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Five a long time later, NASA has a plan to ship astronauts again to the lunar floor. Called Artemis, after the sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, the undertaking goals to go to a brand new space of the moon and retrieve new samples, this time with new faces behind the solar visors—together with the primary girl and first particular person of shade.
Whether this plan will succeed—and whether or not a recent moon touchdown will encourage a brand new “Artemis generation” in house exploration, as NASA management hopes—is a matter of debate. The variations between Artemis and the Apollo program, which itself fizzled out ahead of many had hoped, are definitely stark. Artemis is constructed on a much less precise, much less nimble, and far much less well-heeled imaginative and prescient of house exploration than the one which launched Cernan and his predecessors. Where Apollo was conceived and executed as a high-priced monument to American ingenuity and the ability of capitalism, its sister program is extra a mirrored image of American politics and the ability of inertia.
Though this system is formally solely three years previous, components of Artemis have been within the works for a few years, even a long time. Its ancillary initiatives, unfold all through NASA and at college companions throughout the US, in lots of instances existed lengthy earlier than the Trump administration gave this system a reputation. Its origins had been rocky even earlier than fueling issues and two hurricanes delayed its first launch in November.
Artemis has many disparate functions, serving very completely different teams. For some house fanatics, it’s merely a method again to the moon, a vacation spot that may all the time loom largest in our collective consciousness. For others, it represents a path to Mars. Some see Artemis as a technique to reclaim American superiority in house, one thing that was most visibly misplaced when the house shuttle retired in 2011. Still others see it as a method to unlock a brand new period of scientific discovery and invention, first undertaken throughout Apollo however arguably begun the primary time people seemed on the moon and questioned what it was.
The undertaking’s first mission, an uncrewed take a look at flight known as Artemis 1, thundered to house in the course of the evening on November 16. It was carried into house by essentially the most highly effective rocket ever launched, the Space Launch System (SLS). Towering 15 toes taller than the Statue of Liberty, the SLS consists of an orange predominant tank flanked by white boosters that make it resemble the house shuttle, its progenitor in each propulsion and programmatic type. After a number of missed deadlines and criticism from Congress, a number of White House occupants, and NASA’s personal auditors, house exploration followers and scientists had been amped to return to the moon.
But overshadowing Artemis is the uncomfortable incontrovertible fact that the rocket, not the moon missions it would carry, has lengthy been the first objective of NASA’s human spaceflight program. Where precisely that rocket goes has all the time been secondary—and the vacation spot has modified a number of occasions. If one thing goes fallacious, or if SLS is deemed too costly or unsustainable, there’s an opportunity the complete moon program will fail or at the very least be equally judged. This is a wobbly, unsure begin to an effort to return people to the lunar floor for the primary time in a half-century—and will make that return, if it does occur, a really temporary one.
On February 1, 2003, the skies over Texas flashed with what seemed to be a daytime meteor bathe. The shiny objects had been items of the house shuttle Columbia, which had damaged aside throughout its twenty eighth reentry by Earth’s ambiance. As the nation mourned the shuttle’s seven crew members, President George W. Bush started work on a brand new method ahead for NASA.
Artemis has its roots in that effort. In January 2004, lower than a yr after the Columbia catastrophe, Bush introduced a Vision for Space Exploration—a reimagining of the house program that known as for retiring the shuttle by 2011, scuttling the International Space Station by 2016, and changing them with a brand new program known as Constellation. Constellation would include a brand new, configurable rocket able to launching to the moon and even to Mars, named Ares; a brand new crew car for low Earth orbit, known as Orion; and a brand new lunar lander, named Altair.