On Dec. 19, 1972, Apollo 17 returned from the moon. In the 53 years since, no humans have ventured back, until now. In April, the Artemis II mission, crewed by three Americans and one Canadian astronaut, will fly to the moon.
This mission is one of many firsts, including the first woman and first African American to fly beyond low Earth orbit. The crew consists of Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch and Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency. The addition of a woman to a lunar crew has been a long time coming for NASA, which selected its first female astronauts in 1978, six years after the final moon landing.
Artemis II is the first crewed mission of the Artemis program, after a mostly successful uncrewed test in 2022. The goal of the mission is not to land on the moon, but to test the Orion spacecraft in deep space, assuring its life support, power and propulsion systems are safe for future lunar landing missions.
The spacecraft, nicknamed “Integrity” by the crew, will make a free return trajectory around the moon, which will use the moon’s gravity to slingshot them back to Earth. This type of trajectory was used before on Apollo, most notably during the Apollo 13 mission, in which the crew was unable to land due to an explosion. One major difference, however, is that Artemis II will pass higher above the lunar surface, which will make the crew the farthest humans from the Earth ever. Because of this high pass, the four astronauts will, upon returning home, become the fastest-moving humans ever, using a “skip” style reentry, where they bounce off the upper atmosphere to slow down, before descending at a shallow angle to splashdown in the Pacific, beating the speed record held by the Apollo 10 mission in 1969.
The program is not without its controversies, however. In late Feb., NASA administrator Jared Isaacman announced a controversial decision to change the order of the Artemis missions, changing Artemis III to an Earth orbital test in 2027 of one or both of the lunar landers, provided by SpaceX and Blue Origin, leading to Artemis IV in 2028, which will land humans on the lunar surface. This is a much better path than the original plan, which did not include any crewed testing of the lander vehicles before the actual landing attempt. This decision has been controversial in the spaceflight community, however, because even though it is an increased launch cadence from the original plan, due to hardware delays, such as production of the SLS rocket which boosts the spacecraft to lunar orbit, have been delayed, including a reworking of the upper stage to a different stage provided by commercial provider United Launch Alliance (ULA) instead of a much larger and more capable stage that has been in development since 2013. I believe that this actually will help to increase launch cadence and bring humans to the moon faster, because a large scale of production and testing has already been done with this new stage, and this has proved it to be safe and reliable.
After the Artemis I mission in 2022, it was discovered that large pieces of the spacecraft’s heat shield were missing. The heat shield protects the crew from the roughly 5000-degree temperatures inflicted on the ship from a lunar reentry, and this was of major concern, particularly because it was not shared with the public until relatively soon before the scheduled launch of Artemis II, which uses the same heat shield design as the first mission. Many outside engineers and even former astronauts recently compared it to what was seen in the wake of the 2003 space shuttle Columbia disaster, where debris impact caused a hole in the heat shield and the shuttle and seven crew were killed on reentry into the atmosphere. I believe this problem has been overblown by much of the news media. The fact that NASA did not release the information about the heat shield to the public until so soon before the launch is very worrying, as there could be other problems that are not known.
The Artemis program as a whole has been under fire recently from the Trump administration, which tried to remove much of NASA’s funding due to many of their programs being over budget and delayed, namely the Artemis program, which has an estimated cost of $4 billion per launch. In Jan., however, Congress approved a funding appropriations package that funded the program up to the Artemis V flight, scheduled for late 2028. I believe this tremendous cost could be reduced in the future by using commercial, reusable launch vehicles like Blue Origin’s New Glenn or SpaceX Starship. I think using commercially provided rockets to launch crew will allow for faster and less expensive expansion on the lunar surface and a faster route to permanent human presence on the moon.
Artemis II is set for a launch no earlier than April 1 and will last 10 days. During that time, the mission will have, for the first time, high definition TV broadcasts from the moon, and the crew will have cell phones to produce social media content, which will allow anyone to follow the flight’s activities and see photos of the moon’s far side, which I hope will restart the interest in spaceflight created by the Apollo program.
