The last man to leave the low orbit has not made a step over 50 years ago, but NASA has proposed to send another crew on a trip around the Moon. Artemis II, a spacecraft that is now in its final preparations before launch, is a step forward in the long-term exploration of the moon and, in the long-term, long-term human missions to Mars.
NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and a Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen are boarding Artemis II, which is set to launch no sooner than February 6 and which will see them spend ten days orbiting the moon and returning to Earth. The spacecraft will not make a landing, but the main purpose of the mission will be to test the operation of Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the presence of people on board the Orion spacecraft in deep space.
The four miles journey of the fully stacked SLS and the Orion between NASA Vehicle Assembly Building and the Launch Pad 39B of Kennedy Space Center will take place in the days to come. This crawling session is powered by the giant crawler-transporter 2 and will take twelve hours and it will be the first occasion when the integrated vehicle will be exposed to the outside environment before it enters into launch. Once at the pad, the teams will need to interconnect electrical lines, environment ducts, and cryogenic propellant feeds, load power to all the systems that are functioning to ensure that there is no malfunction between the rocket, spacecraft, and ground infrastructure.
The second major milestone will be the wet dress rehearsal and it will be a complete-fueling and the countdown simulation, without the crew. The engineers will load super-cooled liquid hydrogen and oxygen into the rocket (exceeding 700,000 gal) and execute terminal countdowns and empty the tanks in a safe manner. Any leakages or malfunctions within the system can also be identified using the test and a number of rehearses can be made in case some issues occurred. Artemis I experiences learnt have served in the redesign of the processes that would be employed particularly when handling liquid hydrogen and when the gaseous nitrogen would be accumulated around the Orion hatch.
During its launching, Artemis II will begin with two of its orbit around the earth to test life support systems and the navigation and communication systems. There will also be the proximity operations test, where the crew will manually fly Orion forward to test rendezvous systems which will be needed in later landing missions to the moon by piloting it near the expendable upper stage of the mission. Upon such verifications, its service module, of European descent, will be given a burn trans-lunar injection which will inject the space craft in a four day outbound trip to the moon.
It is supposed to be a free-return orbit, and to be a hybrid, i.e. it makes use of the gravitational force of the Moon to propel Orion back into earth orbit without needing to use a lot of propulsion to perform the trip. The crew will travel more than 230000 miles distant on earth, having the earth and the satellite in a single frame. The astronauts will also perform the system tests, emergency procedures drill, and scientific experimentation of human health and space environment conditions during the mission.
The landing will be a high-speed rocket in air of earth, Orion will have attained some 25,000mph when the capsule will be decelerated by the agency of parachutes and then will be washed down into the Pacific Ocean off San Diego. Recovery teams of NASA and Department of Defense will be present to rescue the spacecraft and the crew.
Artemis II is not only a trial flight but also the tests of technologies and work that will enable the implementation of Artemis III and its planned landing on the Moon at the southern pole of it. That would be the mission that will occur in 2027 in case of the successful completion of this flyby to demonstrate that everything can go right when astronauts are on board. In that manner, the Artemis II will occupy the missing link between the Apollo age and the next phase of human exploration reviving the desire to explore the solar system even further.
