Davidson Technologies’ contribution is shaping human spaceflight.

In the wake of Artemis II’s historic success, propelling humans farther than ever before, Davidson engineers are preparing for formal testing on Artemis III.

“For the next six months, we’ll do everything necessary to make sure Artemis III has a safe and successful flight,” said Bill Hartsell, lead systems engineer for NASA’s Integrated Avionics Test Facility.

He and his Davidson colleagues, Jill McCutcheon and Marilyn Linton, support the design, maintenance and operation of the System Integration Lab, or SIL, at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. It’s a six-degree-of-freedom, or 6DOF, hardware-in-the-loop facility for the Space Launch System.

NASA said the SLS is “the most powerful and capable rocket” it’s ever built and the first “designed to meet the challenges of the journey to Mars.”

The 6DOF simulation Hartsell’s team employs provides realistic flight conditions for the SLS’s integrated avionics and flight software suite, allowing engineers to accurately test how the vehicle would actually perform. The space agency calls it the “test like you fly” standard.

The modeling includes the forces and environmental stimuli the SLS would encounter in space. It even emulates Kennedy Space Center’s Ground Operations and Johnson Space Center’s Ground Control communications.

Once the engineers verify the components are working well, then they play what Hartsell calls the “what if game.” “What if this piece breaks? What if that piece is not performing to 100% of its capacity? First and foremost, can we keep the crew safe?” said Hartsell. 

Artemis’s second flight took astronauts around the Moon for the first time in more than half a century. Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen made up the crew. In late 2023, Wiseman and Koch visited the SIL.

“When they saw the complexity of our facility and we explained the rigor of our test program and the terabytes of data that we have generated over the years, it gave them a very comforting feeling,” Hartsell said.

On April 1, he excitedly watched the latest Artemis launch from his couch, seated next to his wife, while some of his colleagues worked the mission from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

“You’re sitting there on the edge of your seat. You’re just praying that everything goes well, all the data holds up, and the brave astronauts have a good ride,” Hartsell said. 

And they did. “It was very gratifying to understand that what we do led directly to that success,” he added.

The sight also awed Pedro Capó-Lugo, Ph.D., Davidson’s senior modeling and simulation lead. He posted on LinkedIn, “Launches never stop giving me chills.”

Capó-Lugo previously worked on a NASA team that managed the control design of space vehicles, including the SLS.

“I was on the board that approved it for flight. My NASA career started in the Constellation Program under President Bush, and I performed the controllability analysis for all of the vehicle variations from Ares V to Artemis I,” he said.

Despite the thrill of the launch and the gratification of the landing, he finds validation to be the most rewarding phase.

“Using flight recordings, engineers validate models, simulations, and control system performance against actual flight behavior,” explained Capó-Lugo. “This is where systems engineering truly comes to life—closing the loop between prediction and reality, reducing uncertainty, and strengthening confidence in future missions.”

The simulation data from Artemis I and II testing aligns with actual flight data from both missions, said Hartsell, “so, we’re very, very pleased with that.”

Both men believe inspiring the next generation of physicists, engineers and astronauts is crucial. 

“The spinoffs and the technologies that we’re going to find, the efficiencies, the shielding, the power generation, communications — all of this is very, very important,” said Hartsell, “and we need to have the enthusiasm in the younger generation to carry that torch and bring all of this to fruition. I look forward to seeing what’s going to happen over the next 15 or 20 years. It’s going to be amazing.”