With only 12 minutes left before the Trans-Lunar Injection burn, Orion’s caution and warning display lit up “Cabin Leak Suspected.”
For Zach Huffaker ’15, serving as flight lead for the Emergency and Environmental Consumables Manager flight controller console during NASA’s Artemis II mission, this was the nightmare scenario.
The TLI burn is a propulsive maneuver that accelerates a spacecraft beyond Earth’s gravitational pull and onto a trajectory that intercepts the moon. The burn is a critical milestone that requires precise timing and is often called the “point of no return.”
“That burn commits you to the moon. There are ways to abort and exit that trajectory to come home sooner, but it’s on the order of multiple days because of how much speed you gain,” Huffaker said. “So, the TLI burn is a big moment not just for the crew and mission control teams but for NASA as an agency.”
Seeing the warning, Huffaker’s heart rate skyrocketed, but his extensive training and experience also kicked in.
“EECOM’s responsibility, if you see a message like this, is to lock into a very specific leadership response and rhythm,” Huffaker said. “We immediately point the crew and the rest of the ground teams to specific procedures with the goal of establishing the crew’s safety first and foremost. If this is a real cabin leak, it is absolutely an ‘abort mission’ moment. We’re not going to the moon.”
The team quickly reviewed its data and recalled that moments earlier, it had commanded a change to its system while the crew was exercising for the first time. Because of how the spacecraft system and sensors are designed, one of the cabin fans created just enough of a data transient to make Orion’s software think there might be a cabin leak.
Thankfully, Huffaker and his team soon confirmed that the alert was a false alarm, and 10 minutes later, the NASA team successfully executed a TLI burn for the first time in 53 years.
It was a moment that captured both the intensity and triumph of the Artemis II mission — and was a defining experience in Huffaker’s journey from JBU student to achieving his dream of NASA flight controller.
Growing up, Huffaker had a unique curiosity for math and science, sparked by the symbols and equations he saw in encyclopedias. In fourth grade, he made a discovery that, like the TLI burn, propelled him onto a new trajectory. He was born on July 20, the same month and day that Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon 24 years earlier. This ignited Huffaker’s passion not just for math and science but for space exploration itself.
“Growing up in the ’90s, we were getting amazing images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the space shuttle program was humming along and the International Space Station was beginning assembly,” Huffaker said. “All of that, combined with the Apollo 13 movie, fed into my inspiration to someday work at NASA’s mission control.”
In high school, Huffaker decided to pursue an education that would lead to becoming a flight controller for NASA. JBU’s engineering program stood out for its senior design project, which involved competing in NASA’s annual robotics competition at the Kennedy Space Center.
“That was a big deal to me,” Huffaker said. “I thought it could be a great opportunity to get my foot in the door at NASA.”
Huffaker enrolled at JBU in August 2011 and majored in mechanical engineering. He shared his aspirations to work at NASA, and his professors encouraged and equipped him with tools and experiences to help him realize his dream.
In the summer of 2014, Huffaker received funding from the Arkansas Space Grant Consortium for a summer internship working at Kennedy Space Center’s Swamp Works Lab, the same lab that hosted the annual senior design robotics competition. After graduating from JBU in 2015, Huffaker started his career at NASA, supporting the International Space Station mission control team in the ETHOS flight controller group — the equivalent to EECOM.
In March 2025, Huffaker transitioned to full-time support of the Artemis program.
The goal of NASA’s Artemis program is twofold: to develop the technologies to establish a lunar base — a permanent American presence on the moon — and to deploy those proven technologies to send humans to the surface of Mars.
Huffaker said that to get to the lunar surface, a vehicle is needed to transport astronauts to the moon and return them safely to Earth. The Artemis II mission was designed to demonstrate that the Orion spacecraft could do so successfully.
“We haven’t been to the moon and back since 1972,” said Huffaker. “We needed to put our completely new spacecraft, new hardware and software through similar tests that we put the Apollo spacecraft through in the ’60s.”
Throughout the 10-day Artemis II mission, Huffaker worked seven shifts at the EECOM flight controller console — the physical workstation in the flight control room, which is staffed 24/7 during a mission like Artemis II. A standard shift varied but typically lasted nine to 10 hours.
EECOM is the group responsible for several different onboard subsystems that work together to provide a breathable and habitable environment as well as consumables such as water, oxygen and nitrogen.
“The two emergencies you can have onboard Orion are either a cabin fire or a cabin leak, which is where you’re losing atmosphere and pressure in the vehicle. The EECOM console is responsible for both of those,” Huffaker explained.
As the flight lead for Artemis II, Huffaker had to constantly step back to take the 100,000-foot view and ensure the EECOM team’s priorities and actions aligned with the objectives of the mission.
On the days Huffaker wasn’t at the console, he was still on-site, supporting technical meetings on behalf of his team.
In addition to being the Artemis II EECOM flight lead, Huffaker served as crew instructor for the astronauts in the lead up to the mission, preparing them for emergency response.
Along with the false alarm before the TLI burn, Huffaker said that the Orion spacecraft’s reentry was another pivotal moment.
“Reentry is one of the most apprehensive moments you go through as an operations team, because we’re in blackout,” Huffaker said. “We’re completely out of the loop, and there’s nothing we can do. It is all on the crew and vehicle at that point.”
He explained that as a vehicle reenters Earth’s atmosphere, it moves so fast that air molecules ionize around it, encapsulating the vehicle in hot plasma that blocks all communication.
“We were all waiting for the crew to get through reentry and establish that first call with us, ‘Hey Houston, we got you loud and clear.’ The moment when we all felt relief was when we heard the voice of the crew,” Huffaker said. “As soon as they splashed down and reported that they and the vehicle were doing great, we celebrated our first crewed, deep-space mission since 1972.”
After Orion landed safely in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego on Friday, April 10, Navy recovery forces took over, and Huffaker and his team’s responsibility for Artemis II came to an end.
While the Artemis II mission may have ended, the Artemis program continues to gain momentum.
“The agency is moving at warp speed to get Artemis III flown in 2027, so even during and immediately following the Artemis II mission, the agency has continued working toward what’s next,” said Huffaker, who will continue serving as crew instructor and flight controller for EECOM. “Going forward, it’s going to be very challenging, but it’s also going to be a lot more fun.”
The goal of Artemis III will be to rendezvous and dock with one or both landers provided by SpaceX or Blue Origin in low Earth orbit, similar to the Apollo 9 mission flown in March 1969. Based on the lessons learned during that multivehicle interaction, the agency plans to land both Artemis IV and V missions on the moon’s surface before the end of 2028.
“The ultimate challenge of our lifetime is to successfully land humans on Mars,” Huffaker said. “It’s going to take the Artemis lunar surface missions to develop the technology that enables those longer-term missions to Mars.”
NASA still has significant technological obstacles to overcome to make a Mars landing possible. One is the major communications delay between mission control and any spacecraft near Mars. A two-way conversation could have lags of 40 to 45 minutes between sending and receiving. This will force astronauts and future space vehicles to become more self-sustaining compared to NASA’s current and previous vehicles, which have relied heavily on support from ground teams in mission control.
“While that technology will be developed during the Artemis program, it will take several years, possibly even decades, to learn all of the lessons required before we can take that much larger step of landing on Mars,” Huffaker said.
This article is from the summer 2026 edition of the Brown Bulletin. Access the full issue.