Artemis: Changing the Interaction Paradigm

17 July 2026

NASA has unveiled fresh details of its Artemis programme, taking another significant step towards returning humans to the Moon. The agency has announced the four prime crew members and a backup astronaut for the Artemis III test flight, while confirming that the mission will now carry out a series of complex tests in Earth orbit in 2027. These demonstrations will pave the way for Artemis IV in 2028, the first planned crewed mission to the lunar South Pole.

As NASA prepares for one of the most technically ambitious human spaceflight missions in decades, the evolution of the spacecraft itself is just as remarkable as the mission it will undertake. In this article, University of Wales Trinity Saint David’s Dr Nik Whitehead explores how the relationship between astronauts and spacecraft has transformed since the Apollo era, with Artemis representing a fundamental shift in the way humans interact with technology in space.

Two Nasa employees working inside a space ship environment.

Artemis: Changing the Interaction Paradigm

Spaceships weren’t always so shiny

As we all watched the footage of the Artemis II crew in their Orion capsule we saw just what we’d expect of a high-tech spacecraft – glass screens with computer-generated displays and cursor-driven interfaces. Not quite Star Trek: The Next Generation but definitely heading in that direction.

Now think back to the grainy black and white footage of the Apollo systems. Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins surrounded by walls of switches, dials, and buttons. Analogue displays and a small numeric keypad. Long routines of buttons to press and dials to turn to keep them alive and on-course.

The changes we’ve seen over the last half-century don’t just reflect an increase in the computer power available to manned spaceflight, they also show an underlying change in how we expect humans to interact with their ships.

The Apollo model – humans adapt, computers don’t.

The Apollo cockpit design was constrained by the early computer technology. The original Apollo Guidance System was a 16-bit machine that ran on 4KB of RAM; limited and slow compared to a modern PC. This resulted in the human crew having to undertake a great deal of the operational workload, entering commands through a numerical interface known as the DSKY (display and keyboard).

The DSKY accepted commands as pairs of numbers, each between 00 and 90, requiring the astronauts to memorise these codes and enter them in long sequences. This, of course, placed a huge cognitive workload on the astronauts; a problem that wasn’t helped by the fact that other controls and displays were spread across multiple panels. It therefore took time for the astronauts to scan their work environment and work out the ship’s current status.

The computer reliably responded to these commands, but the humans had to adapt to how the computer needed those commands to be presented. The burden of interpretation rested squarely on the humans.

The Space Shuttle – cutting the workload

By the time the space shuttle came into use in the 1980s, improvements in technology allowed the designers to add computer display screens to the familiar buttons, switches and dials. This hybrid system meant that information could be displayed more effectively, removing the need for some controls, but the system still needed a lot of monitoring. Controls and displays were still scattered across multiple panels, making it necessary for them to synthesise information from many different systems to work effectively.

As a reusable spacecraft the shuttle was continuously upgraded, and in 2000 the first ‘glass cockpit’ system was introduced. These 11 flat-screen monitors replaced many of the old dials and gauges with full-colour, configurable displays. In terms of reducing astronaut cognitive workload these were a huge step forward, bringing all of the necessary information together in one place, grouped by function. Even so, the astronauts still had to monitor individual systems rather than interacting with a unified interface.

Artemis – designed for humans

By the time NASA were designing the Orion crew module for the Artemis programme, computers and their interfaces had taken further leaps forward. The cockpit is no longer defined by hardware, but rather by software. Reconfigurable screens provide information as it is needed through different phases of the mission. The astronauts are no longer being asked to interpret raw data from multiple sources spread across the cockpit. Instead, the system will organise the data and present it to them in a manner that helps them quickly understand it. Rather than continually executing operations they now have time to think about problems and make good decisions.

The astronaut’s role is no longer to control the system, it is to supervise it and step in if anything unexpected happens. The ship’s onboard systems monitor the raw data automatically and can carry out normal operations without human input. This marks a significant shift from ‘hands-on control’ to ‘supervisory control’ for the astronauts, relieving them of a lot of workload and allowing their time to be devoted to other mission tasks. The human remains an important part of the mission, but they now interact with the computing systems at a higher level through a simple cursor-controlled interface.

Changing the paradigm

In moving from Apollo to Artemis more than just the technology has changed. The whole human-computer interaction has evolved with it. In Apollo, the humans adapted to the computer. The space shuttle was more flexible but still an incredibly complex system that required careful management. For Artemis, though, the machine adapts to the human, presenting information and accepting commands in ways that support the human’s capabilities.

This has clear advantages in that it reduces workload, improves safety, and makes training more efficient. But it also raises some new challenges: if the systems become more autonomous then it’s more difficult for the astronauts to understand why they are doing unexpected things. Designing interfaces that support both trust and understanding will be an ongoing challenge.

As we head back to the Moon, then to Mars and beyond, the spacecraft systems will get more powerful, including more machine learning elements and advanced decision support tools. This is a big step forward in computing capability, but it is not enough. We will also develop ways to improve the partnership between the ship and the humans it carries, allowing them to manage information, reduce workload, and make high-stakes decisions under extreme conditions.

Top pic: credit NASA

Second pic: Dr Nik Whitehead