To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, Vice President Mike Pence on Saturday announced the completion of NASA’s Orion crew capsule for the first Artemis lunar mission.
The effort—named after Greek deity Artemis, twin sister of Apollo and goddess of the Moon—will help put the first woman and the next man on the Moon’s south pole by 2024.
It also aims to establish sustainable missions within a decade.
“Thanks to the hard work of the men and women of NASA, and of American industry, the Orion crew vehicle for the Artemis 1 mission is complete and ready to begin preparations for its historic first flight,” Pence said during a speech at the Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.
NASA’s goal 50 years ago was to prove it could land humans on the Moon and return them safely to Earth.
Now, the agency is being forced wants to revisit Earth’s satellite (in a sustainable way) as a sort of pit stop on an eventual trip to Mars.
In February, Pence demanded the National Aeronautics and Space Administration put new boot prints in the lunar dust within five years.
To help the process along, President Donald Trump in May proposed another $1.6 billion of support, bringing the total funding request to $22.6 billion.
The Trump administration “has given us a bold direction to return to the Moon by 2024 and then go forward to Mars,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said over the weekend.
“Their direction is not empty rhetoric,” he added.
The exact timeline remains unclear: Sometime in the next five years, Artemis 1 will launch NASA’s Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System (SLS) rocket around the Moon to test the system, before landing humans back on the planetoid.
Now that Orion’s crew module and European Service Module (the latter contributed by ESA) are complete, engineers have begun joining the pieces together.
Later this year, the spacecraft—complete with heatshield backshell panel—will travel to NASA’s Plum Brook Station in Ohio for testing, then return to Kennedy for final processing and inspections.
“Similar to the 1960s, we too have an opportunity to take a giant leap forward for all of humanity,” Bridenstine said. “And we are well on our way to getting this done.”
Following two initial missions—Artemis 1 (uncrewed) and Artemis 2 (crewed)—Artemis 3 will launch the next American moonwalkers into “a new era of exploration,” NASA said.
The agency in May selected 11 companies to conduct studies and produce prototypes of human landers for its Artmetis lunar exploration program.
Over the next six months, the selected firms will study and/or develop prototypes that reduce schedule risk for the descent, transfer, and refueling elements of a potential human landing system.
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