NASA must carry out a first 42-day test mission, called Artemis 1: an empty flight around the Moon. In 2025 it is this super-powerful rocket that will bring astronauts to land on the Moon.
The prospect of seeing a Man on the Moon once more is getting closer this summer and is generating scientific and popular enthusiasm. On August 29, in fact, the NASA space center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, is due to take off, in front of some 100,000 people expected, the largest rocket in the world, heading for the Moon. An unmanned test for what looks like a rehearsal of what will happen by 2024.
This “blank” flight has been in preparation for three years already. For the first time since the last Apollo mission – Apollo 17 which ended on December 19, 1972 – the most powerful rocket in the world, the Space Launch systerm (SLS) capable of propelling up to 45 tons, will send into space a habitable capsule, baptized Orion, to orbit around the Moon, before returning to Earth. From 2024, astronauts will board to make the same journey, and the following year (at the earliest), they will once more set foot on the Moon.
For this first 42-day test mission, called Artemis 1, around ten people will be in the hall of the famous “Mission Control Center”, modernized for the occasion, at all times. “This is all completely new. A whole new rocket, a whole new ship, a whole new control center”, summarizes Brian Perry, who will be at the console in charge of the trajectory just following the launch.
How Americans Want to Return to the Moon
Geopolitical issues
Beyond the control room, it is the entire Johnson Space Center in Houston that has set itself to Moon time, because the issue has become as crucial as the conquest of the Moon was during the Cold War. In fact, the ambitions of the United States, Russia and China have increased in recent years.
In March 2019, Donald Trump had decided on a return of American astronauts to the Moon from 2024, instead of 2028. For the president of Make America Great Again, finding American leadership in space in the face of Chinese ambitions in particular was a priority. Despite difficulties in balancing its budget and establishing partnerships with India and Europe – a partnership reduced to nothing with the invasion of Ukraine – the Russian agency Roscosmos, which no longer approached the Moon since 1976, prepares four lunar missions and should launch next month Luna 25, a lunar lander which must land near the lunar South Pole. China, which collected and brought back to Earth, with Chang’e-5, a sample of lunar soil, plans to launch manned missions to the Moon by 2025-2030. The Chang’e 7 mission scheduled for around 2024 aims to find water at the South Pole. China has always theorized with the European space agency “Moon village”: a first colony of six to ten people (scientists, engineers, technicians) which might settle on the Moon by 2030.
But in this multitude of projects, the symbolic charge of seeing a man once once more tread on our nearest star is immense.
The huge swimming pool used by NASA for astronaut training, containing a replica of the space station, August 5, 2022 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
A lunar swimming pool
In Houston, in the middle of the immense swimming pool more than 12 meters deep where the astronauts train, a black curtain has been drawn: on one side the replica of the submerged International Space Station; on the other, a lunar environment is gradually created at the bottom of the basin, with gigantic models of rocks, manufactured by a company specializing in aquarium decorations. Astronauts can then experience a sensation close to weightlessness. For lunar training, they are weighted so they feel only one-sixth their weight, and are guided remotely, with the four-second time lag they will face on the Moon. Six astronauts have already trained there, and six others are to follow by the end of September, putting on NASA’s new lunar suits for the first time.
NASA has designed other simulators – including a replica of the 9 m3 Orion capsule. Thanks to virtual reality helmets, astronauts will be able to get used to walking in the difficult light conditions of the South Pole of the Moon, where the Artemis missions will land. Intense training before the big day that will mark history…