska, honestly,” she said. “I mean, we live in a frontier. As developed as it has become over time, it's still on, sort of, the edge, and we’ve got to look out for each other, and it's very easy to get off the beaten path and find something new. And I think that's kind of what space exploration is, as well.”
On Wednesday, Caswell talked to KDLL from Houston, Texas, where she works at the Johnson Space Center as a lead capsule communicator. Since April 1, that’s meant near-constant check-ins with the four Artemis II astronauts who’ve spent the last week on a historic trip around the moon.
Anyone who’s watched NASA’s mission livestream may have seen Caswell. She’s one of the people wearing headsets at Mission Control. She’s Houston in “Houston, we have a problem,” but that’s thankfully not a phrase she’s heard on this mission so far.
Caswell says the role is twofold.
“One is to make sure that we are providing clear and relatively concise direction to the astronauts if they have questions or if the ground has some specific instruction that we need to convey to them,” she said. “Our other job is to be the representatives for the crew in the room in Mission Control, because they're not there to speak for themselves.”
NASA’s Artemis II mission is the closest humans have come to the moon in more than half a century. The astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft make up the first crewed test flight of the agency’s Artemis campaign, which kicked off with the uncrewed Artemis I launch in 2022.
Caswell says there are two main functions of the astronauts’ mission.
“We're really testing Orion's ability to keep humans alive and safe in the deep space environment,” she said. “And while we're at it, we have the opportunity to do some pretty cool science, especially with human eyes on the far side of the moon.”
Despite humanity’s best efforts, Caswell says there is no camera that comes close to replicating the human eye. So the astronauts’ visual observations of things like color variability and surface texture of the moon are key. She says not even the Apollo astronauts saw the far side of the moon.
But why do scientists care so much about the moon? Caswell says it’s because the space rock can tell us a lot about Earth. After all, the two are pieces of what was once a single large object.
“Something the size of Mars smashed into the Earth and created this huge molten mess, and part of that spun off and became the moon,” she said. “So our histories are linked, and when we can learn about the moon, we actually learn about the formation of the Earth and our own planet in a really cool way.”
The implications of Artemis II go beyond the 10-day lunar flyby.
NASA’s larger Artemis campaign describes a series of increasingly difficult missions, with the goal of building on long-term plans to establish a permanent human presence on the moon and to send a crewed mission to Mars. The agency has already planned an Artemis III launch next year and Artemis IV the year after.
Caswell says those milestones are closer than ever.
“The kids who are at SoHi today could live on the moon at some point, if they put their mind to it. And that's just mind-boggling,” she said.
She hopes the mission will inspire young people today the same way she was inspired as a kid on the Kenai Peninsula. That doesn’t just mean astronauts. Everyone at Mission Control is supporting the success of the mission from different angles. And she says she and her coworkers are just as over-the-moon as the rest of the world.
“Everyone is so excited to be part of this mission and thrilled that we are learning and growing as a team and learning about the Orion spacecraft to prepare for the upcoming Artemis missions,” she said. It's just — the energy here is just electric.”
Caswell’s next shift at Mission Control in Houston will be early Friday morning — just before the Artemis II astronauts are scheduled to begin reentering the Earth’s atmosphere. They’re heading back from the moon at thousands of miles per hour, she said, and the reentry will be a crucial final test of the spacecraft’s life support systems.
The crew of Artemis II is scheduled to splash down off the coast of San Diego at 4:07 p.m. Alaska time Friday evening. NASA is streaming the mission live on YouTube and providing updates on its website.
Listen to KDLL’s full interview with Tess and her dad, Steve, on the Kenai Conversation – next Wednesday at 10 a.m. and Saturday at 5 p.m. here on KDLL.
