The U.S. is preparing to send astronauts to the moon for the first time in 50 years
After more than a decade of development, NASA’s new moon rocket will finally attempt to shed the shackles of Earth’s gravity and soar into space.
“We use the word ‘exploration’ in this discussion, and I think sometimes we forget what exploration is. And that is—we don’t know all the answers,” says Daniel Dumbacher, who oversaw the SLS’s initial development while he was at NASA and now serves as executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “This launch system is going to give us the capability to put humans and equipment into space that we haven’t had in a long time.
“For people who were really interested and enthusiastic about lunar exploration with the Apollo program—and now it’s been 50 years since the last Apollo mission in December of 1972—it’s exciting to see this important step in that process of a return to human lunar exploration,” she says. “And just seeing the evolution of this program and all the different players—it’s a great example of the ways that space exploration gets done in the U.S.
“The question is: Is Artemis a priority for this nation? Do we feel we must, as we felt during Apollo, get people on the moon in the next few years?” asks Lori Garver, former deputy administrator of NASA. “If this program were being done in a way that was different from Apollo—really lowering the costs and really advancing technology and being reusable and being sustainable—I think it would be exciting.
As a result of those congressional machinations, the SLS is somewhat of a “Frankenstein” rocket, assembled from variously sourced components, some of which were state-of-the-art decades ago, when they were used in support of NASA’s space shuttle fleet. Boeing provides the rocket’s core and upper stages, Northrop Grumman makes the twin solid rocket boosters, and Aerojet Rocketdyne built the main and upper-stage engines, along with the main and auxiliary engines of the Orion crew capsule.
The Artemis I test orbit is different than the path a crewed mission would take. Artemis II, if it flies, will be a much shorter 10-day mission with as many as four crew members onboard.
The reentry burn will set up Orion for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, optimally within 50 or 60 nautical miles of San Diego, Calif. And as it hurtles home, the mettle of Orion’s protective heat shield will, in a very real sense, be put to the test in a fiery crucible of glowing plasma formed from frictional heating between the capsule and molecules of air.
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