Artemis I: The Artemis I Mission: Countdown to Mankind’s Return to the Moon | Science and Technology

It seems that everything is ready for the first step of humanity’s return to the moon. Despite the last-minute hydrogen leak that threatened to delay the launch, which NASA said… He was working on a fixOn Monday, the Artemis I mission will take off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida (USA) at 8.33 a.m. local time.

For 42 days, the Orion spacecraft will fly around the Moon as a test flight for future Artemis II missions, which aims to repeat a similar flight with four astronauts in 2024, and Artemis III, which aims to land on the Moon in 2025 at the earliest. NASA’s stated goal is “first woman and first person of color” to walk on the moon.

Artemis I will take off from the world-famous launch pad 39B, which was used on May 18, 1969 for the Apollo 10 mission, which orbited the moon without landing. NASA will now test the Space Launch System (SLS), the most powerful rocket ever built, according to Spanish flight engineer Pedro José Herráz, who is on the mission with the European Space Agency (ESA). The height of the assembly consisting of the launch vehicle and the Orion capsule reaches 98 meters, which is five times the height of the Statue of Liberty. “Seeing a rocket of this size again, with such intentions to return to the moon, on the 39B launch pad is impressive. It is something we haven’t seen in 50 years,” Haraz said emotionally.

NASA is responsible for the Artemis program, named after the twin sister of the god Apollo in Greek mythology. The European Agency was responsible for the service module, an essential component of the spacecraft that will provide oxygen, water and electricity to astronauts on future missions, as well as to propel the manned capsule and control its temperature.

This is the first time that NASA has entrusted the European Space Agency with a “critical” part of the mission, according to Heyrise. “None of the first three missions will be the same as the others. In Artemis I, since there is no crew and we are going to try things, it will be more dangerous than the next group, which will be run,” said the Spanish engineer.

The last person to set foot on the moon was astronaut Gene Cernan, on December 13, 1972. Twelve white men He walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972. The day before the launch of the Apollo 11 mission, in which Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, hundreds of activists protested outside the Kennedy Space Center. At its head was the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the assassinated successor to Martin Luther King Jr. at the head of the black civil rights movement. For Abernathy, it didn’t make sense to spend so much money on going to the moon when a fifth of the US population lived in poverty. The Apollo program cost about $25 billion at the time, the equivalent of about $150 billion today.

With the Artemis program, NASA wants to pay its dues to the diversity of the United States and the rest of humanity. The first American female astronaut was Sally Ride, who flew into space in 1983, the same year that NASA’s first black female astronaut, Guyon Bluford, flew. Ride and Bluford never went beyond Earth’s orbit.