How cool is this?

As astronauts lifted off on the Artemis II mission, traveling farther into space than humans have ever gone before, one of our own was part of the team that made it happen.

Nick Houghton (Michigan State ’15) has been working behind the scenes at NASA as part of the Crew Survival Engineering Team, helping design the Orion Crew Survival System Suit, or OCSS suit. This is the suit astronauts rely on during launch, flight, and recovery. It is not just a uniform. It is a critical safety system designed to protect astronauts in extreme and unpredictable conditions.

This week, all of that work turned into something real.

“It’s hard to describe the immense feeling that my team and I felt as that rocket flew off the pad,” Houghton shared. “So many years of hard work… and then we watched our friends take a ride into space on the biggest rocket to ever fly people. It was amazing in so many ways.”

The Artemis II mission is a major step forward for human spaceflight. It is the first crewed mission to orbit the Moon in more than 50 years and a key milestone in NASA’s plan to return humans to the lunar surface.

And in a small but meaningful way, Delta Sigma Phi is part of that story.

Nick’s work on the OCSS suit helps ensure astronauts can safely complete the mission, even in contingency scenarios. The suit acts almost like a personal spacecraft, supporting astronauts with everything from pressure and protection to survival systems if something goes wrong . It is one piece of a massive effort, but an incredibly important one.

It is not every day you can say a brother helped send humans farther into space than ever before.

We are proud. We are excited. And we are inspired by the role our members continue to play in shaping the future.

To learn more about Nick’s journey to NASA and the work behind the OCSS suit, check out the full feature in the Spring 2025 issue of The Carnation.