With the capabilities of probes and other robotic tools today, what is the purpose of sending human astronauts into space?

If you just want to take pictures, you do that with robotic assets. Robots can take pictures. They do that all the time. We have lots of pictures in the area. We also have, on the International Space Station, a way for us to ask, “Please take a picture of this. Please take a picture of that.” That’s not what we did with Artemis II, and that’s not what we’re trying to do with Artemis III or Artemis IV, V, VI. With the Artemis missions, we’re trying to use the humans to their best capability, and what the humans are really good at is seeing a wide scene, zooming in on details very naturally, and then trying to interpret what they’re seeing and take the next step.

We don’t know everything about the moon. To learn more, we need to literally go on the surface and figure out what’s there and where to go next. So some of this is trying to train—not just the crew onboard—but the flight directors and the science team and the engineers. We all need to work together to enable humans to do what they do best.

We also give the crew science prompts. We say, “What do you think is happening in this scene? There’s something like a storm or an algal bloom or a fire. What do you see? How do you see the scene changing? What do you think that means? What do you think is causing that change? What do you think is going to happen next? If you could do anything, what would you do next?” That helps us understand what they’re looking at, which is not just taking pictures. It’s making observations, making understanding, making inferences with their brains. That’s what humans are really good at. That’s what we’ll be asking them to do.