EDWARDS, Calif. — If NASA’s colossal new moon rocket, slated to launch with astronauts for the first time as soon as tomorrow, explodes on the pad or breaks up as it accelerates through the atmosphere, the space agency has a plan:

Fire a powerful motor affixed to the top of the crew capsule that is literally designed to outrun debris from an exploding rocket, flip the capsule around as it soars through the air, then deploy parachutes to bring the astronauts back to safety.

Reliably pulling off this high-energy yet delicate dance isn’t easy. Engineers and scientists across the country spent years developing and testing this Launch Abort System, including many at the Armstrong Flight Research Center, which has spent decades pushing the limits of human flight in Southern California’s Mojave Desert.

For the Artemis program, aiming to bring humans back to the moon for the first time in a half-century and prepare for eventually landing people on Mars, NASA tapped the center to help execute two critical tests of the abort system in the 2010s.

In the first, NASA engineers attached the system to a dummy test capsule packed with hundreds of sensors, placed it alongside the glimmering white sand dunes of New Mexico and fired it off to simulate an abort from the launch pad.

In the second, crews headed to the Florida space coast, where they placed the abort system and test capsule on a modified missile. To mimic the conditions of a rocket ascent, they launched the missile and, after it broke the sound barrier, triggered the abort system.

It’s these kinds of extreme flight conditions that the Armstrong Flight Research Center specializes in.

Brad Flick, who retired as director of the center on March 20, recalled a poster outside his office depicting the Apollo moon landings: “The poster says, ‘Before we did it there, we practiced it here.’ And that’s what we do.”

Southern California’s pioneers in human flight

Even before NASA was called NASA, its engineers, scientists and test pilots were pushing the limits of flight in the Mojave Desert.

Out in the middle of current-day Edwards Air Force Base — one of the largest airfields in the world, at some 480 square miles — a small team began the X-plane program, a series of experimental aircraft designed to travel faster, higher and (purposefully) more awkwardly than ever before.

In 1947, with its X-1 plane, the team became the first in the history of human flight to break the sound barrier.

By the early 1960s, the full-fledged flight research center had become a hub of cutting-edge aviation research, thrown into high gear by NASA’s “brightest and boldest”:

A young pilot by the name of Neil Armstrong was guiding the rocket-powered X-15 on a number of test flights. On one where Armstrong flew above Earth’s atmosphere, he struggled to trigger a safety system designed to limit the intense forces pilots experience and overshot his runway by about 45 miles, ending up over Pasadena.

This NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center hangar houses a Gulfstream III airplane that the center will use during the Artemis II mission to track the capsule as it reenters the atmosphere.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

The center was also designing and testing mock-ups of a lunar lander, which Armstrong — now the center’s namesake — later used to practice landing on the moon while still here on Earth.

Meanwhile, another plane dubbed the “flying bathtub” was also taking shape at the center. The odd-looking craft essentially aimed to test whether they could fly with no wings, instead generating lift from the body of the plane. To launch it, they attached the plane to a Pontiac convertible and ripped across the nearby lake bed at 120 mph.

The data they got from the experiment informed the design of the Space Shuttle. Instead of relying solely on large wings — which would have needed to be heavy and bulky to survive the extreme conditions of reentry — the shuttle generated a fair amount of lift with its body so it could get by with stubbier, lighter wings. The necessary but perhaps inelegant design earned the Space Shuttle its own nickname: the “flying brick.”

Flick didn’t indulge in telling any of the “cowboys-in-airplanes stories” he’d heard during his nearly 40 years at the center. However, he noted that it’s a special breed that can handle the extremes of the test pilot job — and that it requires some serious risk management across the whole team.

“The safest thing to ever do with an airplane is to never fly it,” Flick said. “That’s not the business we’re in. … The people in that airplane — be they pilots, or in the cabin — they rely on us to do our jobs well, to keep them safe and alive. That’s a responsibility we take very seriously.”

Armstrong Flight Research Center Director Brad Flick stands next to a Gulfstream III airplane on March 18, 2026.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Testing astronauts’ last resort

The center’s experience not only pushing far past the frontiers of flight, but also turning its experimental aircraft into “flying labs” with dozens or hundreds of sensors, has made it key to the success of NASA’s space missions over the years.

For the first of the two Artemis abort tests, called Pad Abort-1, the Armstrong Flight Research Center team painted the test capsule; installed the sensors, flight computers, wires and parachutes; and then put the whole system through a series of tests and measurements to make sure it was ready for launch.

Throughout the complex aerial gymnastics of an abort, the distribution of weight matters immensely: A top-heavy capsule performs differently than a bottom-heavy capsule. Unaccounted weight on one side can also set the capsule off-kilter. So the Armstrong team employed a series of tests involving fancy scales and gently tipping the capsule.

