Tim Goddard: The Man Who Brings Artemis Astronauts Home

When NASA's Artemis II astronauts return from their mission around the Moon, a team of U.S. Navy divers and NASA personnel will be there to recover them from their Orion spacecraft. Leading this complex operation is Tim Goddard, NASA's open water lead, ensuring the safe recovery of both the Orion capsule and its crew after they splash down in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego.

Listen to this audio excerpt from Tim Goddard, NASA open water lead:

As the open water lead, Tim Goddard's responsibilities are vast and critical. He oversees the entire process, from design and certification to procurement and training, for both the NASA and Navy teams involved. His role includes:

Goddard also manages the hardware and operations required to safely retrieve the crew and spacecraft from the ocean and transport them aboard an amphibious Navy ship.

The recovery operation is a highly coordinated effort involving multiple teams and resources. "This is a very complex set of operations," Goddard explains. "We have six small boats in the water, relying on four separate helicopters and the host Navy ship simultaneously. We have over 50 folks in the water and in different boats. I have team members underwater, on the surface, and small boats moving all around."

This intricate ballet requires seamless coordination of:

"It’s a large orchestration of personnel and hardware to just enable recovery of the astronauts from the capsule — and then, we have to recover the spacecraft in the well deck of the Navy ship, which can be up to nine hours later," Goddard emphasizes.

To ensure a smooth recovery, Goddard and his team engage in extensive training exercises long before the actual mission. These exercises begin with simulations using representative Orion hardware at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The NBL, one of the world’s largest indoor pools, allows for large-scale underwater and topside operations training.

The team then moves to San Diego, where they conduct training in bay operations before progressing to open ocean conditions that mimic those expected on recovery day.

“By the time they do the real mission, they have hours and hours on each type of facet or each phase of that recovery,” Goddard says. “We bring them out and then we just go through repetition after repetition. When we do the real thing, it’s not their first time seeing it.”

This mission marks Goddard's third time overseeing the recovery of an Orion capsule. He led the recovery efforts for Orion’s first flight, Exploration Flight Test-1 in 2014, and Artemis I, the uncrewed test flight around the Moon in 2022.

“We were strictly focused on capsule recovery for both of those flights,” Goddard explains. “Now we introduced humans to the loop with a flight crew being in the capsule. Our primary focus has shifted from recovering the capsule to recovering the crew first. Once we get the crew safe and sound on the ship, we transfer our focus and shift our operations to the recovery of the capsule.”

Goddard's involvement with the Orion recovery team began in 2007, and he has served as the open water lead for over a decade. His career at NASA started in the 1990s, following a 27-year career as a Navy diver. Initially, he worked in dive operations at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab before transitioning to mechanical engineering.

"Over half of my time at NASA has been supporting this operation. That's a long time, and to finally have the Moon mission go off and bring the folks back — it's an immense pleasure. I am very excited and proud to be able to support this mission," Goddard shares.