NASA’s Artemis II mission has managed to send four astronauts to fly over the far side of the Moon and brought them back home safely.
The Orion spacecraft has performed perfectly and the images captured by the astronauts have sparked the interest of a whole new generation in the possibilities of space travel.
But does this mean that children fascinated by the mission will be able to live and work on the Moon throughout their lives? Maybe even go to Mars, as the Artemis program promises?
It may seem rude to say it, but circling the Moon was relatively easy. The really difficult part is yet to come, so the answer is “maybe yes, maybe no.”
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to land on the moon in July 1969, many assumed that this was just the beginning and that there would soon be people living and working in space.
That did not happen because the Apollo program was not born out of a love of exploration, but out of the Cold War, to demonstrate the superiority of the United States over the Soviet Union. That feat was achieved with Armstrong’s “small step” when leaving his lunar module: mission accomplished.
Just a few years after he planted the American flag on the lunar surface, television ratings for subsequent missions plummeted and future Apollo missions were canceled.
This time, NASA’s stated goal is different. Administrator Jared Isaacman has laid out plans for one manned lunar landing a year starting in 2028, and the fifth Artemis mission (scheduled for the end of that same year) will mark the beginning of what the agency calls its lunar mission.
It sounds like science fiction, but these are the words of an expert in the space sector who handles scientific data: “The lunar economy will develop,” Josef Aschbacher, current director of the European Space Agency (ESA), tells me.
“It will take time to get the different elements in place, but it will develop.”
But, as the commander of Apollo 13 said when his spacecraft broke down on the way to the Moon: “Houston, we have a problem…”.
The lander problem
To take astronauts to the lunar surface, NASA needs a lander.
The US space agency has hired two private companies to build them: Elon Musk’s SpaceX, whose lunar version of the rocket Starship will be 35 meters high, and Blue Origin, by Jeff Bezos, whose ship Blue Moon Designate 2 It is more compact, but just as ambitious.
Both are very late.
NASA’s own Office of the Inspector General laid out the situation starkly in a report published on March 10.
He Starship SpaceX’s moon is at least two years behind its current delivery date, and more delays are expected. He Blue Moon Blue Origin is at least eight months behind schedule, and nearly half of the issues flagged in a 2024 design review remain unresolved more than a year later.
These landers are very different from the compact lander Eagle that carried Armstrong and Aldrin to the surface in 1969 and was barely big enough to carry two men to pick up some rocks and return.
The new landers must carry a very significant amount of infrastructure: equipment, pressurized rovers, the first components of a defective. And transporting that mass requires enormous amounts of propellant, far more than can be launched in a single rocket.
The Artemis program plans to store all this fuel in a depot that will orbit the Earth and which will be replenished by more than ten independent resupply flights, all launched at regular intervals over several months.
The idea seems elegant, but it is tremendously difficult.
Keeping liquid oxygen and methane stable at extremely low temperatures in the vacuum of space, and then transferring them between spacecraft, is one of the program’s most demanding engineering challenges.
“From a physics point of view, it makes sense,” says Dr Simeon Barber, a space scientist at the Open University. However, he notes that the launch of Artemis II was delayed twice this year, before it finally took off, due to refueling issues.
“If it’s hard to do on the launch pad, it’s going to be much harder to do it in orbit,” he says.
The next Artemis mission — Artemis III — is designed to test docking the Orion crew capsule in Earth orbit with one or both landers. It is scheduled for mid-2027.
Given that Starship has not yet completed a successful orbital flight and that the rocket Current Glenn of Blue Origin has only achieved two launches, this goal seems, as Barber says, “a very difficult task.”
The new space race
NASA has maintained its goal of 2028 for the first lunar landing of the Artemis mission, partly for political reasons: it now coincides with President Trump’s renewed space policy, which foresees the return of Americans to the lunar surface by 2028, a deadline that falls within his staunch mandate, which ends that year.
Independent analysts do not believe the goal is realistic. But Congress has backed the date with billions of dollars of taxpayer money, in part because there is a new competitor on the horizon.
China’s emergence in this century as an economic and military superpower has been accompanied by rapid advancement in its space capabilities, and it has now set the goal of landing an astronaut on the Moon by 2030.
If the Artemis schedule is delayed, as many experts believe, China could reach the Moon first. His approach is simpler. It uses two independent rockets, a crew module and a lander, and avoids the complexity of in-orbit resupply of the US aircraft.
Mars, the distant dream
Beyond the Moon is Mars.
Musk has talked about taking humans to the Red Planet before the end of this decade.
Many experts believe it is much more likely to be in the 2040s at the earliest.
The journey itself—seven to nine months, through intense radiation and with no possibility of rescue—poses challenges that far eclipse any difficulties involved in reaching the Moon.
The thin atmosphere of Mars makes the landing of a full-size manned spacecraft—and its subsequent takeoff—a problem of overwhelming complexity.
Artemis II has put human spaceflight back in the spotlight. Private companies are building rockets and landers with real urgency. Europe is currently debating to what extent it should get involved.
As I drove by the Kennedy Space Center after the launch of the Artemis mission, my attention was drawn to the new buildings being built by Blue Origin and others that SpaceX has under construction: private sector infrastructure located very close to a government agency that once sent astronauts to the Moon.
Even if the deadlines are pushed back, this new collaboration seems to indicate that something special is happening off the Florida coast, and NASA has already regained some of its old charm.
ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst once told Aschbacher, after returning from the International Space Station, that the view from space changes everything.
Gerst told the ESA director that he wishes the eight billion people on Earth could go to space just once and see what he saw: a small, fragile, beautiful planet, not cared enough for by the species lucky enough to live on it.
“That,” Aschbacher says, “would create a very different life on planet Earth.”
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