A NASA video (above) reveals in great detail how its upcoming Artemis II mission is expected to play out.
The space agency released the animation last year, but seeing that the Artemis II astronauts could be heading to the moon as early as February 6, it’s a great time to watch it again.
The Artemis II crew members — NASA’s Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Koch, together with the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen — will launch inside the Orion spacecraft, carried to space by the powerful SLS (Space Launch System) rocket.
The crew will spend 10 days in space, flying first around Earth, then around the moon, before returning for a splashdown landing.
The much-anticipated mission marks the first lunar-bound flight for humans since the final Apollo mission more than 50 years ago.
NASA’s video shows the mission every step of the way, from launch to landing.
“The 10-day test flight will demonstrate a range of deep space exploration capabilities with crew,” the narrator says. “The mission will prove the Orion spacecraft is ready to keep astronauts alive in deep space and allow the crew and ground teams to practice operations essential to the success of future missions.”
The mission does not include a lunar landing. Instead, the four astronauts will come within 4,000–6,000 miles (6,500-9,500 kilometers) of the lunar surface as they fly around the moon.
As the spacecraft returns from the far side of the moon, it’ll be drawn home by Earth’s atmosphere over the course of four days.
In the final stages of the homecoming, Orion and the crew will enter Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of nearly 25,000 miles per hour (about 40,000 kilometers per hour).
Friction with Earth’s atmosphere and the deployment of parachutes will slow its descent in preparation for the splashdown about 50 miles off the California coastline.
NASA is currently running final checks on the rocket, with a wet dress rehearsal expected to take place this weekend. The crew, meanwhile, are now in quarantine as they wait patiently for their trip of a lifetime.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.