The following continues a conversation held on February 3, 2026—three days before the originally scheduled launch of Artemis II.
Daniel: One of the most amazing things for me about the upcoming Artemis II launch is the “life imitates art” aspect. I was twelve when the film “Superman II” came out. Mankind had not been to the moon for eight years, but that hadn’t dampened my enthusiasm to see any lunar mission I could. If I couldn’t watch them on TV, I would watch them on a movie screen. That lunar sequence is one of my core memories.
In it, the Kryptonian villains arrive on the moon and encounter a joint American/Russian mission—one astronaut and one cosmonaut on the surface, one astronaut in the LEM, and, although they don’t show it, I would assume one more in orbit. It’s clearly meant to represent a NASA mission. They’re communicating with Houston, they have the same style suits, module, and rover you’d expect—the whole bit.
Although in the film their insignia says “Society for International Space Exploration,” fans may not know that both the Richard Donner shooting script and the Richard Lester revised script called for it to be NASA, so that was the original intent.
What we do know is the name of that mission, because Houston said it twice.
The name of that mission was Artemis II.
That was 1980. Now here we are in 2026, about to watch a real Artemis II go to the moon, complete with four astronauts and a mission emblem whose shape bears a remarkable inverted resemblance to a certain other famous symbol of hope and inspiration. I’d like to think that somewhere in the NASA design department was a Superman fan.
Another aspect the movie gave us was the fictional cooperation between the U.S. and Russia at a time in history when tensions between the two were still running quite high.
You were flight operations lead for two years in Moscow on missions for the Mir space station. You led the first two successful assembly missions of the International Space Station (ISS), became space shuttle and space station flight director in 1998, and oversaw hundreds of human spaceflight missions that were part of assembling the ISS, which is still up there today.
What was it like working on an international effort just after the end of the Cold War? I want to ask you the Apollo 13 question now, “What have you got that’s good?” because I think we would all love to hear a story of partnership and collaboration and shared vision.
What was the reality of that experience like for you?
John: It was a game-changer for me. It made my career. I’m positive that’s why I was selected as flight director. Because I did so well in Russia.
What matters in anything you do in this world—be it engineering, cars, or software—comes down to three key Figures Of Merit (FOMs): Technical performance, Cost, and Schedule, plus the overarching Risk score based on these three FOMs. At NASA, we call it TCSR.
How much do we trust the technical performance of this design and operation? How much does it cost for me to make this new car before it’s ready for market? What’s the schedule required from Authority to Proceed until the product is designed, built, and tested sufficiently to know it meets requirements?
Finally, what’s the risk that this thing might fail once we put it into operation? Can it hurt someone? Can it be a bust commercially? Or do we feel we have something amazing that will change the world?
When NASA was told by Congress and the Russian Space Agency that “these two nations are going to collaborate to build an International Space Station,” the Russian side was on board because they sorely needed our help to continue.
The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. The ruble was severely devalued. The new Russian Federation was in chaos in the early days after the fall of the former Soviet Republic. The Russians desperately needed help funding their current space program’s recurring costs.
U.S. and Russian collaboration turned into a terrific partnership.
At the beginning, when I first started going to Moscow in 1994, my Russian colleagues called us “you winged vehicle people,” because we had been focusing on the Space Shuttle for decades without learning long-duration space flight lessons.
Long-duration space flight is extremely hard on the human body. Even though we had three Skylab flights in the early ’70s, they were short flights (the longest was 84 days) compared to Russian missions on the Salyut and Mir space stations.
Valeri Polyakov holds the world record for longest human flight ever. He launched to Mir in January of 1994 and returned to Earth in March of 1995—a total of 438 days in space. He exercised in space like a madman to set this record.
Frank Rubio holds the American record (371 days onboard ISS) from September 2022 to September 2023. He set it with two Russian colleagues.
The bottom line is, prior to ISS, NASA hadn’t learned what must be learned to keep humans alive and healthy. For example, when someone returns to Earth after 180+ days in space, you have to work daily prior to landing to prevent muscle atrophy and calcium loss that can cause your legs to break after landing.
So that was the benefit for NASA—to learn by doing with the Russians. The big benefit for me was to learn how they operate on the ground and in space.
The way they design and build hardware for space is completely different than the way the United States does it.
Mir’s design requirement was to ensure it operates in space for at least 5 years. To do this, they take what is already built and tested and apply simple redundancy. If you have an assembly line of fuel pumps already proven to operate for 2 years without failure, the Russians simply put three of them on board Mir. When the first pump fails, the second identical tank is activated and runs until failure, and then the third one activates after the second one fails.
That’s how the Russians met Mir’s 5-year requirement.
On the U.S. side, the philosophy is different.
NASA requires critical components to be at least 1-fault tolerant and sometimes 2-fault tolerant. They award a U.S. company to meet that operational requirement.
For example, the ISS is designed to last at least 15 years. To meet NASA’s 15-year requirement, the provider would make, design, and build two identical pumps (or three pumps if 2-fault tolerance is required). Each pump must be verified on the ground to meet the 15-year requirement. That way if one of the pumps fails early, the second (or third) pump can be activated at any time and still meet the ISS 15-year requirement.
The first two ISS elements (Russian Zarya and American Node-1) were both launched in late 1998. It is now 2026. We’re way past 15 years. It’s more like 28 years.
