When Artemis I lifts off in the early morning sky over Florida, you can launch a new era of lunar science and exploration with it.
The NASA mission, scheduled to launch in the next two weeks, is the first of three planned flights intended to bring humans to the Moon for the first time since 1972. No astronauts will fly on the next mission. But the flight marks the first test of the technology — the rocket, the space suits, the aquatic return to Earth — that will ultimately bring people, including the first woman and first black astronaut, to the lunar surface.
The test includes the first flight of NASA’s Space Launch System, or SLS, and its Orion spacecraft, a rocket and crew capsule that have been in the making for decades. These ships have been delayed, over budget and threatened with cancellation more than once. Even within the spaceflight community, many people feared that it would never fly.
Seeing a human-capable lunar rocket finally hit the launch pad is “pretty amazing,” says Casey Dreier, a Seattle-based space policy expert at the Planetary Society. “This is a reality that most of us living on Earth today have never experienced.”
And if the Artemis program works, opportunities for science will follow.
“Because the humans have to come back alive, you have a great opportunity to bring samples back with you,” says Dreier. Sending human astronauts can be a wedge to open the door to pure learning.
The launch
Artemis I is scheduled to lift off on August 29 at 8:33 a.m. EDT. The SLS rocket will carry Orion into space, where the crew capsule will separate from the rocket and continue in an orbit around the moon. After circling the moon for about two weeks, Orion will hurtle back to Earth and sink into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego. The entire mission will last about 42 days.
Orion will stay in space longer than any other human-class spacecraft without docking with another spacecraft, such as the International Space Station. At its closest approach, the spacecraft will fly about 100 kilometers above the lunar surface. It will also travel up to 40,000 miles beyond the moon, farther from Earth than any spacecraft built for humans. The previous record, set by Apollo 13 in 1970, was 10,000 miles beyond the far side of the Moon.
The main objective of the mission is to prove that everything works. That includes Orion’s heat shield, which will need to protect astronauts as the capsule hurtles through Earth’s atmosphere at 40,000 kilometers per hour and heats up to more than 2,700 degrees Celsius on its return journey. It also includes the procedure for recovering the capsule and its crew and cargo after splashdown.
Although it has no astronauts, the mission will not fly empty. Just below the Orion capsule are 10 CubeSats, small, simple spacecraft, each about the size of a shoebox. After Orion separates from the SLS rocket, those CubeSats will go their separate ways to study the moon, the radiation environment in space, and the effects of that radiation on organisms like yeast. A CubeSat will deploy a sun sail and take off to explore a near-Earth asteroid (Serial number: 8/26/11).
The gang”
Inside the Orion capsule are three humanoid passengers. In the commander’s seat is fake astronaut Moonikin Campos, named for Arturo Campos, a NASA engineer who played a key role in the safe return of the Apollo 13 lunar mission to Earth after its mid-air disaster in 1970. The “moonikin”, a mixture of Moon Y manikin – is based on a firefighter training rescue dummy, says NASA engineer Dustin Gohmert. Moonikin Campos will wear the new flight suit that was designed for the Artemis missions.
The spacesuit is like a custom spacecraft, says Gohmert, of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. It is designed to be used during takeoff, landing, and any time there is an emergency in the cabin. The suit may look familiar to anyone who’s seen space shuttle launches, Gohmert says, because it does a very similar job: “It’s an orange suit that acts like a balloon that’s shaped like your body.”
The main difference is that the Orion suit, plus its accompanying helmet, seat, and connection to the Orion spacecraft itself, are designed to keep a crew member alive for up to six days, the time it might take to return to Earth if something goes wrong. evil in deep space. Astronauts visiting the International Space Station, by contrast, have never been more than a few hours from Earth.
To help make that week tolerable, each suit will be custom tailored for the astronaut. “I’d like to say the word ‘comfort,’ but it’s a hard word to use,” says Gohmert. “Nothing will be comfortable for about six days in a spacesuit, no matter what you do.”
The suit and spacecraft will provide oxygen to the astronauts and clean the astronauts’ air of carbon dioxide. The suit will also have a tube for astronauts to ingest liquid food and a way to collect urine and feces, though Moonikin Campos will not test those aspects. It will be equipped with radiation sensors, while its seat will have sensors to detect acceleration and vibration throughout the mission.
The suit, helmet and seat take safety lessons from the space shuttle columbia disasterGohmert says (Serial number: 09/22/2003). Gohmert, a junior engineer at the time, worked on the suits worn by the Columbia astronauts and escorted the seven-member crew to the launch pad. “It was a turning point for all of us, of course, who were there at the time,” he says. “If we didn’t learn lessons from that, we wouldn’t be doing them justice.”
Moonikin Campos will be accompanied by a pair of simulated female torsos named Helga and Zohar. Its mission is to report on the space risks that are unique to female bodies, which have never been near the moon. NASA plans to send a woman on the first manned Artemis flight, and women have different cancer risks from space radiation than men.
The two torsos are figures used in medicine called anthropomorphic ghosts, which are made of materials that simulate human bones, tissues and organs. “They are, in principle, identical twins,” physicist Thomas Berger of the German Aerospace Center in Cologne told a briefing on August 17. But Zohar, whose name means “light” or “brightness” in Hebrew, will wear a provided radiation protection vest. by the Israel Space Agency and the private company StemRad, based in Tampa, Florida.
The vest is made of a polymer designed to deflect protons released by the sun during solar storms and has more protection over radiation-sensitive organs such as the breasts and ovaries. Each phantom will also carry more than 6,000 small radiation detectors to build a three-dimensional picture of the dose of charged particles a female astronaut might receive on a trip to the moon and back. Comparing the radiation levels each ghost receives will help refine the vest design for future astronauts.
Orion will also carry two other non-human passengers: the British television stop motion character. shaun the sheep Y snoopywhich will serve as a zero gravity indicator.
the past and the future
SLS and Orion have had a checkered history. The program dates back to 2004, when President George W. Bush proposed sending astronauts to the Moon and then to Mars. In 2010, President Barack Obama called off that plan, and then in 2017 President Donald Trump ordered NASA to retrain its view on the moon.
Meanwhile, Congress continued to fund the development of the SLS rocket. SLS was originally supposed to cost $6 billion and fly in 2016. So far it has cost $23 billion on the eve of its 2022 launch.
“The rhetoric has changed a lot,” says Dreier, as political leaders continued to change their view of NASA’s direction. “But if you look at the actual shows, very little has changed. … All along, the money was going toward a moon rocket and a moon capsule.”
The next Artemis mission, Artemis II, is scheduled to launch in 2024 and carry astronauts – real, living human astronauts – around the moon but not to its surface.
Artemis III will be the lunar landing mission. August 19, NASA announced 13 candidate regions for landingall close to south pole of the moonan intriguing place that has never been visited by humans (Serial number: 11/11/18). That mission is scheduled to launch in 2025, but there are still plenty of untested elements. Those include the actual lander, which will be built by SpaceX.
There are still many things that can go wrong and a long way to go. However, the launch of Artemis I is an optimistic dawn for lunar science. “Set [human spaceflight] the whole system has been shifting to point to the moon,” says Dreier. “I think that’s deeply exciting. There will be really interesting lessons that will happen no matter what comes out of this.”