“We were finally doing what everyone wanted to do,” says Liliana Villarreal, AE 96, MS AE 97, who had helped process payloads for shuttle delivery to the International Space Station before being tapped as director of the Artemis II landing and recovery at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. “Our team has always been thinking of going farther. That’s our driving ambition, our human instinct for exploration.”
In many ways, this trip to the Moon will be different, Villarreal explains. Artemis is about going to the Moon to stay, to set up human settlements, and learn what it takes to survive and thrive in extraplanetary conditions. Launched in 2022, Artemis I was an uncrewed test flight of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft. (Among the flight directors preparing for this mission was fellow Tech grad Heidi Brewer, AE 05.) Artemis II will use the SLS to carry four astronauts around the Moon to test the equipment and crew in deep-space exploration, and Villarreal oversees the recovery of the crew and Orion capsule upon their return to Earth after their mission around the Moon. Artemis III will return humans to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.
Of course, for people to survive on the Moon, they’ll need an independent source of water—essential for human life by itself and as a potential source of breathable oxygen, not to mention as a fuel and propellant. Here too, Tech alumnae were integral in sending ahead equipment to find and drill for water beneath the lunar surface. Jackie Williams Quinn, CE 89, and Janine E. Captain, PhD Chem 05, led NASA’s PRIME-1 team, which landed a combination space drill and spectrometer on the Moon in March 2025. The lander ended up on its side, so the drill wan’t able to operate, but the spectrometer was still able to gather crucial data, which was computer-modeled with help from Georgia Tech’s Regent’s Professor Thomas Orlando. “It operated flawlessly,” says Quinn. “The landing environment was more rugged than we had thought, but we showed that we could take commercial equipment and modify it to enable long-term habitation on a celestial body.”
The wide range of roles that Georgia Tech graduates have in getting humanity back to the Moon underscores the team effort involved in undertaking such an endeavor. In fact, there’s a Yellow Jacket in NASA’s administrative offices helping oversee the entire project. “You’re not going anywhere without the people on the ground,” says Casey Swails, Mgt 07, NASA’s Deputy Associate Administrator. “Everyone sees the rockets and the landers, but they don’t see the people who make these missions happen. We rely on universities like Georgia Tech that are forward-leading, with students pushing boundaries and thinking about things differently. It doesn’t matter your major—I switched out of engineering. There is space in space for everyone.”
Artemis II, which launched April 1, 2026, was the first crewed mission to the lunar orbit in more than 50 years and the farthest that humans have traveled from earth.
Dozens of alumni contributed to NASA’s historic mission, from Shawn Quinn, EE 90, who led the team responsible for systems that processed and launched the rocket and spacecraft to Liliana Villarreal, AE 96, MS AE 97, who oversaw the astronauts’ safe return as Artemis II Landing and Recovery director.
]]>This story was originally published by the Georgia Tech Alumni Association.
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