The following is from a conversation held on February 3, 2026—three days before the originally scheduled launch of Artemis II.
Daniel: Before we dive in, I’d like to make sure everyone has a full appreciation of the breadth of experience you bring to the space program as we once again send our hopes to the moon—and beyond.
You have a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from Texas A&M University and a master’s degree of Space Science from University of Houston Clear Lake. You were a NASA flight director, NASA Orion Vehicle Integration Manager, and Constellation Design Integration Manager—which included Orion Aries ground and mission systems. Two years later they passed preliminary design reviews under your watch.
Not a bad way to look back on your life, especially when you still have so much more ahead.
John: Yeah, that was my NASA career, and while I did go to the University of Houston, Clear Lake for my Space Science degree, I fell three hours short of the 36 hours required for the master’s degree. So I can’t claim credit for that.
I do have a bachelor’s from Texas A&M, Aerospace Engineering, Class of 1987. I’m proud of that. Then 24 years at NASA. After that, from 2010 to 2020, I oversaw the Dream Chaser space plane. We did two tests of that at Edwards Air Force Base. Then two years at Blue Origin working on the lunar lander that is going to the moon soon. I just saw it roll out for its launch. It’ll be the next New Glenn launch out of Florida. Then three years working at a satellite company called Sidus Space.
Daniel: Now you’re back at NASA proper.
John: Back at NASA proper. At Aerospace Corporation at NASA Johnson Space Center. I’m working on the seventh floor of a building that I spent many years at before. So I’m back, even though I’m an Aerospace employee, I’m back helping them with the Gateway, which is a space station that goes around the moon.
Daniel: As you know, because we’ve been friends for a while, I am also a huge space exploration lover. I was very fortunate to grow up in the space age. I was one year old when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. My father and I watched it on black and white television. He says I toddled up to the tv and put my arms up on the screen right as Neil first stepped onto the surface.
I was exactly two years old, to the day, when Apollo 13 landed safely back on Earth. April 17, 1970.
So I feel I’ve been somewhat blessed to be tied to the history of it all, and this whole journey of “reach, grow, expand, learn—be among others who have that dream.”
If you had asked me then what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said astronaut. Even my TV heroes were Colonel Steve Austin, Major Anthony Nelson…astronauts.
What got you into the love of space?
John: Mine’s very similar to yours. I’m not that much older than you. I was born in 1965, so when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, I was four. I don’t remember Apollo 11 like you’re remembering Apollo 13.
What I do remember is spending the first 18 years of my life in New Mexico. The very last Apollo mission that landed on the moon was Apollo 17, in December of 1972. The last crew to set foot on the moon included Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, who is from New Mexico, and there’s not very many people from New Mexico, so we got extra attention. I was seven by that time, so I remember that one well.
The same way you and your father watched in black and white, all I had was this black and white television, very small, about the size of a laptop screen, that you had to pull the plug and give it about 60 seconds for the radio tubes to heat up so you could see the picture. But I watched the entire Apollo 17 mission every day from launch through the multiple days on the moon’s surface and finally return to Earth and successful splashdown. So that had a lot to do with it.
The Apollo 17 capsule is located at Space Center Houston, just off campus from NASA JSC, so it’s really cool that I get to see it every time I visit that facility.
You mentioned the TV shows. The big one for me was Star Trek. That was a big driver. I always wanted to be Captain Kirk. I wanted to be in charge. And you get all the girls. (Laughs) So both of those things were the reason for loving space.
But really it was Harrison Schmitt. He’s still alive, by the way. There’s only a few of the moon walkers that are still alive (all of them are in their nineties now). Mr. Schmitt helped NASA multiple times to improve spacecraft designs based upon Apollo lessons learned.
When I was still at NASA leading the Orion Spacecraft Vehicle Integration Office (VIO), I gave a presentation to the NASA Advisory Council (NAC) regarding our latest Orion spacecraft design safety modifications that mitigate Apollo moon mission risks as well as Space Shuttle Columbia accident lessons learned. I was part of the NASA Constellation Program back then. It’s called the NASA Artemis program now. After I briefed and we had a break, Harrison Schmitt came up and said “John, you did a good job with your Orion redesign presentation.” I immediately said, “Thank you sir. That means a lot, since you’re the reason I’m here at NASA!”
It’s not often that you get a chance to talk to your childhood space hero when you’re all grown up.
I spoke with him multiple times. That was just the beginning. I wanted to be in the space program my entire life when I was a kid, so I focused on physics and astronomy and any of the things that I could learn. I cut out clippings of every single paper. I still have them. At the time, that was the only way to keep things, just these newspaper articles.
After the Apollo missions, there was the SkyLab that went up into space in ’72, ’73, ’74. Then there was a big gap until the shuttle in 1981. I watched every single one of those things and kept track.
When I decided to choose colleges, I wanted to find a college degree with the word ‘space’ or ‘aerospace’ in the title. There wasn’t a lot back then. There was aerodynamics, but not aerospace. Texas A&M had an aerospace engineering degree. My mother is from Texas, so I knew a lot about Texas. I applied there, even though I came from a very poor family, knowing that out-of-state tuition would probably be too costly. My parents couldn’t afford to cover it. I would have to cover tuition costs myself.
Texas A&M offered me a partial academic scholarship that was based on my performance of grade point average and SAT scores. Once I got that I was able to get in-state tuition. So per-credit-hour costs changed from $40 an hour to $4 an hour. The rest is history.
I went to Texas A&M University, which is right near Houston—the Mecca of human space. That’s why College Station was a great place to hang out.
Daniel: When I hear you tell your story, it seems very much like two rivers—the point in history where you lived, and the fact that you had a hero right there in New Mexico—seemed to converge and almost demand that you became who you did.
