The following continues a conversation held on February 3, 2026—three days before the originally scheduled launch of Artemis II.
John: The Mir is the space station the Russians had. It launched in 1986 and stayed in space. It was only designed for a five-year life. It stayed in space until 2000. So they kept it in space for 15 years.
The U.S. started flying on it because we wanted to practice before the International Space Station was built, and it had to be Russian and American, or Congress would not fund it. So that’s what started the space station. We started this Mir/NASA program and started putting astronauts on Mir for long duration. They would take a shuttle there, get on board Mir, and stay for six months before returning on the next Space Shuttle to arrive.
I was the flight director on console on the fifth one of those, called Mir/NASA-5.
U.S. astronaut Mike Foale was up there, and they were doing testing because the Russians were low on money. The Ukrainians were overcharging them for the radar system that had been autonomously docking these cargo ships to Mir. The Russians didn’t want to have to pay the Ukrainians anymore, because they were no longer part of the Soviet Union. They were trying to save that money, so they decided to turn that system off and practice doing a docking just using joysticks on a video screen, where you can watch the Progress M-34 spacecraft come in.
It turned out to be a terrible idea.
I didn’t even know at the time, because the Russians weren’t informing NASA of the risks. They had tried this once before, and I didn’t know it, and they had a near miss. This time it was worse. Not using the radar system, not having any real telemetry to tell them where the spacecraft was and how close it was coming to Mir…
Progress was supposed to swing in front of the space station and then come in. Instead, it was actually on a collision course from the bottom, what they call the radius vector. It hit the space station, immediately wrenched one of the solar panels, and put a big hole in the cabin of the Mir.
All of a sudden, all the air is leaking out.
Eight minutes after the collision, we came up and saw a DPDT alarm (Delta Pressure over Delta Time), which tells you how much air is leaking out over each minute. Michael and Sasha (cosmonaut Aleksandr “Sasha” Lazutkin) started with normal air pressure like you and I are breathing right now, but it was running out fast. They knew where the hole was because they could see all the air blowing out of that hole. Between it and them was a hatch.
They had to get that hatch closed, or they were going to die.
They should have moved to Soyuz, the lifeboat for emergencies like this, but they didn’t because they were trying to save the station. So they had to cut 21 cables that were running across the hatch before it could close and seal the leak. Some of the cables were bayonet fitting, so it was easier, but some they were literally having to cut with a knife to get them out. Meanwhile, all the air is bleeding out.
It took them 12 minutes to close it. By the time they closed the hatch, they had another 12 minutes or so of air left before they would have died.
That’s not overstating it. It was very risky what they were doing. Had they followed procedures, they would have just gone to the Soyuz and abandoned the station. Then somebody would have to come up and figure out whether you could put air back in the thing or not. Luckily, they saved the station, but it was a high-risk operation.
Another very real danger is MMOD (micrometeoroid and orbital debris).
There are multiple pieces of debris in Low Earth Orbit where the space stations orbit that can hit a station and completely destroy it—sort of like the Progress/Mir collision, only with much faster particles moving at 17,500 mph.
Mission Control Center executes collision avoidance for the International Space Station to raise or lower its orbit to miss the object. During this time, we place the crew in the Soyuz or Dragon capsule to be able to return to Earth if debris does hit the station. These collision avoidance maneuvers happened many times each year, but we performed them all without fatal accident.
Daniel: This is so revealing to the rest of us because, as you said, you cannot predict everything, you cannot train for everything, you cannot prepare for everything. It seems that, between what Gene went through, and some of the things that you oversaw…character is a such strong part of being a flight director…how you have to instantly assess and respond, how your judgment comes into play, how you have to reassure and rally the team…
It’s on you to make them believe that together, they can shape the outcome to be much better than what, in this moment, they may fear it will be.
John: Absolutely.
Daniel: I suppose it’s no surprise that once a truly good team comes together, you really depend on each other, and a good flight director stays in place and leads that team for quite some time. Over the course of what we would consider modern NASA, how many flight directors have there been? Of what elite group are you a part?
John: I am number 45. I was selected in 1998 and stayed as a flight director until 2007.
The original flight director, who was from the Mercury program, was Christopher Columbus Kraft. Dr. Kraft was a hero to me, even more so than Gene. I was very impressed with him. Short guy, like me, but knew how to be a great leader. Knew how to make decisions. Like you said, decision-making is a big part of it. And making sure that you do listen to your team, and that you guide them properly, and you make sure that they know “where are we today?” and “what are we going to do about it on the way home?”
