The Colorado National Guard’s High-Altitude Army National Guard Aviation Training Site hosted Charlie Duke, one of only 12 NASA astronauts to have walked on the moon, July 8, 2024.
HAATS, based in Gypsum, Colorado, teaches military rotary-wing pilots from around the world the knowledge and confidence to safely operate their aircraft at maximum gross weights in any environment—especially at high altitudes.
Since 2021, HAATS has been building a partnership with NASA, training astronauts on power management and rotary wing operations at higher elevations. Duke’s tour was as much an opportunity for him to see current NASA training as it was an opportunity for him to offer insights from his own experience.
“It was an incredible opportunity to learn from an astronaut who personally walked on the moon,” said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Scott Tucker, HAATS commander. “He described his experience to us which demonstrated how complex landing on the moon can be. He also validated our training program with NASA to prepare Artemis astronauts to return to the moon and how we can improve that training.”
NASA’s current mission, Artemis, is to return mankind to the moon and then set their sights on Mars. Although most NASA pilots come from a fixed-wing background, recent determinations from NASA have shown that lunar operations are more aligned with rotary-wing operations. NASA’s goal in partnering with HAATS is to build a program that will give every astronaut a shared base of knowledge that covers some of the challenges associated with landing on the moon.
“The best way to understand how to be successful is to go back and figure out what we learned in the 60s when we did those Apollo landings,” U.S. Army Lt. Col. Anne McClain, NASA astronaut, said.
McClain attended a HAATS course three years ago at the onset of the program.
“In pulling out all the debriefs we looked at the ‘lessons learned’ from a crew-training perspective,” she said. “What did it look like, what did it feel like, what skills did they need, were there skills that they felt that they were lacking? What we need to do is make sure that when we go back to the moon, we're even more prepared than they were.”
McClain and U.S. Marine Maj. Jasmin Moghbeli were the first two astronauts to come to HAATS with the overarching goal of determining whether such a program would be beneficial to NASA.
While at HAATS, McClain and Moghbeli focused on “brown out” operations, power management, flight controls, team communication, and visual illusions. A “brown out” or “white out” is defined as when dust particles blow around the outside of an aircraft making visual landing difficult. This is something that all Apollo missions recorded encountering when landing on the moon.
Incidentally, all of these parts are already built into the curriculum of HAATS and so a natural partnership has developed.
Doug Wheelock, a NASA astronaut since 1998 and former Army aviator, has been a regular at HAATS, having visited more than 15 times since 2021. During that time, he has been instrumental in helping build the curriculum taught to NASA’s other astronauts.
“As Charlie described to us…the Apollo astronauts learned to fly helicopters to incorporate vestibular and proprioceptive motion cueing into their training,” Wheelock said. “Our Artemis astronauts are partnering with the Colorado team at HAATS to build a mastery-level training course to prepare our astronauts to land on the lunar surface.”
Wheelock was part of the official party to tour HAATS with Charlie Duke and, later, the two flew together to various landing zones used in NASA’s program.
Fifty-five years ago this month, Apollo 11 landed on the moon; Wheelock was nine years old.
“I remember hearing Charlie Duke’s voice as the Capsule Communicator in Mission Control in Houston,” Wheelock said. “Apollo inspired generations of explorers and scientists, pilots and astronauts. Those were profound moments in time and proved to be defining moments in my life.”
Speaking more on his personal experience with Duke, Wheelock continued: “We briefed Charlie Duke on our Artemis training strategy, and he flew with us on our NASA lunar-analog trajectories into our most challenging landing zones.”
While many may recognize that Apollo and Artemis are both the names of historical Greek gods, their connection is not so commonly known. Both were twins born to Leto and Zeus with Apollo being associated with sunlight while Artemis is connected to moonlight.
“This was a thrilling moment not just for our NASA-HAATS team, but for all of us as Americans – the opportunity to bridge Apollo to Artemis,” Wheelock said. “We are going back to the moon and training with the HAATS team to get there.”