Aborts are also intense. The motors that pull the capsule away from the doomed rocket are designed to accelerate from 0 to 500 mph — well over half the speed of sound — in just two seconds. In the process, the capsule shakes pretty aggressively. So the team subjected the capsule to vibrations in the lab to ensure everything would still work after that kind of extreme shaking. It’s better to break stuff on the ground than in the air.

The Armstrong team ultimately selected White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico for the pad-abort test. It also oversaw the construction of the launch pad and coordinated operations for the test, which NASA successfully completed in 2010.

Years later, NASA launched its Ascent Abort-2 test atop a modified missile in preparation for the Artemis launches. For that, the Armstrong team had a more focused role designing and testing the network of hundreds of sensors that would be the agency’s eyes and ears for the test. This included strapping the sensors to a vibration table and giving them a solid shake to make sure they could handle the G-forces.

Environmental test technician Cryss Punteney places her hands on the Unholtz Dickie vibration table where components for Ascent Abort-2 were tested inside at the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

“If the tree falls in the forest, and no one was around to hear, did it actually make a sound?” said Laurie Grindle, Armstrong deputy center director who served as the project manager for the first abort test. “If we didn’t have any instrumentation, we could have launched something great that showed up wonderful on video, but we wouldn’t know if it performed well.”

The second test went off without a hitch in 2019. The teams got invaluable data — and some wonderful video too.

In 2022, NASA’s uncrewed Artemis I test mission with the abort system successfully reach the moon — no abort needed. When the crewed Artemis II mission launches to the moon as soon as tomorrow, the abort system will, for the first time, be responsible for keeping astronauts alive.

I’ve been investigating a transformation in the illegal drug market and how it has led to this explosion of drug overdoses. “America’s public enemy No. 1 is drug abuse.” The war on drugs starts in the early ’70s. At that time, annually, there were roughly 7,000 drug overdose deaths. Subsequently, that number completely explodes. How could we have invested so much to stop the problem and just have it get so much worse? So when we start looking at this data, I find that it’s fundamentally a synthetic drug problem. Fentanyl is the first example, but it’s essentially a subset of what we know as novel psychoactive substances. They are often lethal. “So this sample was a 19-year-old in Chicago who was found deceased after taking what he thought was Percocet. But we found one of these synthetic cannabinoids that is several times more potent than fentanyl.” When you get that sample, you’re trying to tease out a molecule that maybe hasn’t been seen before? “Yes, we create what is essentially a digital record, a chemical fingerprint, if you will. But then there’s the interpretation. We need to understand the pharmacology of it, the potency of it, to understand how these substances can affect humans.” This is an information-era story. It’s everything from chat groups where people are sharing different ideas, to exchanges between users and suppliers, and then the chemistry know-how is also being shared. One way to appreciate the magnitude of the problem is to see how easy it is to change these molecules. “So this is MDMA and these are all being manufactured to really elicit similar responses. Methylone, ethylone, butylone, dimethylone, we’ve seen all of those. The left side of the molecule in all of these is the same. It’s really the right side of the molecule that’s different.” Why can’t we just outlaw all drugs of a certain class or type, wouldn’t that simply solve the problem? “The challenge is there’s been so many examples and stories of that leading to even more potent drugs. You kind go through this roller coaster of one substance emerging because another has been scheduled, and then you have that going away, a new substance emerging, new substance emerging over time. So do you like the thing that’s dangerous to the power of five, or do you want the thing that’s dangerous to the power of 100?” Understanding the science and the chemistry is vital to at least knowing what we’re dealing with in this supply. And that way, ideally, we could frame public policy that would get at the problem and not make it worse.

NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first to send humans around the moon in half a century, is slated to launch Wednesday. It will be piloted by one of Southern California’s own.

Victor Glover — a former Ontario High School wrestler and Navy test pilot who often wears his excitement on his royal-blue jumpsuit sleeve — will be the first Black person to reach the moon. The mission is a lunar flyby, so the crew will not land on the moon or enter lunar orbit.

Glover, 49, became the first Black person to serve on an International Space Station expedition in 2020.

“That cannot be right,” Livingston Holder, a former manned spaceflight engineer with the Air Force and space shuttle payload specialist, recalled thinking when he first heard that fact. “How can we go two decades without flying a Black astronaut on a full mission to the station? How can that possibly be?”

Yet, it’s true: Several trailblazing Black astronauts stayed aboard for several days while helping build the ISS on space shuttle missions. None had lived aboard for months on end as an expedition crew member afterward.

