Local man led Artemis II team

HURON — A man with area ties played a key role in a universal, groundbreaking space exploration mission, captivating the world earlier this month. Robert Dence, a 2002 Huron High School graduate, works for Lockheed Martin Space as a mechanical engineer manager in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. He just hit his 20th work anniversary with Lockheed Martin. He's currently working on the Mk7 Re-entry Body within the Fleet Ballistic Missile Program, which supports the U.S. Navy and its partners. With his team, for Artemis II, he led efforts, namely designing and building the door/side hatch, serving as critical infrastructure that allowed astronauts on this mission — in this case, four — to enter and exit the spacecraft. Before Artemis II, the last time humans traveled beyond low Earth orbit occurred with the Apollo missions. The final Apollo mission occurred in 1972. Robert, a former all-Ohio football quarterback with Huron in 2001, also worked on the Orion spacecraft as part of Artemis I — a 25-day uncrewed journey around the moon in 2022. Artemis I served as a precursor, testing the hardware, before a crew went aboard. It served as a verification mission. On April 1, Artemis II launched a nearly 10-day voyage around the moon. NASA deemed the Artemis II mission an overwhelming success, congratulating its astronauts — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — who ended this journey by splashing down on April 10 in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego. "At their farthest point, the crew traveled 252,756 miles from Earth (covering a total of 694,481 miles), setting a record for the greatest distance humans have traveled in space and observing the lunar surface like never before," according to a statement from NASA. This doesn't end this space exploration era. Quite the opposite, in fact. Going forward, "Under Artemis, NASA will send astronauts on increasingly complex missions to explore the moon for scientific discovery, economic benefit and to prepare for future human missions to Mars," the statement read. And the work done by Robert and his team will help with future Artemis missions. Many people congratulated Robert for his invaluable role and long-term commitment to this mission and others. This would include his wife, Megan; their three children: Madison, Mackenzie and Scott; along with his parents, Thomas and Kathleen, who still live in Huron. "He's worked for many years on this project, and it is incredible to see his work put into action in space," Megan said. "So proud of you." Speaking up Robert recently spoke with the Register about his contributions to Artemis II: Q: What is your connection to the Huron area? RD: I have lived in Huron my entire life until college — minus a six-month stint in Athens, Georgia, when my dad went on a teaching sabbatical at the University of Georgia and the whole family went down) I am also a 2002 Huron High School graduate. Q: Where do you live now? RD: I currently reside outside of Philadelphia in the city of Phoenixville. After college, I spent 16 years in Littleton, Colorado, except for a six-month rotation in San Francisco. Q: What role did you have in the Artemis II initiative RD: The timing worked out perfectly for this role. I just completed the second launch of our weather satellite for the GOES-R program and with all my hardware for the future satellites built and on the shelf, I was looking for a new opportunity. Note: The GOES-R program is an advanced fleet of geostationary weather satellites providing high-resolution, near-real-time imagery and atmospheric measurements of the Western Hemisphere. It helps to improve forecasting accuracy, storm tracking, and space weather monitoring. Within two days of telling my boss I was ready for a new opportunity, a manager from Orion reached out. The Artemis I side hatch just finished its performance test campaign, but the Orion team knew a complete redesign was required for Artemis II. That is exactly when I stepped in. My role as the principal engineer of the side hatch was to own the design, build, test and installation onto the crew module all while making sure all of the requirements flowed down from NASA were met. The role was perfect for me. I was leading a team of around 20 mechanical engineers and stress analysts from both Lockheed Martin and NASA. The beauty of my job was that I was able to work with a team of extremely smart and impressive individuals, and I was the one molding it all together into our final product. Q: How did your prior roles as an engineer prepare you for work on Artemis II? RD: I would definitely say that my previous role on the GOES-R weather satellite for eight years helped me out tremendously. I started as an engineer, designing a single gimbal, and worked my way up to being the principal engineer on six products, including one of the space instruments. Although these were all of a smaller scale to the Artemis II side hatch, it gave me insight into several critical areas, including exposure to the full life cycle of a program, learning about flight hardware, building my network of resources across the company and, most importantly, daily interactions and comfort with our NASA team members. With all of this experience on my side, I felt very comfortable when I started on the Orion program and was able to provide strong direction from the start. Q: What was it like to work on a project of this magnitude, significance, and importance? RD: This project was definitely one of those that you just couldn't wait to get to work each day because there was always the next task that you knew you had to complete that day. There was always a lot of pride because I knew my team was amazing. They were a blast to work with, but this wasn't easy. We ran into several design iterations, test failures and vendor hardware issues that kept each day different from the last or the next. One concept that always resonated with me that the program knew was critical to communicate was "the mission." This mindset or phrase was always a great reminder to motivate the team that we were all working on the next body to take humans into space and get them to the moon and back safely, something that hadn't been done in more than 50 years. Who doesn't think that working with rocket scientists isn't awesome? And it was something that I was lucky enough to do every single day. Q: What was it like watching the launch and descent, knowing you played a role in this mission? RD: Everything about space exploration is exciting, but the fact that I get to play a critical part in it is just mind-blowing. The launch itself was super-exciting. It's when my favorite part occurs, just after the launch countdown is completed and at the very beginning of takeoff as the entire sky is lit up by the plume of the launch vehicle. The nervous part was definitely post-landing as the recovery team was opening up the side hatch. There is a lot of nerves when six years of your work is about to be shown on national TV as those four amazing astronauts are about to egress from the crew module. Just seeing the hatch fully open finally put me at ease.