NASA is preparing to launch its most powerful rocket yet ahead of a mission to send astronauts around the moon and back again for the first time in more than 50 years.
The Artemis 2 mission is scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida as early as February 6, taking its crew on a 685,000-mile round-trip that will end about 10 days later with a landing in the Pacific Ocean.
The flight will mark only the second test of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the first with a crew on board. The four astronauts will live and work in the Orion capsule, testing life support and communications systems and practicing docking maneuvers.
Jared Isaacman, the billionaire private astronaut who was sworn in as NASA administrator in December, said Thursday that the mission was “probably one of the most important human spaceflight missions of the last half-century.”
This will be the second time that three NASA astronauts – Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch – have been in space, and the first for Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. Koch will become the first woman, and Glover the first person of color, to travel beyond low-Earth orbit.
The astronauts will not land on the Moon or enter lunar orbit, but they will be the first to travel around the Moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. The mission follows an unmanned test flight in 2022 and paves the way for the Artemis 3 spacecraft, which aims to land astronauts. Near the south pole of the moon Early next year.
“These are the days we live for,” John Honeycutt, head of the Artemis 2 mission management team, said at a news conference on Friday. “There really is nothing better than this: we are making history.”
“It’s a big deal,” said David Parker, former head of the UK Space Agency and visiting professor at the University of Southampton. “It’s a step toward what we’ve always dreamed of in the space world: continued human and robotic exploration of the Moon and, one day, Mars.”
Some portray a return to the moon as a second space race, with the United States competing against China, which hopes to send its shoes to the moon by 2030. “I will curse myself if the Chinese beat NASA or beat America to return to the moon,” Sean Duffy, former acting administrator of NASA, said in September. “We will win.”
The SLS rocket and Orion capsule are about 100 meters tall, and the rocket carries enough liquid fuel to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool. When burned in rocket engines, it produces enough thrust to fly to the moon at speeds of up to 24,500 miles per hour.
But first, the subtraction. Early Saturday morning, NASA’s Crawler Transport 2, a massive tracked vehicle, will begin pulling the 5,000-ton rocket and spacecraft from the vehicle assembly building to the launch pad. The four-mile trek can take up to 12 hours.
NASA will then work through the preflight checklist. If all goes as planned, engineers will move into a dress rehearsal, where they will load the rocket with more than 700,000 gallons of propellant, conduct the test countdown and demonstrate that they can safely remove the propellant.
Any major problems will require the missile to be returned to the Vehicle Assembly Building for repair. In recent days, technicians have been working on a bent cable in the rocket’s flight termination system, a defective valve used to pressurize the Orion capsule, and a leak in the equipment that pumps oxygen to the spacecraft.
The whole process should go smoothly until the mission is launched on February 6. In the event of technical problems or bad weather, NASA has set 14 other launch dates before mid-April. “We’ll fly when we’re ready,” Honeycutt said. “From launch until the next mission days, crew safety will be our number one priority.”
After liftoff, the crew will orbit the Earth twice. Before heading to the moon, the Orion capsule will separate from the rocket’s upper stage. The astronauts will then manually fly the spacecraft, using the cameras and the view outside the window, to approach and retreat from the abandoned stage. This will give NASA an idea of how Orion will handle future Artemis missions where its crews will dock and detach in lunar orbit.
Despite all NASA’s preparations and extensive training for astronauts, the mission could still present some surprises. “This is a test flight and there are things that will be unexpected,” said Artemis 2 flight director Jeff Radigan.
The final push from Orion’s European Service Module will send the crew to the Moon. The astronauts will travel more than 230,000 miles from Earth, passing around the far side of the moon, before returning again in a giant figure-eight-shaped path. During the flight, the crew will practice emergency procedures and test Orion’s radiation shelter, designed to protect them from harmful solar flares.
More than fifty years since humans went to the moon, it’s time to get excited again – and maybe a little nervous. “Every missile launch is a cause for concern,” Parker said. “We’re putting astronauts on a rocket, and it’s only been launched once before, so of course it’s interesting. But I’m confident NASA will only launch when they’re ready.”