Firing Room 1 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida has witnessed the liftoff of several historic Apollo missions, including the one in 1969 that put humans on the moon for the first time, and the maiden flight of Space Shuttle Columbia.

Next month, if everything goes to plan, a launch control team will file into the storied NASA nerve center, a beehive of workstations and monitors behind angled glass windows that provide a direct view of the launchpad, to oversee the final preparations and kickoff of Artemis II. The mission aims to send four astronauts farther than humans have ever before traveled from Earth as part of the first crewed spaceflight around the moon in 50 years.

Astronauts famously need to have the “right stuff.” They are selected from thousands of applicants for the characteristics and skills suited to the stresses of spaceflight and the mettle necessary for the rigorous training and grueling simulations that prepare astronauts for any scenario they may encounter.

But who has the Artemis II astronauts’ backs as they make the 10-day, roughly 685,000-mile journey around the moon, aboard a rocket and spacecraft that haven’t carried humans before? And what does it take to work in the high-stakes, behind-the-scenes roles that keep astronauts safe and the mission on track?

“It’s very psychologically challenging. The decisions that you’re making have life-and-death consequences,” said Wayne Hale, who served as flight director at the NASA Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center in Houston between 1988 and 2003. Hale supported 40 space shuttle missions while leading flight operations.

Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, launch director of NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems program, will shepherd the liftoff of the first human mission of the Artemis program. She takes charge of the official countdown starting 49 hours and 15 minutes before launch. Blackwell-Thompson will give the go from Firing Room 1 at Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, near Cape Canaveral, Florida.

As NASA’s first female launch director, Blackwell-Thompson leads a team that manages propellant loading and follows the launch commit criteria: a detailed set of rules that determines whether the launch goes ahead or stands down. These factors include temperature, wind, cloud cover and the overall health of the launch vehicle.

Blackwell-Thompson helmed launch operations in late 2022 for Artemis I, the uncrewed mission that took a 25 ½-day journey around the moon and back. The test flight set the stage for the highly anticipated crewed mission that could lift off as soon as April 1. With humans on board, Artemis II promises to be “incredibly exciting,” she said. During the final minutes of countdown, an intense hush envelops the room, she added.

“So as we count through those milestones of terminal count, the room is incredibly quiet in the firing room, because the team is focused on their data. They’re focused on their system. They’re focused on their go, no go or their launch commit criteria and ensuring that we are ready to go fly,” she explained in the September 12, 2025, episode of NASA’s “Houston We Have a Podcast,” referring to the launch status check when the flight director queries each team to determine whether the mission can move forward with liftoff.

For launch, Blackwell-Thompson, who has worked at NASA for 30 years, said she has a tradition she calls “green for go” that involves wearing a particular green accessory.

“They’re just very inexpensive little beaded bracelets that I put on,” she said in the podcast. “It is my symbol. It’s my symbol to myself. It’s my symbol to my team that when I slide that bracelet on every morning, it is my way of saying I am all in. I am here to give it my all.”

Once the countdown hits zero and the towering Space Launch System rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft lifts off, Blackwell-Thompson hands over to Jeff Radigan, Artemis II lead flight director at Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center in Houston. There, he and a crew of flight directors will oversee the mission until the Orion capsule splashes down in the Pacific Ocean 10 days later.

The team practices the handover so often “it feels just like a simulation,” said Rick Henfling, one of the flight directors who will be at mission control in Houston for launch.

“The only thing that’s different is out of the corner of my eye, I can see in one of the TVs that there’s fire coming out of the rocket,” he told CNN.

However, as the lead Artemis II entry flight director, Henfling is primarily responsible for the opposite end of the mission: ensuring the Orion spacecraft returns home safely.

In the first four hours after launch, Henfling said the team will be checking that everything is working as it should aboard the Orion spacecraft as it ventures into space with humans on board for the first time.

“We did the Artemis I mission back in 2022 and we got a good shake out of Orion from a guidance, navigation, control and propulsion system perspective, but we really don’t know how Orion’s going to behave as a spacecraft,” he said. “How well will it do with removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere? How well will the toilet perform?”

For example, the spacecraft will vent urine overboard, and NASA guidance systems need to ensure that process doesn’t affect the spacecraft’s trajectory. Similarly, as the astronauts breathe oxygen on board, carbon dioxide will have to be vented, which puts a force on the vehicle.

“We have analytical models that are computer-based and they’re informed by the best test data that we have, but until you get the spacecraft with people inside, in the vacuum of space, you really don’t know what the true spacecraft response will be,” Henfling said.

A pivotal moment for the mission will come about 24 hours into the journey when Orion’s propulsion system fires up for the translunar injection burn, which will send the spacecraft on the trajectory needed to fly by the moon, Henfling said.

