The launch of the NASA Artemis I mission after Hurricane Ian left the Kennedy Space Center on September 27th, 2015 due to a lack of hangar space

NASA decided to abandon its September 27th launch plans after Hurricane Ian due to a lack of hangar space. The space agency announced on Friday that it’s aiming to squeeze in the Artemis I launch between November 12th and November 27th.

The next launch attempt by NASA was scrapped after they decided to put the rocket back in the VaB so it would not get hit by the storm. NASA successfully secured the rocket on Tuesday after an hours-long trek to the VAB.

Hurricane Ian made landfall in Florida as a Category 4 hurricane, but weakened into a tropical storm by the time it reached the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday. NASA says “there was no damage to Artemis flight hardware,” and that its facilities only suffered “minor water intrusion.”

The overall goal of NASA’s Artemis program is to return humans to the moon for the first time in half a century. The first mission, called Artemis I, is expected to prove that the rocket is safe for astronauts to travel to the moon and back.

The Space Launch System Mission to Artemis I: Launching an Uncrewed Test at the Naval Base Base Station in Cape Canaveral

There was a leak at a more manageable level according to the testing of the fueling system. NASA says that it will retest the flight terminated system after the rocket returns to the VAB.

NASA is set to try again to launch the Artemis I mission Friday as the hulking rocket at the center of their plans to return people to the moon is headed back to the launchpad.

Liftoff of the uncrewed test mission is slated for November 14, with a 69-minute launch window that opens at 12:07 a.m. ET. The launch will stream live on NASA’s website.

The Space Launch System, or SLS, rocket began the hours-long process of trekking 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) from its indoor shelter to Pad 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida late Thursday evening.

The unnamed storm could develop near Puerto Rico over the weekend and will slowly move northwest early next week, said meteorologist Mark Burger, the launch weather officer with the US Air Force at Cape Canaveral.

“The National Hurricane Center just has a 30% chance of it becoming a named storm,” Burger said. The models are very consistent in developing a low pressure.

The 322-foot-tall (98-meter-tall) SLS rocket was brought to the nearby Vehicle Assembly Building so engineers could look at issues that have been afflicting the rocket and to perform maintenance.

In the fall of 2015, NASA raced against time to get Artemis I off the ground because there was a risk that it would not be ready in time. Engineers were able to recharge or replace batteries throughout the rocket and the Orion spacecraft atop it as they sat in the VAB.

But getting this first mission off the ground has been trying. The SLS rocket, which cost roughly $4 billion, had a few problems as it was loaded with super- chilled liquid hydrogen. The rocket attempted to cool down its engines so that they wouldn’t get shocked by the temperatures of the super- chilled fuel, but a faulty sensor gave inaccurate readings.

NASA has worked to troubleshoot both issues. The Artemis team decided to mask the faulty sensor, essentially ignoring the data it puts out. And following the second launch attempt in September, the space agency ran another ground test when the rocket was still on the launchpad.

The purpose of the demonstration was to check the seals and the loading procedures of the supercold propellant, which is what the rocket will experience on launch day. While the test didn’t go exactly as planned, NASA said it met all its objectives.

The First Flight Test of the New Astronaut Space Shuttle, an initiative of the Kennedy Space Center, and the Space Mission for Exploration Ground Systems

The NASA space shuttle program flew for 30 years before it was scrubbed several times. The history of scrubs for mechanical or technical issues is a known problem with the Falcon rockets.

Free wants to reflect on the fact that it is a challenging mission. Getting all of our systems to work together is a challenge that we do a flight test for. It’s about going after the things that can’t be modeled. We’re learning that we should take more risks before we put crew on there.

The space agency plans to send a group of people to Mars in a voyage that will take less time and be much riskier than going back to Earth.

The next phase of the Artemis program will send the first crewed capsule around the moon and back, without landing on the moon, in 2024. Shannon Walker estimated that NASA will announce the crew sometime in the next six months.

NASA is once again counting down the hours to the first flight test of its new 32-story-tall Artemis rocket, the one the agency hopes will carry astronauts back to the moon in just a few years.

The deputy program manger for Exploration Ground systems at the Kennedy Space Center said to reporters that they are on schedule.

Artemis Mission Manager Mike Sarafin: “We are ready to fly” through the hurricane-damaged, Orion Rocket Launch Pad (Nasa)

And once the massive rocket returned to its launch pad on the Florida coast, it got blasted by Hurricane Nicole, which proved to be a stronger storm than officials had expected.

