Manufacturing the hardware for those missions is already well underway. That task will not require capabilities beyond those demonstrated during Artemis I and Artemis II. The moon landing is planned for the third Artemis mission, in which the Space Launch System and Orion will ferry four astronauts to a large looping orbit around the moon. Vanessa Wyche, director of the Johnson Space Center, said NASA planned to name the crew members for Artemis II early next year. That flight will send four astronauts to the moon, without landing, and then back to Earth. The space agency now appears to be in good shape to launch the next mission, Artemis II, as planned in 2024. “It’s a huge relief, and excitement, at NASA.” “It’s fantastic that it is working,” she said in an interview. “I feel good about the fact that what we intended is coming to fruition.”Įven Lori Garver, a former deputy administrator of NASA who favored turning to private companies to come up with more innovative rocket designs that might have been built faster and cheaper, acknowledged that the Artemis I flight went smoothly. “From my standpoint, it certainly measures up to the expectations, if not more,” said Jeff Bingham, a former senior Republican aide on the Senate subcommittee that shaped legislation in 2010 directing NASA to build the Space Launch System, in an interview. While the mission was years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, the flight provided some validation of the traditional government-run approach that NASA took for the development of the complex space hardware. Dumbacher oversaw early work on the Space Launch System more than a decade ago when he was a top human spaceflight official at NASA. Dumbacher, the executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, in an interview. “It’s a great demonstration that this stuff works,” said Daniel L. The capsule and the Space Launch System, a giant new rocket, are key pieces of Artemis, which aims to land astronauts on the moon near its south pole as early as 2025.ĭuring the 26 days of Artemis I, glitches popped up as expected, but the flight appeared to be devoid of major malfunctions that would require a lengthy investigation and redesign. Jose Romero/Agence France-Presse, via NASA TV/AFP Via Getty Images It will then head back to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for detailed inspection.Ī camera aboard the Orion spacecraft captured parachutes as they were deployed during the splashdown on Sunday. Over the next few hours, recovery crews worked to pull Orion out of the water. Portland experienced brisk winds and choppy seas with waves four to five feet high. Eastern time, the capsule settled in the Pacific Ocean off Mexico’s Baja peninsula. As expected, there were two blackouts in communications as the heat from the capsule’s encounter with the atmosphere created electrically charged gases that blocked the radio signals.īefore and after the blackouts, live video from outside Orion’s window showed impressive views of Earth getting larger and larger.Īt 12:40 p.m. It was the first time that a capsule designed for astronauts had performed this maneuver, known as a skip-entry, which enables more precise steering toward the landing site. This was the mission’s last major objective: to demonstrate that the capsule’s heat shield could withstand temperatures up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.īy design, the capsule bounced off the upper layer of air before re-entering a second time. On Sunday, just after noon Eastern time, the Orion crew capsule - where astronauts will sit during future flights - re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere at 24,500 miles per hour. NASA’s Orion spacecraft captured a view of planet Earth during its trip home from the moon on Sunday morning. NASA is relying on a version of Starship, the company’s next-generation spacecraft that has not yet flown to space, to land astronauts on the moon. With the conclusion of Artemis I, more attention will shift toward SpaceX, the private rocket company founded by Elon Musk. Its DART mission showed in September that slamming into an asteroid on purpose could protect Earth in the future if a deadly space rock is discovered on a collision course with our planet. Its James Webb Space Telescope, which launched almost a year ago, began sending back breathtaking images of the cosmos this summer. The moon trip capped a year of spectacular successes for NASA. “And this is what mission success looks like.” “This was a challenging mission,” Mike Sarafin, the Artemis mission manager, said during a news conference after the splashdown. The Artemis program is the successor to Apollo, and after years of delays and a mounting price tag, the new rocket and spacecraft that will take astronauts back to the moon worked about as smoothly as mission managers could have hoped.
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