NASA is just days away from the Artemis II moon launch

NASA astronauts may be days away from blasting their way to the moon for the first time since 1972, when Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan took his final steps on the moon’s gray dust.

As early as Wednesday, a four-person crew could begin a mission to orbit the moon in the Orion capsule currently sitting atop a 322-foot, orange-and-white rocket waiting at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

“When those engines fire up, this thing goes off,” he said Reid WisemanNASA mission manager, during a press conference on Sunday. He said it was “surreal” to go to the launch site and see this huge rocket.

The first opportunity for staff to start will come on April 1, at 6:24 pm EDT. Career managers have many opportunities to start on April 6.

“Things are definitely starting to make sense,” said the NASA astronaut Christina Koch. He and Wiseman were sidelined before the flight, along with a fellow NASA pilot, pilot Victor Glovertogether with an astronaut Jeremy Hansen from the Canadian Space Agency.

If their trip goes as planned, it will be the first time a woman, a person of color, and a non-American will walk from lunar orbit.

“We’re getting very, very close, and we’re ready,” it says Lori Glazeacting deputy administrator for NASA’s mission systems development division.

During the briefing, project managers said that preparations for the launch are going well and they are not dealing with any technical problems that could threaten Wednesday’s effort.

“One thing we’re looking at is climate,” says NASA’s director of operations Shawn Quinnwho says the forecast currently calls for an 80% chance of good starting conditions.

No moonwalks, but airplanes

This will be the first time in NASA’s Artemis lunar mission that includes a crew.

Three years ago, during the Artemis I test flight in November and December 2022, NASA put the Orion capsule through its paces without astronauts. The slab made a trip around the moon that lasted more than three weeks and covered more than a million kilometers before splashing into the Pacific Ocean.

This time, scientists will begin orbiting Earth to observe the spacecraft’s critical systems, including life support, communication and navigation.

If everything goes as planned, they will fire up their vehicle’s systems to launch themselves into orbit around the moon and back, a deep space journey that will take them more than 230,000 kilometers from Earth. It will take a few days to get to the moon, and the whole job is expected to take about ten days.

The closest they will come to the moon is 4,000 to 6,000 kilometers above the moon, as they zip past the moon and temporarily lose control of the mission.

According to NASA, at that distance, the moon will appear the size of a basketball, with the distant blue Earth beyond.

The citizen is still coming

This mission is a major step towards the end of the coming moon that will support NASA’s mission to establish a permanent lunar presence, including a lunar base, with the help of international partners.

But work on key equipment – in particular, the rover – is still incomplete, even as NASA continues to accelerate its two lunar space contracts, SpaceX and Blue Origin.

NASA officials now plan to test one or both of the Earth’s space probes before continuing with the lunar experiment. To do so, they added a probe mission next year to the Artemis launch program.

Under the current timeline, an attempt to land on the moon could be made in 2028.

But longtime NASA veteran Wayne Hale, who spent decades as an astronaut and space program manager before retiring, thinks the timeline will be tight.

“I’m worried about whether it will be before 2030 or not, but hopefully not that long after that,” says Hale.

He says NASA’s new roadmap for the moon, unveiled last week at the agency’s headquarters, is ambitious, including several robotic missions, a lunar base and the development of a power station.

“These are all great but, to use a cliche – show me the money,” Hale noted, adding that he hopes Congress will provide the necessary funding, but he doubts it.

The speed of the new moon?

Currently, the Artemis program has spent $93 billion, according to a recent accounting from the agency’s inspector general.

NASA’s return to the moon has been in the works since 2004, when President George W. Bush gave a speech announcing that NASA would finish building the International Space Station, retire its aging spacecraft, and focus its new efforts on the moon, as a stepping stone to Mars.

“It’s really the same program, with a slight adjustment in the way we’re trying to implement it 22 years later,” says John Logsdon, a historian of space policy and professor emeritus at George Washington University. “It’s taken forever.”

In the 1960s the space race with the Soviet Union seemed to exist, says Logsdon, and this created an urgency that does not exist for the current lunar program. “This is something that seems like the next logical thing to do, but not with a huge commitment to do it on any kind of reasonable schedule,” says Logsdon.

China also wants to put people on the moon, and lawmakers in Congress and NASA officials have tried to use that as a new space rush that could spur more funding and support.

Most people alive today don’t remember being able to look at the moon and know that scientists were there. Recent surveys suggest widespread support among Americans for NASA’s return to the moon, says Teasel Muir-Harmony, curator of the Apollo collection at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

“The Artemis program is actually more popular than the Apollo program,” says Muir-Harmony. “Overall, polls show that today, Americans are more supportive of the program than they were in the 1960s.”