Mission managers have spent much time discussing hurricane damage to a thin strip of caulking material that fills in a small gap at the top of the rocket, up where the Orion crew capsule sits. Some of this material has torn away, and it’s too high up to be repaired.

One concern was that more bits might get dislodged during lift-off and strike other parts of the rocket. NASA’s Mike Sarafin, the Artemis I missionmanager, says engineers have analyzed the situation extensively and feel like it is ok to fly.

“We went through that today and we closed that action item,” Sarafin told reporters during a conference call on Monday. “I asked if there were any dissenting opinions, and we accepted the flight rationale.”

He says that because the Artemis team has persevered through all of the setbacks they will be ready when given the opportunity to fly.

“Our time is coming. And we hope that that is on Wednesday,” Sarafin says. “If Wednesday is the wrong day, we will take the next hurdle, that next trial, and keep going.”

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/15/1136687244/nasa-artemis-moon-rocket-upcoming-launch

The First Flight of the Space Launch System to the Lunar Orbit : Status and Problems with the Navigation and Electrical Systems onboard a Spacecraft

NASA’s new rocket is too expensive to be sustainable and the first three flights are expected to cost more than $4 billion.

The rocket won’t fly very often. The next flight, which will send astronauts to the moon, won’t happen for a couple of years. There won’t be a moon landing until at least 25 years from now.

The trips to the International Space Station were off loaded so that the agency could focus on moon and deep space. Space capsules operated by the private company SpaceX, founded by wealthy entrepreneur Elon Musk, have been carrying up cargo and operating as space taxis for astronauts.

NASA selected SpaceX to build the lunar lander that will take astronauts from a capsule in orbit around the moon down to the surface. And SpaceX also has a large rocket in development called Starship, which is designed to be reusable and less expensive than NASA’s Artemis rocket.

The rocket that transported the mission to the Moon on the first ever flight of NASA’s powerful new Space Launch System was launched in November. Having travelled from Earth to the Moon and performed a 2.5-minute engine burn to make its fly-by, Orion has just about finished the first of three legs of its journey. The second part of its trip will be launched on 25 November by burning its engines, which will bring it 432,000 kilometres from Earth.

The furthest a human-carrying spaceship has ever traveled is the farthest that can be travelled beyond the moon. For now, the capsule is only carrying inanimate, scientific payloads.

Engineers are working to troubleshoot several small glitches, such as occasional problems with Orion’s star-tracking navigational system that are probably due to damage from space radiation, as well as some intermittent issues with the electrical system that ferries power from Orion’s four solar arrays to the capsule.

While on the journey so far, the images show Earth as a pale blue dot in the distance, or as the moon looms large in the sky. NASA has also released pictures of the capsule’s interior, where a mannequin known as a moonikin watches over control panels and a small stuffed Snoopy toy floats around as an indicator of zero gravity. More video footage will be released soon, as well as a low-resolution livestream from the ship, according to the flight director Judd Frieling.

The main goal of the mission was to deploy 10 small satellites, one of which would be the service module. But at least four of those satellites failed after being jettisoned into orbit, including a miniature lunar lander developed in Japan and one of NASA’s own payload that was intended to be one of the first tiny satellites to explore interplanetary space.

The small satellite CAPSTONE, which was launched in June and encountered some issues in September, entered it’s own lunar circle on 13 November. The elliptical path is used by the Gateway lunar space station, which will be used to send humans to the moon.

NASA released a selfie taken by the Orion capsule and close-up photos of the moon’s crater-marked landscape as the spacecraft continues on the Artemis 1 mission, a 25-and-a-half day journey that will take it more than 40,000 miles beyond the far side of the moon.

As of Thursday afternoon, the capsule was 222,993 miles (358,972 kilometers) from Earth and 55,819 miles (89,831 kilometers) from the Moon, zipping along at just over 2,600 miles per hour, according to NASA.

It will be at high altitudes above the moon’s lunar surface in order to circle it in the opposite direction as the moon travels around Earth.

According to NASA’s Artemis blog, the agency’s television coverage of the distant retrograde orbit insertion burn is scheduled for 4:30 p.m. ET Friday and the burn is scheduled to take place at 4:52 p.m. ET.

