Launching Artemis 1: Onboard a Multibillion-Doll Spacecraft to Splashdown a Moon in Baja California
NASA’s new multibillion-dollar spacecraft successfully returned from the moon Sunday, taking the agency one step closer to getting U.S. astronauts back on the moon by 2025.
The capsule splashed down off the coast of Baja California, marking the beginning of phase one of the Artemis program. Artemis 1 traveled more than a million miles and returned in 25 and a half days, a feat no other human-rated craft has accomplished.
The capsule performed a “skip entry” descent where it dipped in and out of the atmosphere to slow down the vehicle before re-entry. This type of descent will provide data for splashdown sites for future crewed missions, NASA spokesperson Rob Navias said on NASA’s live stream on Sunday.
“Watching it from the deck as an observer, we saw those three full main parachutes pop out,” said NASA spokesperson Derrol Nail, speaking from the USS Portland several miles from the splashdown site. “We watched the descent of the crew module with great interest as it descended from the sky to the Pacific Ocean.”
The navy boat was ready to close in on the capsule after waiting for the ammonia to vent off. Nail said that Ammonia is used in the crew module’s cooling system, which is crucial for future missions.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/11/1141946917/nasa-artemis-splashdown-moon-mission
Artemis Launch: A Stepstone for the Mission to Mars and Rejoinder for the Revival of NASA’s Apollo 11 Mission
A key part of the descent was to measure the heat shield against the searing heat of entry, where temperatures can reach as high as 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The outer surface of the sun is half as hot.
But delays are not out of the equation, as seen in the months leading up to the capsule launch. After an engine issue and a liquid hydrogen leak, the Artemis 1 mission was delayed for several months. The mission finally launched Nov. 16.
The lunar program, named after Apollo’s twin sister, hopes to revitalize some of the glory that NASA’s previous moon-landing missions amassed a half-century ago. The Apollo 11 landing in 1969 was watched by an estimated 600 million people.
“It seems appropriate to honor Apollo with the new legacy of the Artemis generation, and that’s what we did on Sunday,” said Catherine Koerner, associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate.
Bill Nelson considers Artemis a stepping stone for the Moon to Mars program. The European Space Agency has its own program which is expected to eventually send crewed missions. China’s space agency is working on several projects. It is no wonder that the CEO of the company is talking about how he wants to build a multiplanetary species, including on the Red Planet.
NASA then aims to use the Orion capsule and a SpaceX human landing system to land astronauts on the moon for phase three of the program by 2025. The contract with Elon Musk’s company is valued at nearly $2.9 billion.
The science that motivated Schmitt was only one of the reasons behind the renewed push. Technology and politics are again pertinent. Congress allows NASA a small annual budget increase due to the fact that the costs are building slowly, even though Artemis is very expensive. The rise of powerful private companies such as Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies (Space X) has brought new public enthusiasm for space exploration and has new ways of delivering it. The moon is where NASA wants to send Artemis astronauts using the enormous Starship with which Musk dreams of colonizing Mars.
China just finished building the main phase of a space station and could be planning to use it to send astronauts to the Moon in the near future. Sending astronauts to other worlds is a statement of US policy according to some members of the US Congress. A not-insignificant reason for the revival of human space exploration is that it is once more being seen as a space race.
The launch of NASA’s Artemis I mission aims to re-create the spirit of Apollo a half century after the United States left the lunar surface. Science is the least of the driving forces.
When Cernan, fellow Moon-walker Harrison Schmitt and command-module pilot Ronald Evans had blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida seven days earlier, it was already clear that this would be the last Apollo mission. But few anticipated that, 50 years on, human exploration of space would be confined to low Earth orbit. Apollo 17 is the last time boots were crunched into the soil of an alien world; the last time astronauts watched the blue globe from the lunar edge; and the last time anyone saw Earth from the moon.
As they guided the lunar module, each of them had a personal mission. Cernan was looking to gain the status of Moon-walker, which he had just missed in 1969 as lunar-module pilot on Apollo 10, the practice run for Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s successful landing with Apollo 11 a couple of months later.
Schmitt was the only professional scientist to walk on the Moon. He thought that humans could do better than robot landers in science, which is why he pushed NASA to continue the Apollo programme. The Moon’s ancient rocks, much less erased by tectonics than those of Earth, could hold the key to a new understanding of the Solar System.
