NASA’s Artemis 1 mission is expected to launch this spring with a test of the powerful Space Launch System rocket together with the Orion spacecraft for the first time.
There will be no crew aboard, although the mission will serve as a tangible prelude to the complex and auspicious 15-year Artemis program to return humans to the moon and to also prepare the world for sending the first astronauts to Mars.
Artemis 1 is currently scheduled to launch no earlier than March 20 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a mission of about 26 days. During that time, it will spend six days orbiting the moon. An update on the mission will be held on Thursday.
While SpaceX, Blue Origin and other commercial ventures are attracting headlines weekly for low Earth orbit work, the multi-year Artemis program is breathtaking for its ambition. Commercial and international partners will work with NASA to build a sustainable presence on the Moon to prepare for missions to Mars in coming decades.
It will expensive--about $93 billion through 2025--but NASA has mounted a public relations campaign to explain the benefits: everything from hundreds of thousands of future technology jobs to discoveries in how to sustain life on the lunar surface using fission energy and producing drinkable water.
The work is itself an act of peace diplomacy with partnerships between nations, but also a statement of social values. NASA plans to land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon under the program. Artemis draws its name from the Greek goddess who was the twin sister of Apollo, the name NASA applied to the Moon program from 1961 to 1972 with six spaceflights that put 12 white men on the lunar surface.
If discovery and economic opportunity are not a big enough incentive, NASA has described Artemis as “inspiration for a new generation” and has dubbed today’s elementary students the Artemis Generation. A 4-minute video, “Why the Moon?” lays out the many reasons, including offering a “treasure trove of science” and a proving ground for “how to live on other worlds.”
During the uncrewed Artemis 1 flight, NASA will provide a zero-gravity indicator in the form of a Snoopy doll, a realistic manikin and two other “phantoms” called Helga and Zohar that are manikins made of materials that mimic human soft tissues. The phantoms will be used to map internal radiation doses to areas of the body containing critical organs. Radiation is one of the biggest concerns for astronauts who must spend months in space outside the protection of Earth’s atmosphere.
Artemis 2 will be the second scheduled mission in the Artemis program and is planned for May 2024. It will include a four-person crew that performs a lunar flyby test aboard Orion before returning to Earth in 21 days, the first spacecraft with a crew to travel beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.
Future missions with a crew will assemble and dock with Gateway, a spaceship that will orbit the moon for more than a decade providing a place to live and work and as a transfer point between Orion and a lunar lander that will eventually land near a lunar base camp to be established.