NASA’s Orion spacecraft has returned to Earth. The uncrewed capsule safely splashed down into the Pacific Ocean off of Mexico’s Baja California around 12:40PM ET on Sunday, marking the end of the landmark Artemis I mission.

The capsule isn’t carrying any astronauts. It is supposed to be one day. The Artemis programme of NASA aims to eventually get humans to the moon, and if it is not done safely, then it will be impossible.

During re-entry, much of Orion’s energy will be imparted to Earth’s atmosphere, causing the pressure and temperature in the air flowing around the vehicle to spike. The air will get so hot that nitrogen and oxygen molecules in the atmosphere will break apart, causing a flow of ionization around Orion that will block communications for several minutes. One of the scariest parts of the mission for Joe Bomba is developing the heat shield.

The Artemis II mission will mean that four astronauts will sit next time it flies, and the interior is currently staffed by one mannequin and a floating Snoopy doll. The crew cabin is a bit chilly but NASA is not testing life-support systems on this flight.

What is being tested are the effects of space radiation on simulated humans. The capsule holds two fake torsos, one of which is strapped into a vest and the other not, to be protected from radiation. Detectors on the torsos measure radiation dosage as Orion flies out of and back into Earth’s magnetic shield, which protects our planet against harmful solar energy. The effects of radiation on organisms are being measured. None of these data can be collected and studied until after splashdown.

The capsule will drop part of its cover around 7 kilometres above earth’s surface and then deploy 11 parachutes in rapid sequence to slow the capsule for splashdown. The capsule will be pulled on board the well deck from the waiting ship.

Nelson told CNN in a phone interview that the next big test is the heat shield, designed to protect the capsule from reentering the Earth’s atmosphere.

The spacecraft will be traveling about 32 times the speed of sound (24,850 miles per hour or nearly 40,000 kilometers per hour) as it hits the air — so fast that compression waves will cause the outside of the vehicle to heat to about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius). The heat will cause air gasses to be ionized, which will cause a 512 minute communications breakdown.

The Lockheed Space Shuttle, or A-plus, Arrived on an Extrasolar Mission to the Moon. The First Flight of an A-Plus Spacecraft

The lead of the aerothermal team at the company said in a statement that skip entry gave them a consistent landing site that supported astronauts safety because it allowed teams to better coordinate recovery efforts. NASA has a primary contractor in Lockheed for its new spaceship.

Nelson, the NASA chief, has stressed the importance of demonstrating that the capsule can make a safe return after a test mission that had no astronauts on it.

The capsule was carried farther out to the moon than any other craft that has ever existed, when it traveled 1.3 million miles in this mission.

On its trip, the spacecraft captured stunning pictures of Earth and, during two close flybys, images of the lunar surface and a mesmerizing “Earth rise.”

“Not an A-plus, simply because we expect things to go wrong. And the good news is that when they do go wrong, NASA knows how to fix them,” Nelson said. But “if I’m a schoolteacher, I would give it an A-plus.”

After traversing 239,000 miles between the moon and the Earth, the spacecraft came to a stop in the thick inner layer of Earth’s atmosphere. It made landfall in the Pacific Ocean off Baja California at midday on Sunday.

The capsule is currently bobbing in the Pacific Ocean, as NASA collects additional data and runs through some tests. The process is similar to the rest of the mission in that it is meant to make sure the spaceship is ready to fly astronauts.

The heat generated on the capsule is being tested. We want to make sure that we characterize how that’s going to affect the interior of the capsule,” NASA flight director Judd Frieling told reporters last week.

The Launch of the Multibillion-Double Spacecraft Artemis 1: On the Way to Get the U.S. Back on the Moon

The capsule slowed down to thousands of miles per hour as it began its final descent. By the time it splashed down, it was traveling at an average speed of 20 miles per hour.

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.

“From the deck as an observer, we saw those three full main parachutes pop out, and we are quite close to the splashdown site,” said NASA’s Derrol Nail. The sight was a beautiful one and we watched the crew module slow down as it came down to the ocean.

The navy boat was waiting for the ammonia to give off, and then closing in on the capsule for two hours. The crew module’s cooling system is important for future crewed missions as it is reliant on the use of Ammonia.