For Glover, the achievement — and title of “first” — stirred complicated feelings. In the flurries of media interviews that come with life as an astronaut, he acknowledged the deep responsibility he felt toward the next generations of Black astronauts he hoped to inspire. At the same time, he often reframed his role into NASA’s greater mission and pointed to the many Black trailblazers, such as Holder, before him.

“He’d probably been the first Black person to do X, Y or Z,” said Holder, whose planned mission to space was ultimately canceled after the Challenger disaster in 1986. And since Glover, a team player, was not the first person to serve on an ISS expedition or reach the moon, but instead the first Black person to do so, “I don’t think he really wanted to emphasize ‘I’m the first,’” Holder added.

Glover wasn’t really supposed to be the first Black person to serve on an ISS expedition, either. In 2018, Jeanette Epps was scheduled to join a Russian Soyuz mission to the ISS, which would have given her the title, but five months before the mission, NASA suddenly benched her without explanation.

And while he was aboard the ISS, many Black Americans — including Glover — were forced to grapple with more Earthly challenges. Just months before launch, a white police officer murdered George Floyd in the streets of Minneapolis.

It’s a familiar tension in Black America: The Apollo program began during the peak of the civil rights movement. Many criticized the program as a distraction from the country’s problems and a waste of money that the government could instead use to better the lives of everyday Americans.

During the training for his moon mission, Glover listened to the poem “Whitey on the Moon” by the late Black poet and jazz musician Gil Scott-Heron — which articulates those arguments painfully and pointedly — every week on his morning commute to ground himself in his work.

Glover undergoes spacesuit checks inside the crew quarters suit-up room in the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building as part of the Artemis II Countdown Demonstration Test at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center on Dec. 20, 2025.

(NASA/Glenn Benson)

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For Glover, space exploration is an opportunity to lift all Americans and invest in technology that creates hope for a better future.

“Every time you are the first — the first person in your family to go to college, the first person from your school to get a PhD … it’s important for all the people that start where you started,” Holder said. Now they can say, “‘Oh, it is possible.’”

For Black parents in Pomona and beyond who see the next generation of NASA astronauts in their cute, nerdy children, Glover’s example is deeply meaningful.

Glover, born in 1976 in Pomona, was an adrenaline junkie who dreamed of being everything from a stuntman to a race car driver. His parents, a police officer and a bookkeeper, encouraged his curiosity. The young astronaut-to-be also looked up to his grandfather, who enlisted in the Air Force during the Korean War, but was told he couldn’t fly because of his race.

When a young Glover watched a space shuttle launch on television, he immediately wanted to drive the thing.

His first attempt to leave Earth was through sports — pole vaulting, to be specific. Throughout his time at Ontario High and Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, Glover also added football into the mix and ultimately became best known for his wrestling prowess (despite feeling quite intimidated by his college teammate at the time, Chuck Liddell, who ultimately became an MMA star).

Gregg Givens, an English teacher at Ontario who coached football at the time, remembered Glover as a very nice, very smart kid. “He was marching to his own drummer,” Givens said. “I know that’s a cliche way to say things, but … he was going to do what Victor was going to do.”

After getting a bachelor’s degree in engineering, Glover enlisted in the Navy in 1998. Over his 15 years in the military, he accumulated 3,500 flying hours in more than 40 aircraft, a few master’s degrees along the way, and served in 24 combat missions.

One of his commanding officers bestowed on him a call sign that’s stuck through his NASA days: “Ike,” meaning “I know everything.” (It’s a sensibility his four daughters surely appreciated when Glover, a family man at his core, checks in from space to help them with their homework.)

Like many others before him — including Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon — Glover cut his teeth as a test pilot out in the Mojave. He attended test pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base, the site of many daring Armstrong flights and space shuttle landings, then served with the Navy’s Dust Devil test pilot squadron in China Lake, Calif.

In 2013, while Glover was in Washington, D.C., on assignment as a Navy legislative fellow, he happened to miss a phone call from NASA. After frantically calling back, he got the news: He was one of eight selected out of a pool of more than 6,000 for the space agency’s 21st class of astronauts.

On Artemis II, he won’t be the only “first” on the capsule: NASA astronaut Christina Koch is set to be the first woman to reach the moon, and Jeremy Hansen, an astronaut with the Canadian Space Agency, is set to be the first non-American to do so.

Holder, whom Glover has pointed to as a mentor, is happy to live vicariously through Glover’s generation of Black astronauts.

On a recent trip to Australia, Holder, now a co-founder of the spaceflight startup Radian Aerospace, stopped by one of the many stations that will help the astronauts communicate with Earth to send Glover a message ahead of launch:

“Through you, we all go to the moon.”