NASA
On Monday, NASA held the kind of celebration it has wanted to hold for 50 years.
The Artemis II mission will have four astronauts fly around the moon during a flight that lasts about a week. He was the first human to leave low Earth orbit since December 1972, when the Apollo 17 mission ended.
“It’s been more than half a century since astronauts went to the moon,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “That’s about to change.”
Nelson next announced the crew of Artemis II. Pilot Victor Glover, test his pilot who flew in the first practical Crew Dragon flight. Mission Specialist Christina Hammock Koch is the engineer who holds the record for the longest space flight by a woman. And mission specialist Jeremy Hansen, a Canadian physicist who will be the first non-American to fly into deep space.
NASA made the crew announcement inside a large, packed hangar at Ellington Airport in South Houston. It was a raucous yet joyous event for Houston’s spaceflight community, which was struggling through a difficult time following the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011.
Apollo astronauts lived and trained here. The Apollo program flew from here. And even during his 30-year Space Shuttle mission, preparatory flights and astronaut training were routine. But for most of the last 12 years, before SpaceX started flying his Crew Dragon, NASA astronauts were launched into space on Russian rockets, so they spent as much time training in Russia as they did in Houston. have spent on
NASA is back
But NASA is back in a big way. Most of the agency’s dozen astronauts paraded on stage as part of Monday’s announcement. The International Space Station is great, but these men and women were explorers at heart. That meant going beyond low earth orbit. Now they are on the move.
“Today is a big day,” said mission pilot Glover. “We have a lot to celebrate. Humanity has a lot to celebrate.Artemis II is more than a mission to the moon.It is the next step in the journey to bring humans to Mars. This crew will never forget it.”
NASA completed the Artemis I test flight of its Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft late last year. On Artemis II, a crew of four was launched on his SLS rocket and spent approximately 24 hours in an elliptical orbit around the Earth before Orion started the engines to send the spacecraft into a “free return” around the Moon. Place it on the track. This means that when Orion fires up its engines, it promises to fly within about 6,000 miles of the moon’s surface before looping back to Earth.
Artemis II could fly as early as late 2024, but more likely in early 2025. The success of this flight sets the stage for Artemis III to land his two astronauts on the moon. Ultimately, NASA will fly missions to the Moon regularly from his late 2020s, learn to live and work in deep space, and eventually—as Glover put it—a manned landing on Mars. Aim to try.
Mars remains distant, with only a conceptual schedule and an underfunded budget. But now the Artemis II mission is definitely underway. The actual crew names, along with all the pomp and circumstance that goes with it, put this flight on an inexorable road to takeoff. An 18-month intensive training period for the profile begins.
This is the first crew of many. Koch becomes the first woman to fly into deep space. Glover is the first minority. And Hansen is the first from outside the United States.
Transfer from Apollo
There are several important ways that the Artemis program differs from its predecessor. Artemis aims to get to the moon with permanence rather than making half a dozen sorties to the surface. The new program is partially supported by the commercial space industry, which until recently did not exist.
But perhaps the most important thing that distinguishes Artemis from Apollo is his international activities to other nations. More than 20 nations have signed the “agreement” to join the Artemis program. The lunar initiative builds on a partnership developed by NASA and the US government to fly the International Space Station.
This approach creates international goodwill, and strong international ties make NASA programs less likely to be canceled by a new president or Congress.
“There’s no way you can go 250,000 miles from Earth and look back. I wish I had gone alone,” Wiseman, the crew commander, said in an interview. “No, you turn around and say, ‘I’m very happy that we’re doing this internationally.’ Jeremy is in charge of this. Europeans, Japanese astronauts, And in the future there will be someone from the UAE, so I hope this is just the beginning.”
