'This is how I'm going to land': New NASA astronaut candidate's helicopter skills could come in handy on the moon

New NASA astronaut candidate Ben Bailey thinks that his 2,000 flight hours here on Earth might come in handy during a moon landing.

The 38-year-old U.S. Army helicopter pilot can't remember what first got him interested in flying, but what got him interested in NASA is clear: As a kid, Bailey saw the 1995 moon-mission movie "Apollo 13," which famously uses U.S. Navy helicopters to recreate the real-life splashdown that brought that dramatic, near-catastrophic mission to a safe close.

As "Apollo 13" replayed in theaters this week 30 years after its release, Bailey touched down in the agency's newly announced 10-person 2025 astronaut class — on his first try. Two years of basic training lie in front of Bailey (who doesn't yet know what he'll be asked to do first), but the future brings an intriguing possibility: a new generation of missions to the moon, where experience in flying helicopters should be a boon for NASA's Artemis mission training cycle.

Bailey emphasized that he is brand-new to the agency and therefore not versed in the specifics of, say, recent mountain training in Colorado that astronauts performed with a LUH-72 Lakota. But he has 30-plus aircraft types on his pilot resume, including famed rotary wing craft such as the UH-60 Black Hawk and CH-47F Chinook.

When asked, Bailey cited one advantage of lunar training with a helicopter: landing with no runways. "We don't have, really, a landing environment that could accommodate much forward speed at all," Bailey told Space.com in an exclusive phone interview on Monday (Sept. 22), hours after he and the other nine newly minted astronaut candidates were revealed during a ceremony at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Helicopters perform vertical takeoffs and landings like moon landers, and Bailey said he can imagine the "external stimuli that you see and feel" on a chopper being "fairly similar" to a dusty, lunar environment. Bailey noted that in the U.S. Army, where he serves in the Warrant Officer corps, dusty landings are a fairly common part of flight training.

"It's some of our most intense takeoffs and landings," he said. "As you come in on an approach to a landing zone, you're always assessing to see if you think there's going to be dust, and how thick the dust is going to be. Then, when you decide that this is going to be a dusty landing, your technique becomes very specific: 'This is how I'm going to land, because at some point I'm going to lose sight of the ground, and if I lose sight of the ground, I need to make sure that I'm in a safe position to land, still.'"

He explained that in a "dusty scenario," you need to set yourself up at a high altitude during the approach, "where you can almost change nothing with the helicopter, and have it continue on its trajectory all the way to its touchdown point." That takes a lot of training time at the controls, he emphasized, to learn to fly with as few "inputs" as possible before touching the ground.

Astronauts who landed on the moon with the Apollo program appear to have used a similar technique. Neil Armstrong, who became the first person to land a spacecraft on the moon during Apollo 11 in 1969, said in his authorized biography "First Man" (Simon & Schuster, 2005) that he initially set up the Eagle lunar module with slight forward momentum to avoid tipping back into any unseen divots behind him. But after scanning the ground, Armstrong deliberately stopped that motion just above the surface, to allow for a straight drop.

As for the dust, Armstrong laconically remarked that trying to spot (and navigate by) stationary rocks through the dust sheet below meant "I spent more time trying to arrest translational velocity than I thought would be necessary."

Bailey graduated from the famed U.S. Naval Test Pilot School and served as an experimental test pilot. These experiences together have helped him, Bailey said, with assessing risks during planning, mitigating those risks and then applying the lessons learned on a mission.

"I think that going into space is going to be very similar," he said, in "that every flight is almost a test flight, that you're going out into the unknown."