Then, late on 14 December, they parked the rover with its television camera pointing at the lander, to broadcast their departure. The plaque that they left said that the first man to explore the moon in December 1972 was here. After the greatest human voyage ever, deep-space exploration just — stopped.
The reasons lay, above all, in the shifting sands of politics. The Apollo programme was brought rousingly to life by US president John F. Kennedy’s “We choose to go to the Moon” speech in September 1962, when he promised that there would be US boots on the lunar soil by the end of the decade. It was a response to the country falling behind in the space race. In 1957, the Soviet Union had launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1. It had also put the first man into orbit — Yuri Gagarin in 1961, just the previous year.
Money and attention began to shift to low Earth orbit. The Skylab space station was launched by NASA in 1973. It aimed to establish a permanent human presence in space — but a few hundred kilometres up, not roughly 400,000 kilometres away on the Moon. It was a rare symbol of cold war cooperation. The United States and Soviet Union staged a real and symbolic handshake in 1975, when the Apollo module docked and astronauts met the cosmonauts. By 1998, with the launch of the International Space Station, the two had entered permanent cohabitation in space.
And there, in low Earth orbit, things have stayed. Members of Congress have kept alive dreams of a US return to deep space by funnelling funds to their districts for aerospace jobs. But the momentum has never been fully regained. George W. Bush made an announcement on the 20th anniversary of Apollo 11 that he wanted to return to the Moon and then go to Mars. Four years after this ended, the absence of a space race had an adverse effect on political support. In 2004, president George W. Bush tried again, with a more modest proposal for renewed lunar exploration. It was only a year ago that the space shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry into the atmosphere and killed all seven of its crew. This Bush plan got enough traction for NASA to begin building a new generation of Moon rockets — before president Barack Obama cancelled the programme in 2010, citing cost.
Then, the cycle was broken. Republican advisers made a plan to get astronauts back to the Moon in Trump’s presidency. The programme was named after the ancient Greek goddess of the Moon, Artemis, because of the administrator at the time, Jim Bridenstine. For whatever reason, Joe Biden kept it on when he became president in 2021.
There are renewed scientific imperatives to return to the Moon. In the 1990s, lunar surface frozen water was found to be not as dry as was thought. That water could reveal secrets of the Solar System’s history – as well as being one thing we wouldn’t have to transport to a permanent lunar base.
Some still think Artemis doesn’t fit for purpose. Garver is a former NASA deputy administrator and claims the agency could move more quickly with its partnerships. Many would prefer NASA to forget deep space and spend more time and money on Earth, including space-based climate monitoring. Such comments echo criticisms from the 1960s, when much of the US public wanted the government to focus not on the space race, but on Earth-bound problems such as civil rights.
What permanent significance that will have is anyone’s guess. It means that, after fifty years, we are finally recapturing some of the wonders of human space exploration. We are once again seeing live streams from the moon, this time from a capsule steered by humans and will one day carry them. In real time we are seeing the pale blue dot of Earth, in the cold depths of interplanetary space, as a reminder of our vulnerable presence on a planet. The steps are still steps, even though they might be smaller than previously thought.
The First Visitors on Mars: How Hard is It to Get There, And How Hard Is It To Living On Mars? A Tale Of Three Goldilocks
But the hellish conditions on Mars make it hard to imagine living there, let alone sending millions. The Red Planet lies on the edge of our solar system’s habitable—or “Goldilocks”—zone, where it’s not too hot or cold to have liquid water on the surface, which is probably necessary for life as we know it. More than 3 billion years ago, Mars was likely much more life-friendly, with some flowing rivers and lakes, a more temperate climate, and a more substantial atmosphere. The air is almost entirely made up of carbon dioxide. The temperature is not as cold asAntarctica. It’s many times drier than the Atacama Desert in Chile, the driest place on Earth.
The isolation of the Covid pandemic might give us a small taste of the psychological challenges of life on Mars. Those first visitors will be trapped in one or two small structures with the same few people for something like 2.5 years, counting travel each way and around a year on the ground. Just going for a walk outside would be a huge ordeal. They wouldn’t see a single tree, they wouldn’t take a dip in a river, or they wouldn’t get fresh air in the morning. Everyone will have a good chance of getting cancer (thanks to a high dose of space radiation) or losing bone and muscle mass (thanks to the long flights and the planet’s weaker gravity).