John: Yeah, I’m one of the few who knew what he wanted to do when he was in grade school and high school. There are even articles where I stated early on that I wanted to do exactly what I do today. Here I am sitting with you, talking to you at age 60, almost 61, and I’ve had a great career. Nearly 40 years in the space program.
Daniel: Most of us in the general populace know what a flight director is predominantly from the film “Apollo 13” and the role that Ed Harris played depicting the real-life flight director of that mission, Gene Kranz. Lines he spoke in that movie are now in the zeitgeist of popular culture like “Failure is not an option” and “I believe this will be our finest hour.”
You knew Gene, didn’t you?
John: He was my first boss. He was the head of Mission Operations when I started as a 22-year-old kid in 1987. I graduated May 8th, 1987, and was working at NASA by May 15th. He was my boss’s boss, because I was just a young kid at that time. This was right after Challenger, so there was a lot of “we just killed seven people.” We had to do a lot of tough things and he was the one that gave us briefings for meeting the goal to fix the problems. Even as a young kid, I wanted to impress him. The way Ed Harris played him is exactly the way Gene was. Very impressive guy.
He’s the one who came up with “failure is not an option” after the Apollo 1 fire when we killed those three. He said we messed up, it’s our fault, we need to fix it, and it’s not okay. You know, there’s critiques about whether it’s really okay to say “failure is not an option,” but he’s the one that came up with that phrase.
Daniel: I do remember being struck, when you arranged for me to have the tour of Johnson Space Center, that to this day on the wall are the names of those who have given their lives in the space program. It’s such a wonderful memorial and reminder of the standard that is expected. It seems to permeate the future of the space program. It’s embedded. Not only ‘never forget,’ but ‘honor them and live up to everything that dream was about.’ You can’t help but feel all of that when you see it on the wall.
John: You’re exactly right. There’s an emblem by where you saw the names of Gus Chrisom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White, from the Apollo 1 fire, and then Challenger, and ultimately Columbia crews that says “Tough and Competent.”
Tough, Competent, Morale, Discipline—were these four things. There were others that were added, but to this day, you’ll still hear people say “tough and competent,” and they’re talking about how you do your job. So when you step into the control center, or the crew steps into the capsule…
As you know, you and I are here talking, it’s February 3. We just did a wet dress rehearsal for Artemis II yesterday, leading into today. This is the first time that we’ll send people to the moon since 1972, and a lot of that depends on tough and competent people spending a lot of time trying to make sure that this goes well, because they’re flying on a rocket that’s only lifted off one time previously.
Daniel: From what you were able to watch Gene do, and from your own years as a flight director, what are some of the pressures of being a flight director—especially on a mission like Artemis II?
John: There’s been a lot. The pressure is…
You see, the way it is, it’s got to be “crew safety, vehicle safety, mission success.” In that order. So you have to always manage the risk. There’s no such thing as zero risk. Any time you do a mission—any mission—even when all of us get into our cars, there’s some risk, but the risk of a rocket failure…
For example, when Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins lifted off, the odds of them making it and surviving that flight was somewhere between 1 in 5 and 1 in 8 of a loss of life because of all the different things that had to go right that had not been proven.
So you have to spend a lot of energy trying to reduce risk by testing and training in advance of the flight. Once you get into a flight, you must have already thought about what your failure cases are. Do you have the right amount of redundancy on a spacecraft? Do you have two of this, three of that? So if one fails, you can just fail over to the other one and they still keep alive on the critical functions like environmental control, life support, power, propulsion…you have to have those things. You must have fallbacks. So that comes into the design that you spend a lot of time on. All this stuff’s on the prep side.
When you get into flight control, you have to be able to wing it sometimes because usually the failure that causes some kind of major potential catastrophe isn’t the one that you practice. It’s usually some random thing that causes issues. So you have to be prepared for that, and you have to train the team for that, so they don’t freeze and they don’t lie to you when you ask them a question.
There’s another Gene Kranz quote from “Apollo 13” that goes, “What do we got that’s good, Sy?” What he’s saying is, rather than everybody saying how bad things were—because an oxygen tank had just blown a hole in the side and it was venting out the side and the crew is saying, “Hey, I’m seeing venting” so you know something’s wrong… Then the people in the control center are saying, “Well, the electrical system’s not working” because it was the tank that was providing fuel, what they call fuel cells, which gives you the electricity, so all of a sudden, these things aren’t working anymore… Everyone was going through “what’s wrong, what’s wrong, what’s wrong” and Gene’s input was, “Let’s don’t talk about what’s wrong. Tell me what you’ve got that’s good. What is still working? Let’s go from that perspective.”
What he had to do—and I think I’m pretty good at it, too—is stay calm.
If you panic, the rest of the team is going to panic, and that’s going to cause more mistakes. Mistakes get made because everybody’s in a panic state. So you have to go, “Okay, let’s just slow down.”
I don’t know if you’ve seen this in life, but sometimes you get to something and something didn’t go right, and then you make the next step without really thinking it through, and it ends up making whatever the first mistake was worse.
You don’t want to do that in flight control.
All those things you have to do in a short period of time—you have to be calm. Even if it’s a bad situation, you must remain calm. I’ve had multiples of those.
I’ve had near misses.
The closest one was when I was in Russia…
NEXT: In part 2 of this exclusive interview, John tells us about working with the Russians on a joint satellite venture, how the recent rescheduling of the Artemis II launch made it possible to continue cancer research, and the details of that “near miss” experience:
“They could see all the air blowing out that hole. They had to get that hatch closed or they were going to die. They should have moved to Soyuz, but they didn’t because they were trying to save the station. Meanwhile, all the air is bleeding out…”