But delays are not out of the equation, as seen in the months leading up to the capsule launch. A liquid hydrogen leak and then a storm caused NASA to delay the Artemis 1 mission for several months. The mission began Nov. 16.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/11/1141946917/nasa-artemis-splashdown-moon-mission

The last words of Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan and his expedition to Taurus – the legacy of a giant leap for mankind

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 which NeilArmstrong became the first human to walk on the moon, was watched by an estimated 600 million people.

“It seems fitting to honor Apollo with the legacy of the Artemis generation and this mission today,” said Catherine Koerner on Sunday.

NASA’s inspector general Paul Martin said that each of the first three flights will cost more than $4 billion, not including development costs. NASA expects to have spent $93 billion by the end of fiscal 2025, on the Artemis missions.

And then there is the looming influence of China, which has just finished building the main phase of its first space station and might be planning to land astronauts on the Moon in the 2030s. Sending astronauts to other worlds is a statement of national importance 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.

Eugene Cernan, Apollo 17 commander, said these words as he prepared to come home from the Moon. They bookended a grand human endeavor with NeilArmstrongs “one giant leap for mankind” little more than three years earlier. After 50 years, they remain the last (officially prepared) words spoken on the Moon.

Cernan and Schmitt spent 3 days in Taurus–Littrow, and more than 22 hours walking and driving around the valley’s landslides and volcanic cinder cones. They brought home the biggest haul of rocks from an Apollo mission when they took more than 35 kilometres on the odometer of their lunar rover.

Schmitt, meanwhile, was a geologist — still the only professional scientist to walk on the Moon. He had pushed NASA to continue the Apollo programme, arguing that humans could do better science than robot landers. The moon’s ancient rocks, which were not altered by tectonics like Earth’s, could hold the key to a new understanding of the Solar System.

On December 14th they parked the rover with its camera pointing at the lander to broadcast their departure. They left a plaque that read, in part, “Here man completed his first explorations of the moon, December 1972, A.D.”. After the greatest human voyage ever, deep-space exploration just — stopped.

The reasons lay, above all, in the shifting sands of politics. In 1962, US president John F. Kennedy made a speech about the Apollo programme and said that the US would be on the moon by the end of the decade. It was a geopolitical prestige project, a response to the country falling behind in the cold war 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 started to move towards the low Earth orbit. NASA launched the Skylab space station in 1973, and later used it to propel its space shuttles. It was aimed to establish a permanent human presence in space, but only a short time away from the Moon. Cold war cooperation became a rare symbol of space. In 1975, the United States and Soviet Union orchestrated a real and symbolic in-orbit handshake when an Apollo module docked with a Soyuz one and astronauts met cosmonauts. The International Space Station was launched in 1998 and two people were living permanently in space.

And there, in low Earth orbit, things have stayed. Congress has kept alive dreams of a return to deep space by spending money in their districts for jobs in the manufacturing sector. But the momentum has never been fully regained. In 1989, on the 20th anniversary of Apollo 11, president George H. W. Bush announced an expensive push to return to the Moon and travel on to Mars. The elimination of a space race deprived it of political support, but it ended four years later. In 2004, president George W. Bush tried again, with a more modest proposal for renewed lunar exploration. That came a year after the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, killing its crew of seven and signalling the beginning of the end for the shuttle programme. Before Barack Obama axed the plan in 2010, the Bush plan was enough to get NASA to begin building new generation of Moon rockets.

The cycle ended up being broken. Republican advisers created a new plan to return astronauts to the moon during Donald Trump’s presidency. Jim Bridenstine, NASA’s administrator at the time, championed the programme and named it Artemis, after the ancient Greek goddess of the Moon, sister to the Sun god Apollo. For whatever reason, Joe Biden kept it on when he became president in 2021.

To be sure, there are renewed scientific imperatives to return to the Moon. In the 1990s, researchers using orbiting spacecraft discovered frozen water on the lunar surface, showing that it was not bone-dry as once 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.

Artemis is not fit for purpose, according to some. A former NASA deputy administrator has said the agency can move more quickly andnimbly in partnerships withAerospace companies. 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.

It is anyone’s guess as to what permanent significance that will have. It does mean that, after half a century, we are once morecapturing some of the wonders of human space exploration. We are once again seeing live streams from the moon from a capsule that will one day carry them. We are seeing the pale blue dot of Earth, in the cold depths of interplanetary space, in real time, contextualizing our fragile presence on a vulnerable planet. These might be smaller steps than thought but they are still steps.