Daniel: As of the day of this interview, the Artemis II launch has been pushed back. Final tests were being performed, but eleven hours ago, Colonel Chris Hadfield announced that the launch was “delayed until March due to hydrogen leaks, a balky hatch, need to launch a new crew to Space Station, and geometry with the Moon.”
I think we all understand the geometry with the Moon. Talk to me about the “need to launch a new crew to Space Station.” Obviously, the safety of the crew and the success of the mission, like you mentioned before, are the highest concerns. Why did NASA decide to postpone until March? And as a flight director, how do you proceed from a day like today?
John: The wet dress rehearsal is an important step that you must do prior to each one of these launches. Artemis is massively capable, but also only flies once a year. The last flight was in 2022, so it’s been three years since the last one flew. You must take your time and be careful on this, especially on a flight that’s flying four people on top for the first time ever. Apollo flew three. We’re flying four to the moon this time.
The wet dress rehearsal is a very good checkpoint. You load all the propellants in there, then you load the crew, then you make sure that the abort system is enabled—all those kinds of things. A complete dry run. It’s a “wet” dress rehearsal in the sense that it’s flowing the propellant, the fuel, and the oxidizer into the tanks. Those are super-cold cryogenic propellants. So you’re right about the leaks.
We had similar leaks on a shuttle and been able to mitigate them. Then we had leaks back in 2022 when the first Artemis flew. It took the third try before we got those leaks solved and were finally able to launch in November of 2022. So that’s a necessary step.
You mentioned the phasing of the moon. The moon only rotates one time every 29 days. The same face is facing us all the time, so as it’s swinging around, you get 12 and a half days of daylight, 12 and a half days of darkness, basically. You want to time the phasing so that the lighting conditions are very good around the moon.
We also want to have a good wring-out of the Orion Spaceship, where the crew is going to live for 10 days. We test the health and status of the entire spacecraft, but especially the environmental control and life support systems, which did not fly on the first Orion launch in 2022. You’ve got to make sure that’s working well.
Communication assets are another one. You want the crew to be able to do all the right things. You do a run for the trans-lunar injection burn—that’s the one that sends you on this trajectory to the moon. You want to make sure all those things are working right and that the crew can do everything they need to do.
Once we decided there were enough little things we needed to spend more time on, we lost our window for the first week of February, so it moved to March. March 6 is the next great opportunity. We’ve got that week to try to get launched again. If we run into a problem there, it’ll go into April.
Daniel: And there’s the humanitarian reason.
John: Yes. You were asking about Crew-12 [the Space Station crew]. I think Crew-12 is a really good thing for anyone reading this to understand.
For the first time in 60 years, on the Crew-11 mission, we had a medical emergency.
The Crew-11 team had almost completed their mission. They generally all stay up there for six months (180 days). They had been up for about 160 days, plus or minus three days, when one of the crew had an issue occur. That that specific individual was stable, but the medical problem that they had was concerning enough to cut the mission short. They were supposed to stay there for another 20 days, but we brought them home.
Bringing Crew-11 home sooner means that, for the first time since Columbia, we only have three people up there. The space station is intended to have seven. So currently there’s a gap in being able to do science and normal business because there’s fewer people to do it. They’re sending the four members of Crew-12 up earlier than their normal schedule so that the gap is less and they can have more time. That crew will stay for nine months instead of six.
That’s why the Crew-12 mission is now highest priority. We’ve got to get those guys up to the space station so they can get back to the normal business of what they’re doing, which is relevant research.
The International Space Station is a research laboratory—for people who don’t realize—they’re not just playing games upstairs. They’re doing relevant, meaningful things. I’m seeing it. It’s the best research and science that we’ve done since we started, because the station is fully assembled and we’re no longer having to maintain as much.
We’re making a lot of strides in things like cancer research and other critical areas that might make a huge difference, and since we’re supposed to deorbit the station in three years, we’re really trying to do everything we can in four years to get as much of the science done as we can.
At Kennedy Space Center, you can’t launch two missions at the same time because they take up the same assets. Artemis being pushed over to March gives Crew-12 a chance to launch into an earlier window. Once Crew-12 is up there, we can go back to focus on getting Artemis II launched…
And off we go to the moon.
All four members of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission docked successfully with the International Space Station at 3:15 pm EST on Saturday, February 14, 2026.
NEXT: In part 3 of this exclusive interview, we discuss the Artemis II connection with “Superman II,” potential issues with a land rush to own the moon, and John’s personal experience living and working in Russia.
“When you and I were young, the Soviet Union was called “the evil empire”—and it turns out that those people are not like that at all. The real people living there are like you and I. I think if we spent more time—all of us—getting to know the other better, then things would be better.”
