I do wonder what it's going to be like
when we are really far from Earth and can see it.
The sensation of being so far away from everything that you know.
I had that sensation on, on the Space Station
the first time I got to sit in the cupola for a really long time.
So I can only imagine what that's going to be like from 200,000 plus miles away.
My name is Victor Glover,
and I'm the Pilot for NASA's Artemis II mission around the Moon.
When I was in fourth grade, I was ten years old
and that's when the Challenger accident happened.
And it helped me understand how the general public felt
about the astronaut corps.
Right? Like these are the people that we want to be.
And that just gave me an easy thing to strive toward.
The biggest fear that I've had to overcome
in my life is doubting myself.
Going to college when no one in my family had gone to college was a huge risk.
I had more confidence in my athletic ability than in my academic abilities.
I could play football with those college students that I saw on TV,
but my classmates that I saw in the lab and around the university union,
I didn't know if I had what they had.
I think addressing that self-doubt
was a part of, you know, swinging for the fence
and trying to go get an engineering degree,
not just go to college, but get an engineering degree and then go
do something challenging and technical, like flying.
Apollo is known for sending humans to the Moon.
Artemis has an opportunity to continue the Apollo story,
but I actually think it's important for this story to stand on its own.
Artemis is a new program, and we're trying to do new things,
and it's great to compare and contrast.
When you look at our spaceship,
you can see parts that were designed, built and integrated in another country.
When you look at our crew, you see that our crew is international.
There are also men and women, and I just think that that comparing
and contrasting makes the story even richer.
The piloting role specifically, I will have an hour and a half
or so where I get to fly the spacecraft by hand.
We haven't flown that many spaceships, and so the ability to fly one actually
in space on a test mission is just a really unique opportunity.
I can't tell you how I'm going to feel when we fly by the Moon
and see the Moon up close in the Earth from a quarter of a million miles away.
But I don't use the word excited because I'm focused.
You know what we do,
this is very serious, and it's very risky.
And we are all intimately familiar with that risk.
And so if we go out there and we're successful
and we can pass that baton on to Artemis III,
that's something to really be excited about.