Experience Projects Artemis II Crew and Capsule Recovery Plan
Artemis II Crew and Capsule Recovery Plan
- Context
- ISEN 665, Texas A&M University
- Period
- Apr 2026 – May 2026
- Role
- Team member
- Topics
- Systems engineering, Project management, Mission planning, Risk management, FMEA, Contingency planning, Stakeholder analysis, Work breakdown structure, Milestone planning, Cost estimating, Quality assurance
- Tools
- IDEF0 functional modeling, 5×5 likelihood-consequence risk matrix, Requirements traceability and compliance matrices, Earned Value Management (EVM), NASA NPR 7120 and NPR 1450.10C guidance, OSHA 29 CFR standards, NASA Underway Recovery Test (URT) documentation
Our team wrote a project management and systems engineering plan for recovering the Artemis II crew and Orion capsule from the ocean after splashdown. The project was the final for ISEN 665, and the group I worked with was comprised of 4 engineering students from different educational backgrounds.
Problem
Artemis II was NASA's first crewed mission to the Moon in over fifty years, and the recovery after splashdown carried a set of constraints that made planning difficult. Splashdown timing was fixed by orbital mechanics, the crew needed to be out of the capsule and into a ship's medical bay quickly after ten days in microgravity, and the capsule itself had to be preserved well enough to support post-flight engineering analysis. The operation also spanned four organizations with different chains of command: NASA, the U.S. Navy, the Canadian Space Agency, and Lockheed Martin. Our assignment was to treat recovery as a project that had to be planned, coordinated, and reviewed in advance rather than as a single operational event.
Approach
We started with a project charter that defined scope, stakeholders, and four technical objectives covering the recovery process, the engineering factors affecting it, crew safety, and off-nominal decision-making. From there we built an IDEF0 model of the management effort, which broke the work into five functions: scope and organization, team preparation, readiness programs, operations strategy, and post-recovery planning. That structure carried the rest of the report, since the work breakdown structure, the milestone roadmap, and the phase-based budget all used it as a foundation. We then wrote the two main documents in parallel, a Project Management Plan covering schedule, budget, quality, risk, testing, documentation, and communications, and a Systems Engineering Management Plan working through NASA's seventeen common technical processes. Where we could, we grounded decisions in published precedent, including the Underway Recovery Test campaign and findings from Artemis I.
Solution
The final deliverable was a 60-page planning baseline containing the charter, the IDEF0 model, both management plans, compliance matrices, and recommended next steps. It included a preliminary cost basis of $14.8 million nonrecurring and $3.3 million annually for sustainment, a matrix organization spanning the NASA and Navy chains of command, a risk process built on expert teams and FMEA with a 5×5 escalation matrix, and a controlled "Recovery Living Document" with readiness status indicators built into it.
Takeaways
This project demonstrated to me how much planning needs to be done in order to achieve a project on the scale of the Orion recovery. The stakes and groundbreaking nature of the work make it very rewarding, but the tremendous number of variables made it feel overwhelming at first. I learned a lot about the relationships between individual cogs in the machine – the PMP, the SEMP, the IDEF0 model, etc. I especially enjoyed gaining experience with and learning about risk management / mitigation planning, stakeholder identification and analysis, and milestone planning.