The excitement is building as NASA works toward launching its first crewed lunar flight in more than five decades. The Artemis II mission, which will take four astronauts on a 10-day voyage around the moon, could lift off as early as February 6.
NASA has just released a cinematic trailer for the highly anticipated mission. You can watch it via the player embedded at the top of this page.
“We will see things that no human has ever seen … pushing ourselves to explore is core to who we are … it’s part of being a human,” one of the crew members, Victor Glover, says in the video.
Glover will be flying alongside fellow NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
Their Orion spacecraft will be powered to orbit by NASA’s massive SLS (Space Launch System) rocket, which arrived at the launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida last weekend.
After several days in an elliptical Earth orbit during which the astronauts will test Orion’s performance in manual control, the crew will fly on toward the moon, coming within 3,300 miles of the lunar surface as it flies around Earth’s closest natural satellite.
“We’re going to turn the spacecraft so you can have the best view of anybody of the moon in 50 years,” Jeff Radigan, the Artemis II lead flight director, said in a recent NASA documentary about the mission. “We want to ensure that we’re getting the videos of the moon that all of us back here on Earth want to see, and ensuring that all of our systems work on the far side of the moon as well.”
After 10 days in space, the Orion and its crew will splash down in the ocean at the end of a major mission that will pave the way for Artemis III, which plans to put the first humans on the lunar surface since 1972.
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.