Back to the Moon and Beyond
By: Tony Rehagen | Categories: Featured Stories
For generations of scientists, engineers, and other NASA personnel, including many who were not yet alive in 1969, the Apollo Moon landing was a watershed moment—the first steppingstone of space exploration. So in 2017, when the agency announced that after 45 years the Artemis program would finally return humans to the lunar surface, many people working at NASA were elated.
“We were finally doing what everyone wanted to do,” says Liliana Villarreal, AE 96, MS AE 97, who had helped process payloads for shuttle delivery to the International Space Station before being tapped as director of the Artemis II landing and recovery at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. “Our team has always been thinking of going farther. That’s our driving ambition, our human instinct for exploration.”
In many ways, this trip to the Moon will be different, Villarreal explains. Artemis is about going to the Moon to stay, to set up human settlements, and learn what it takes to survive and thrive in extraplanetary conditions. Launched in 2022, Artemis I was an uncrewed test flight of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft. (Among the flight directors preparing for this mission was fellow Tech grad Heidi Brewer, AE 05.) Artemis II will use the SLS to carry four astronauts around the Moon to test the equipment and crew in deep-space exploration, and Villarreal oversees the recovery of the crew and Orion capsule upon their return to Earth after their mission around the Moon. Artemis III will return humans to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.
Of course, for people to survive on the Moon, they’ll need an independent source of water—essential for human life by itself and as a potential source of breathable oxygen, not to mention as a fuel and propellant. Here too, Tech alumnae were integral in sending ahead equipment to find and drill for water beneath the lunar surface. Jackie Williams Quinn, CE 89, and Janine E. Captain, PhD Chem 05, led NASA’s PRIME-1 team, which landed a combination space drill and spectrometer on the Moon in March 2025. The lander ended up on its side, so the drill wan’t able to operate, but the spectrometer was still able to gather crucial data, which was computer-modeled with help from Georgia Tech’s Regent’s Professor Thomas Orlando. “It operated flawlessly,” says Quinn. “The landing environment was more rugged than we had thought, but we showed that we could take commercial equipment and modify it to enable long-term habitation on a celestial body.”
The wide range of roles that Georgia Tech graduates have in getting humanity back to the Moon underscores the team effort involved in undertaking such an endeavor. In fact, there’s a Yellow Jacket in NASA’s administrative offices helping oversee the entire project. “You’re not going anywhere without the people on the ground,” says Casey Swails, Mgt 07, NASA’s Deputy Associate Administrator. “Everyone sees the rockets and the landers, but they don’t see the people who make these missions happen. We rely on universities like Georgia Tech that are forward-leading, with students pushing boundaries and thinking about things differently. It doesn’t matter your major—I switched out of engineering. There is space in space for everyone.”
Yellow Jackets Contributing to Moon Missions
- Liliana Villarreal, AE 96, MS AE 97, is director of Artemis II landing and recovery at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
- Russell Ralston, ME 12, AE 14, serves as evecutive vice president of EVA for Axiom Space. He
leads the program designing new spacesuits that will be used for NASA’s return to the Moon.
Ralston worked at Johnson Space Center as a co-op student while at Georgia Tech. He later
worked at NASA developing spacesuit technologies. - Jean-Pierre de la Croix, CS 10, EE 10, MS ECE 12, PhD ECE 15, leads NASA’s CADRE project,
which will, for the first time, demonstrate multi-agent autonomous exploration of the lunar
surface. de la Croix is a robotics systems engineer in the Maritime and Multi-Agent Autonomy
group at JPL. The CADRE technology demonstration involves three small lunar rovers that will
work together autonomously as a team. - Shawn Quinn, EE 90, is manager of the Exploration Ground Systems program, leading the
team responsible for developing and operating the systems to process and launch NASA’s SLS
rocket and Orion spacecraft on the Artemis Moon missions to the Moon,. - Malik Russell, CmpE 17, was a NASA civil servant for 10 years. As an extravehicular activity
flight controller in Mission Control, he trained astronauts for spacewalks and collaborated
with private companies to design spacesuits and lunar rovers. - James K. Orr, AE 71, is the Gateway Avionics Architecture lead. He’s been involved in Orion
for Artemis I, Artemis II, and Artemis III and in Gateway for the Configuration 1 and
Configuration 2. - As a Loads and Dynamics engineer for Barrios Technology, Kenneth Smith, MS AE 18, worked
on the development of the new Gateway Space Station. Now he’s continuing that mission to
return humans to the Moon as deputy launch director at Blue Origin. - Luke Roberson, Chem 99, MS Chem 02, PhD Chem 05, and Daniel Yeh, PhD EnvE 00, are
creating the next generation of water recycling and resource recovery systems to support
missions to the Moon and to Mars, and beyond. Roberson is a portfolio lead for
Bioregenerative Life Support Systems within the Mars Campaign Office at NASA’s Kennedy
Space Center, and Yeh is a professor at the University of South Florida. - Casey Swails, Mgt 07, is NASA’s Deputy Associate Administrator.
- Jackie Williams Quinn, CE 89, and Janine E. Captain, PhD Chem 05, led NASA’s PRIME-1
team, which landed a combination space drill and spectrometer on the Moon in March 2025. - Kavya Manyapu, AE 06, serves as a spacewalk specialist and lunar surface operation technical assistant at NASA, where she designs spacewalks and tests spacesuits for the Artemis Program.
Artemis Timeline
November 16, 2022
Artemis I: The uncrewed lunar flight test of the SPace Launch System (SLS) sent the Orion spacecraft 1.4 million miles beyond the Moon and back to Earth on December 11, 2022.
April 2026
Artemis II: Four astronauts will perform a test flight aboard the SLS and Orion spacecraft. The crew will spend 10 days flying around the Moon.
Mid-2027
Artemis III: Four astronauts will travel to lunar orbit, where two astronauts will descend and spend a week near the South Pole of the Moon.
2027+
Artemis IV: Astronauts will live and work in Gateway, the first lunar space station, which will prepare humans for missions to Mars.
Top Rendering (Credit: NASA)
