In San Diego, NASA unfazed by SpaceX rockets blowing up before Artemis trips ...0

Twice this year, Starship rockets built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX have blown up. A version of that biggest-ever booster is slated to launch the manned Orion spacecraft to the moon in the Artemis III and IV missions.

Is NASA worried?

Not according to a La Mesa-born astronaut and the NASA official in charge of last week’s testing of Orion capsule recovery off San Diego.

Artemis II — set to launch in early 2026 and land off San Diego — will be lofted by Boeing’s SLS rocket for the first manned trip to the moon since 1972, making a fly-by but not landing.

At a Naval Base San Diego press conference Monday, shuttle astronaut Stanley Love — born at Sharp Grossmont Hospital — joined three other astronauts who took part in 3- to 5-foot choppy-water recovery tests.

As a “peripheral” member of the NASA team that investigated the 2003 shuttle Columbia disaster, Love was asked whether the Starship failures concerned him.

Not at all, he suggested.

“NASA tends to develop vehicles hardware-poor,” Love said in the well deck of the amphibious transport dock ship Somerset. “We carefully build a thing and then we carefully launch and operate it. And if we damage it, we feel bad.”

SpaceX — which he called “hardware-rich” — doesn’t work that way.

“They build it and throw it up there and it blows up and they get the data,” Love said. “They build another one. They throw it up there, it blows up.”

The rate of Starship losses “does not bother me,” he said. “That’s the way they do business. That’s the way they learn. Fast and frequent failure gives just as much information as, you know, slow methodical development.”

Also unfazed was Lili Villarreal, who worked at Boeing for 10 years before joining NASA, now as Artemis II recovery director.

“I’ve been around since SpaceX started and that is really the way that they do operations,” she said, echoing Love (who lived here only two months. His dad moved from a San Diego State University job to teaching at the University of Oregon.)

NASA and SpaceX still achieve the main goal, she said, “which is to get a vehicle that can be proven safe to [launch] pad, and that’s what they’re doing.”

Villarreal added: “I’m not worried about it at all. And it’s really interesting to see their milestones — like we are just cheering for them and they’ll get it.”

Despite constant news of Musk’s DOGE team firing thousands of workers across many federal agencies, NASA appears safe for now.

“Luckily, I have not been affected by any of the cuts,” Villarreal told Times of San Diego. “You know, we were already set to do these operations.”

The only hiccup, she said, was having to get extra OKs for travel and Purchase Card expenses.

“But you know, it did not impact us at all,” she said of DOGE.

A year ago, UC San Diego graduate Deniz Burnham became an astronaut, and still awaits her first space mission.

But she was busy off the San Diego coast with Love and two other astronauts occupying a mock Orion spacecraft as the Somerset, with helicopter crews and divers, bringing them onto ship.

Burnham is the latest astronaut with UCSD connections, including the late Sally Ride, American’s first woman in space and a UCSD physics professor.

Burnham never knew Ride, but graduated with a chemical engineering degree — a specialty that could prove useful on the moon.

But veteran astronaut Love said Burnham’s expertise might not be suited for the first landings, since geologists might be more useful in those lunar South Pole missions.

(But he also said that all astronauts get 1,000 hours of geology training, so perhaps Burnham has a shot at being the first woman on the moon.)

A third astronaut taking part was Andre Douglas, a backup for the Artemis II mission going up by April 2026.

“Basically, they pull up to the capsule .. load us into the capsule,” he said. “We get all strapped down and suited up, and making sure that we’re kind of simulating the return condition.”

After more than an hour’s wait, they simulated radio calls after splashdown.

“The rescue diver opens the capsule for us and then the medical doctors they simulate: ‘Hey, are you guys, OK? Are you not OK?”

The crew, including Italian Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency, was told to “kind of play into what you might feel if you came back from space,” including feeling nauseated. “Or if you feel like you have weak legs.”

Something he learned: how to urinate in a space suit.

“That one was something I hadn’t really anticipated, and we figured it out,” Douglas said, “but it is something where it’s actually important to train to do because you don’t want to be uncomfortable with a full bladder … something that we don’t really talk about that much.”

He said SpaceX Dragon crew astronauts — on their backs for three to four hours — have shown the way.

“Some people will go sit in bathtubs and sit on their backs and figure out how to do that, right? So I got the real training out here, so I’m pretty happy about that.”

Capt. Andrew “Andy” Koy, commanding officer of the Somerset, said he was humbled to be involved in Artemis’ 12th recovery test.

The “once-in-a-lifetime experience” was possible, he said, because the Somerset is ideal for spaceship pickup.

“We can flood this well deck up to seven feet, which allows us to bring in different types of pieces of equipment from Marine vehicles or a space capsule. Not not every ship can do that.”

“So it’s the ultimate rideshare,” Koy said.

Overseeing the helicopter hoist-up of the astronauts at sea was Cmdr. Caleb Derrington, call sign “Gump” (due to his Arkansas roots).

“This was the confirmation exercise and we hit our objectives,” he said, thrilled especially by having a Starlink access that gave him live video of the helicopter.

“So I got to sit in the little command and control and watch my pilots flying around doing the stuff,” he said — something he’s wanted for 20 years.

On Sunday, during recovery testing, Derrington said he saw something like the dolphins greeting the stranded space station astronauts returning to earth.

He said a seal scoped out the black Orion test capsule.

A nine-year Chula Vista resident based at North Island Naval Air Station, Derrington doesn’t expect to be involved in the actual 2026 recovery mission, but said his junior officers are prepared.

But if NASA and the Navy call him, he said, “I will happily answer.”

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