Fifty years ago this month, mission directors at the American space agency Nasa gave the final go-ahead to what would be humanity’s most recent odyssey to the moon. Few realized at the time that it would be more than half a century before NASA was ready to return, not least Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan, whose belief that when he returned to the lunar module in December 1972 was that “it wouldn’t be too much”. far in the future” that the astronauts were there again.
Four minutes after midnight on Wednesday, despite late technical problems and the Florida weather gods, Artemis 1, the most powerful rocket in history, will attempt to close that decades-long gap.
There will be no humans aboard the Orion capsule on its 25-day, 1.3m-mile journey to the Moon and back, but the successful test mission will pave the way for a landing effort manned in four years. Artemis 3, currently scheduled for 2025 but likely pushed back a year, will add a woman’s name to the only 12 in history, all men from the Apollo flights between 1969 and 1972, who qualify as moonwalkers.
“We’re going back to the Moon after 50 years, to stay, to learn how to work, to create, to develop new technologies and new systems and new spacecraft to go to Mars,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, explaining purpose of the Artemis program in an interview with Newsweek earlier this year.
“This is a great turn of the story.”
The space agency is looking for conditions to finally come together for Wednesday’s launch after a series of delays over the summer and early fall. Attempts in August and September were scrapped after engineers discovered an engine cooling problem and then failed to fix an unrelated fuel leak.
Hopes for an early October launch were dashed when the threat of Hurricane Ian forced the space agency to return the giant $4.1 billion Space Launch System (SLS) rocket to the hangar security.
And some second-guessed NASA’s decision to leave Artemis on display at its Cape Canaveral, Fla., launch pad in recent days amid the fury of Hurricane Nicole’s 100 mph wind gusts.
That storm prompted an additional two-day delay until Wednesday and a thorough post-hurricane inspection by Kennedy Space Center engineers before it was declared airworthy.
“If we didn’t design it to be out there in rough weather, we picked the wrong launch site,” NASA’s associate administrator for exploration systems development, Jim Free, said at a press conference on Friday .
Nelson, a former space shuttle astronaut, acknowledged the delays as “part of the space business.”
“We’ll go when it’s ready. We’re not going until then, and especially on a test flight. [We’ll] Make sure it’s right before you put four humans on top,” he said after the September bush.
Those humans will be aboard Artemis 2, a tentative 10-day mission scheduled for May 2024 that will fly astronauts beyond the Moon without landing, testing new life-sustaining systems and equipment designed for spaceflight from long duration
The Artemis 1 “crew” includes sensor-equipped mannequins named Helga, Zohar and Moonikin Campos, who will measure radiation levels, and a stuffed Snoopy and Shaun the Sheep as gravity detectors.
“We’ll never get to Artemis 2 if Artemis 1 isn’t successful,” Free said.
As technology has evolved, so have NASA’s reasons for wanting to return to the lunar surface. The agency is looking beyond the short exploration visits of the Apollo era and wants to establish a long-term human presence, including building a lunar base camp, as a base for manned missions to Mars in the mid-2030s.
Scientific discovery, economic benefits, building a global alliance and inspiring a new generation of explorers are among NASA’s stated goals for what it calls the “Artemis generation.”
NASA’s Moon-to-Mars vision, of which the Artemis program is just one part, has a broader outline of attracting international and commercial partners for deep space exploration, including SpaceX’s ‘Elon Musk and the heavy lift Starship rocket that could be ready for its first orbital test. fly as soon as next month.
There is no stated desire to keep the US ahead of Russia, and particularly China, in the next era of human spaceflight.
Analysts, including NASA’s own inspector general, consider the Artemis program’s $93 billion price tag, including $4.1 billion for each of the first launches, unsustainable. They point out that they are already billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.
But some experts see political will in Washington DC to keep the Mars moon program fully funded, even if Republicans take over the House and the nation’s purse strings to Democrats when the results come in. end of the mid-term elections.
“The coalition of support is bipartisan, much more linked to constituent interest. There is political support,” said George Washington University Space Policy Institute founder John Logsdon.
“[But] So many things have to happen before the first Mars landing mission is feasible that all you can say is that if all goes according to plan, yes, we will send humans to Mars.”