Jason Hutt ’98: “A dream made real” with Artemis II

Jason Hutt ‘98 serves as the Orion Program Systems Engineering & Integration Manager and Orion Human Rating Lead for Artemis II. He was selected to be one of NASA’s Artemis II Mission Evaluation Room (MER) Managers for the upcoming Artemis II mission, currently planned to launch in March 2026, and served as an Orion Shift Lead during processing of the spacecraft for flight. The Artemis II mission will send astronauts around the Moon in the Orion Spacecraft, the first crewed mission to the Moon since 1972.

Jason shared more with us about his role in Artemis II, his life-long dream of sending people into space, and how his WPI experience helped make it a reality.

Interested in connecting with Jason? Find him on LinkedIn. 

Q: Set the stage for Artemis II. Why is this such a big deal?

A: Artemis II is NASA’s first crewed mission to the Moon since Apollo 16 splashed down in April of 1972. This will be the first crewed flight of NASA’s Artemis campaign through which we’ll establish the architecture to further explore the Moon and enable human exploration beyond the Moon.

This will be the first flight of the full Orion spacecraft, which has been designed to enable human space exploration beyond Low Earth Orbit. This will be the first flight of Orion life support systems, crew spacecraft controls, crew support systems, and several crew survival methods that are in place to give the crew a fighting chance in otherwise unsurvivable scenarios. This will be a shakedown flight through which we’ll see how well our new systems allow the crew to complete the mission and keep them reasonably safe throughout.

Q: What are your biggest dreams for where a successful launch of Artemis II could lead?

A: The practical next step after Artemis II will be to actually land on the Moon. We currently have two landers in development by SpaceX and Blue Origin that will allow for the first Moon landings since the Apollo program.

That’s the practical answer—the dream is to enable human exploration beyond the Moon.

We’re flying new systems and new approaches that will hopefully help astronauts execute missions beyond Low Earth Orbit for decades to come. While Orion is only intended to fly as a standalone spacecraft for missions up to 21 days, it would be part of a broader integrated system for any crewed mission to Mars or elsewhere.

Q: Tell us about your role in this mission.

A: I’ve had a fairly substantial role in bringing the Artemis II mission to fruition. When I started on Orion, I was the Crew Systems Integration Lead, responsible for ensuring the integrated spacecraft design allowed the astronauts to successfully complete missions. I shepherded the cabin design through its final Critical Design Review back in 2018, so this will be a chance to see how all that work panned out.

This year, I’ve had several major challenges to complete to ensure we stayed on track to launch in March of this year. In April of 2025, I was responsible for leading the System Acceptance Review & Design Certification Review for the Artemis II Orion Spacecraft. 

Once the spacecraft was turned over, MER Managers served as Orion Shift Leads during processing. Processing activities include loading up fuel, oxidizer, oxygen, and water; final assembly activities such as mating the Launch Abort System to the Orion Crew Module; and performing continuity checks for communications systems or operational checkouts of mechanical systems like our hatches.

Spacecraft processing was a 24/7 operation. Our job as shift leads was to help the team work through any issues they encountered with the spacecraft.

I served in this role immediately after getting the spacecraft turned over and throughout the summer and early fall. At that point, I turned my attention to leading the Orion Flight Readiness Review process. We determined that Orion was ready to support the Artemis II mission and obtained the Human Rating Certification of Orion and the overall Artemis architecture for Artemis II.

In parallel with all of this, we’ve been completing training for the Artemis II mission through a series of simulations that started early in 2025, including launch and landing, a manual piloting demonstration we’ll perform on the first day of the mission, and the trans lunar injection burn we’ll execute on day 2 or 3 that will send us on our trajectory around the Moon and back to Earth. 

MER managers lead the team in evaluating how the spacecraft is performing and then forecasting whether we think we’ll be able to execute the mission as planned or if we need to come up with an alternate plan. 

Q: When you were a student at WPI, what inspired you to pursue Aerospace? How did your WPI experience prepare you for your career?

A: My desire to get involved in aerospace started well before I went to WPI. My mom was 20 years old when Neil Armstrong first walked on the Moon in 1969. She was enthralled with it and introduced me to everything space-related that she could when I was just a little kid. She worked for a civil engineering firm and brought me home pads of graph paper that I would use to draw basic spacecraft layouts and schematics. Finding a school with an aerospace program was a top priority for me.

The most helpful preparation at WPI for this work was the team-based project work. There is no mission at NASA that can be completed by a single person. You’re always working with someone else whether it’s working within a given technical discipline designing, testing, or operating systems, or you’re working on big multi-disciplinary teams needed to complete complex mission objectives or the mission as a whole.

Q: What does it mean to you to play a part in this historic launch?

A: This has been my lifelong dream to send people off to explore further and further into the solar system. I’ve known I wanted to work in space exploration since I was 10.

Astronautics was my favorite course at WPI, figuring out how to get from one world to another. My IQP was writing the Advanced Space Design Journal in which we wrote about Professor Al Sacco’s Shuttle Mission, STS-73. My first job was commanding satellites for the Navy, then I started working at Johnson Space Center 26 years ago at the start of International Space Station (ISS) assembly. I was on the training team for the first ISS Expedition Crew.

Now, I’ve played a significant role in sending people to the Moon for the first time in my lifetime, something nobody under 50 has ever seen. This is a dream made real.

Q: What advice would you give to today’s WPI students looking to launch careers in aerospace?

A: Be patient. You may not start at the dream job. You may have to start off commanding a communications satellite at 3am from a remote outpost on the coast of Maine where it’s -14 degrees outside. You do that job well and keep an eye on when other programs and projects ramp-up, and be ready to put your name in the ring.