“The big milestone is the TLI decision — is the spacecraft performing well enough to send four people out potentially further than any people have ever gone before?”

The only time mission control in Houston will lose contact with the spacecraft — apart from a brief blackout during reentry — is when Orion goes behind the moon, an event scheduled for Day 6 of the mission. “All of our communication depends on having a line of sight with Earth,” Henfling said. “It’s nerve-racking, because whenever you don’t have communication with the spacecraft, you don’t have insight as to what’s going on,” he added.

However, Henfling noted that the roughly 45-minute period will “be a special moment for the crew,” and the hope is that the astronauts may be able to take a striking photo in the same vein as the iconic Earthrise image captured in 1968 by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders.

“If we’re working through a problem, we will give the crew the best information that we have to continue over those 30 to 45 minutes without communication, and we’re confident that when it gets on the other side and the moon is not blocking them anymore, we’ll pick up where we left off,” Henfling said.

The flight director doesn’t routinely speak to the astronauts on board. That role falls to the capsule communicator, or CapCom, who ensures that the crew receives clear and concise communication. Artemis II’s lead CapCom is NASA astronaut Stan Love. After joining the astronaut corps in 1998, he served as CapCom during several space shuttle missions to the International Space Station.

Henfling will, however, speak with the crew on the day before the mission’s most critical stretch: when Orion reenters Earth’s atmosphere and splashes down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego.

“Typically when you hear CapCom talking, it’s very operational in nature, formal, but we’re going to just have a conference, and the crew will have had time to study for their procedures for entry, and this will be a chance for them to ask questions in a private setting, a little bit less formal,” he explained.

The Orion crew capsule will enter Earth’s atmosphere — a point known as entry interface — at about 25,000 miles per hour (about 40,200 kilometers per hour), transitioning from the vacuum of space to a dense atmosphere and enduring temperatures about half as hot as the surface of the sun at nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius). However, unlike spacecraft returning from the International Space Station, there is only one shot, with no option to wait, for example, for weather conditions on the ground to improve.

“I’m super confident in the team’s ability to execute,” Henfling said. “But once we hit entry interface, and the heat starts building up on the heat shield, there’s no turning back. We’re coming in and, you know, we’re going to safely finish that mission.”

Radigan, NASA’s lead flight director for Artemis II, agreed that landing is uniquely challenging. “It’s always one of those, you know, operations that gets your heart pumping, and we all kind of hold our breath until we see the parachutes out and the crew hitting the water at a reasonable speed,” he said in the July 25, 2025, episode of NASA’s “Houston We Have a Podcast.”

“I’ll be sitting and watching Rick and his team do it, but we’ll be, we’ll be ready for it,” he added.

Several former NASA engineers and a former astronaut have expressed concern to CNN that the bottom part of the Orion spacecraft, called the heat shield, which is designed to protect the astronauts from extreme temperatures, isn’t safe.

This vital part is nearly identical to the heat shield flown on Artemis I, which returned from space with its 16.5-feet wide shield pockmarked by unexpected damage — prompting NASA to investigate the issue.

Henfling said the space agency had modified the landing trajectory to “make it a more benign environment on the heat shield.”

“I have a lot of confidence in the engineering that was done and the testing that was done,” he said. “And so when I sit console on entry day, the heat shield is not going to be something that I’m thinking about.”

Flight directors train along with the astronauts for many different scenarios, with a recent exercise simulating a fire on board the spacecraft just before entry interface. Henfling, who has been a flight director since 2015, is also no stranger to challenging missions. He was in charge of the launch and landing of the test flight of Boeing Starliner in 2024. While astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams arrived safely at the International Space Station, they did not return with the spacecraft after it experienced problems.

“We practice a lot of different scenarios, but there’s always failure of imagination things,” he said. “Our training is not necessarily to train through all the thousands of things that could go wrong. It’s more to train the team to think critically and to have the critical thinking skills to respond to unforeseen problems.”

Henfling doesn’t have any personal good luck charms, but resting on his console at Mission Control in Houston will be a special cloth patch given to him by the Artemis II astronaut crew. One side features the moon, the other Earth.

“As soon as we get past the furthest point in the mission and start coming back home, … we’re all going to turn our patches around with Earth prominently displayed.”

Henfling will do his best to go home and sleep during the 10-day mission, but he said it will be hard to stay away even when he’s not on duty at the console.

“I think once each of us wakes up, we’re going to want to get back to the Johnson Space Center and get back involved with the mission,” he said.

“This is a show of what’s possible when humanity works together towards a common goal. And I’m super excited to show that off to everybody.”

NASA’s Artemis program is sending humans into deep space for the first time in more than five decades. Sign up for Countdown newsletter and get updates from CNN Science on out-of-this-world expeditions as they unfold.