U.S. modules and hardware are designed to be “more reliable,” whereas the Russian modules and hardware meet requirements by “making more.” (Laughs) But it still works, if that makes sense.
The Russians have amazing simplicity in the way they design things.
If you’ve ever watched a Soyuz rocket launch, you’ll notice the launch umbilical towers (the masts or swing arms that supply electrical power, data connections, and propellants while mated to the rocket) are released and fall away under gravity just before launch without requiring motors for separation—leaving the umbilicals attached to the rocket until liftoff.
U.S. ground umbilical designs like SpaceX require a motor to retract swing arms, or umbilicals pull away by the rocket after liftoff.
The Soyuz design is simpler and more reliable in this example. The dissimilar redundancy between US and Russian designs is very interesting. I learned a lot on how to get more out of a simpler design.
But to be honest, Daniel, the thing that was best while working with the Russians was learning their culture.
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. They don’t believe what their leaders tell them. They never trust what is written in Russia’s Pravda newspaper (Pravda means “trust” in Russian). The real people living there are like you and I. In fact, even more intimately so. They always wanted to get to the real you.
I was single when I was there, and they would say to me, “John, why are you not married? You’re such a handsome man. You should remarry soon. You deserve a nice woman.” (Laughs) They’re more intimate than we Americans are with each other.
Americans were more like, “Hi, we work 8 to 5, and we go home and don’t talk to anybody, really.” That’s not them. They invite you to their house and bring you over, and put out a big smorgasbord of food and drinks on the table—the best they have—always for their guest. And you don’t get to leave until around midnight because they don’t want to end it. They’re just wonderful people from that perspective.
It really teaches you about culture. This is not just U.S. and Russia.
I think if we spent more time—all of us—getting to know the other better, then things would be better.
Even now, as you know, things are completely different with Putin in charge. You mentioned that I started on the Mir side, but I set up the very first NASA/USA control center called the Houston Support Group (HSG) in 1998. It’s still in operation today. Americans play critical liaison roles daily in the HSG in Moscow, working with their Russian counterparts. You get things done better that way.
Everybody’s learned to trust each other. It all takes trust. Everything comes down to trust.
Russian space controllers are technically outstanding, and that’s what makes it great. We started with U.S. and Russia as the core partners and turned it into the International Space Station (ISS) by adding the European Space Agency, Japanese Space Agency, Canada, and others.
The NASA Gateway I’m working on now is a lunar space station with multiple nations participating.
The difference this time is Gateway doesn’t include Russia as a partner because of issues with Putin, and Russia chose to do other things. Gateway still includes all the other ISS International Partners and added the UAE as a new partner. The Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center, located in Dubai, will provide the Gateway airlock for spacewalks.
The bottom line is the number of countries interested in space is expanding a lot, especially for lunar and Mars human missions.
Right now, China is our is our rival for “who will be first humans to return to the moon.” They are doing great things. They have their own space station in low Earth orbit (just above Earth) like the ISS.
Personally, I think it’s good for the entire world if many nations are doing great things in space, as long as we stay friends and not enemies, because you can use these technologies to collaborate in the future like we did with the Russians.
The moon is going to be interesting from that perspective because it’s going to be a fight for who gets what, and possession is nine-tenths of the law.
Just like the Oklahoma Sooners, whomever arrives first will gain possession of the most important parts of the moon. “Planting the flag” will no longer be just the USA. I can see future problems over possession and lines drawn that don’t need to be drawn, like we have on Earth, if we don’t all come together with a standard set of rules to abide by.
What we did with Russia, and the technology, and learning how they do business… It made me a better engineer, flight director, and Program Manager when I was working on new designs of spacecraft, because you could see that the Russians didn’t have any money, and they were still able to achieve the same goals.
There was an accident because they tried to get too cheap on the money [see previous article]. So you have to watch that. That’s why I brought that up earlier. Technical performance, costs, schedule, and overarching risk. As long as you manage those four things, you’ve got a great system, and you can move faster.
NASA’s biggest problem is they’re not moving fast enough. Commercialization is helping. It’s great that Jeff Bezos is part of the game now, and Elon Musk for sure, and other billionaires like Jed McCaleb from Vast Aerospace.
Not just billionaires, but many commercial companies can become a critical part of making humanity better in the future space domain. It’s why the U.S. is leading now. It’s because of SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other commercial companies working with NASA.
NASA enabled SpaceX. NASA got them their start. NASA taught them the technologies.
That’s what NASA’s job is—design and build the technologies that allow us to reach further into the stars. Make the hard stuff easier, and then let commercialization take over and begin to turn the crank for millions of people to be able to live in space in the future.
That’s why you’ve got a real shot at going to space one day.
You’re a little younger than me. You might get to go into low Earth orbit and see the Space Station. You may get to go to the moon in the next ten or twenty years.
Seriously. It may happen.
People didn’t use to fly on planes. Now everybody flies on planes.
In another ten to twenty years, it’s going to be like that for human space missions and colonization—certainly for low Earth orbit in the short term, and around the moon and Mars in the longer term.
But to be truly successful, it requires collaboration…between all nations.
As of date of publication, Artemis II is scheduled to launch today, April 1, 2026, at 6:24 EST.
NEXT: In part 4 of this exclusive interview, John talks about what it takes to build a sustainable society on the moon, and the biggest reason “why” we need to do it.
“The main part of this is to give us the ability to get off planet Earth so that if anything ever goes bad, we still have a way to save the species and regrow.”
