Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center,

episode 265, Capstone. I'm Gary Jordan, and I'll be your host today.

On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts,

all to let you know what's going on in the world of human spaceflight.

A few weeks ago, we chatted with in the Jude Marancy about Artemis mission design.

In terms of orbits, the first three Artemis missions look pretty different.

First in distant retrograde orbit for Artemis 1, then a lunar flybry for Artemis 2.

By Artemis 3, humans will enter into an orbit called a near rectilinear halo orbit,

or NRHO for the first time. There are a lot of perks to this orbit,

but probably at the top is its ability to give astronauts access to land on the lunar south pole,

an area of great interest for exploration and discovery for Artemis.

After Artemis 3, astronauts will regularly enter NRHO to rendezvous with Gateway,

NASA's future lunar orbiting platform. Gateway will be a staging platform

among many other things for astronauts before they head down to the lunar surface,

and though it won't be continuously inhabited like the International Space Station is in

lower orbit, Gateway will be permanently parked in NRHO, something that hasn't been done before

for any spacecraft. Of course, before we put humans into NRHO, we need to test it.

Enter capstone, which is in typical fashion that we find on this podcast and acronym.

Here it is. It is Sys Lunar, autonomous positioning system technology operations and navigation

experiment. Capstone successfully launched in June 2022, and is just now getting into its key

objective of its mission, testing NRHO. As it gets into this exciting place, we're bringing in

some key people to discuss this important mission. On this episode, we have Brad Cheedham,

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