Explained: Destination Moon and beyond for NASA’s Artemis 1

The flight of Spacecraft Orion. Source: NYT, NASA

Back to the Moon

It has been 50 years since the six Apollo human moon landings between 1969 and 1972. There has been huge progress in space exploration since then. Spacecraft have now gone beyond the solar system, exploratory missions have probed Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, more than 500 astronauts have travelled to space and back, and permanent space laboratories like the International Space Station (ISS) have been set up.

However, the promise of transporting human beings to new worlds, the possibility of landing, and living, on other planets, or travelling deep into space, probably even encountering aliens, has remained stagnant since the last of the 12 astronauts to set foot on the Moon returned in 1972.

This is why Artemis 1 is being seen as ushering in a new space age. It is the first in a series of ambitious missions that are planned to take human beings back to the Moon, explore possibilities of extended stay there, and investigate the potential to use it as a launch pad for deep space explorations.

On the face of it, Artemis 1 has extremely humble mission objectives. It is technically only a lunar Orbiter mission. It is not carrying any astronauts. It does not even have a lander or rover component. The mission’s spacecraft, called Orion, will get into a lunar orbit that would be about 97 km from the Moon’s surface at its closest. But unlike most other Orbiter missions, Orion has a return-to-Earth target after it has orbited the Moon for about a month.

Not reinventing the wheel

Although the objective is to ensure the return of human beings to the Moon, the Artemis missions are going to be qualitatively very different from the Apollo missions. In many ways, the Moon landings of the 1960s and 1970s came a little too early in the space age. Man had reached the Moon just 12 years after the first-ever satellite, Sputnik, had been launched.

The Apollo missions were guided by geo-political considerations, and the desire of the United States to go one up on the Soviet Union which had taken a considerable lead in space technology, having sent the first satellite in space, the first spacecraft to crash on to the lunar surface, and the first astronaut in space.

President John F Kennedy had made a public announcement in 1961 that the US would put a man on the Moon before the decade was out. That deadline was met, thanks to a massive mobilisation of resources towards that end. But the technology ecosystem that could have maximised the benefits of such a major scientific breakthrough was still to be built. Therefore, astronauts landing on the moon could do little than bring back samples back to Earth for investigations.

The Artemis missions are in a position to exploit the major advancements in space technologies over the years. These technologies now make it possible to start extracting the resources found on the Moon, build from the materials available there, harness hydrogen or helium as energy source. Not all of that would happen with the first mission itself, but these things are distinctly possible now, making human landings on the Moon much more meaningful than earlier.

Setting the stage

Artemis 1 is all about laying the foundations for more complex and ambitious missions. It is carrying several payloads in the form of small satellites called CubeSats, each of which is equipped with instruments meant for specific investigations and experiments. The focus of these investigations is clearly to explore long-term stays of human beings in space, and on the Moon. One CubeSat will search for water in all its forms, another will map the availability of hydrogen that can be utilised as a source of energy. Then there are biology experiments, investigating the behaviour of small organisms like fungi and algae in outer space, and the effect of radiation, especially the reaction on their genes.

The Orion spacecraft, which is specifically designed to carry astronauts into deep space on future missions, will have three dummy ‘passengers’ — mannequins made of material that mimic human bones, skin, and soft tissue. These would be equipped with a host of sensors to record the various impacts of deep space atmosphere on the human body.

The rocket that is being used for the Artemis missions, called Space Launch System, or SLS, is the most powerful ever built, more powerful than the Saturn V rockets that had taken the Apollo missions to the Moon. The giant, 98-metre-tall rocket, weighing 2,500 tonnes, can help the Orion spacecraft achieve speeds of over 36,000 km per hour, and take it directly to the Moon, which is 1,000 times farther than the International Space Station that sees a regular traffic of astronauts.

The aborted launch

The excitement around the mission will, however, have to be held back for the time being. There was a two-hour window on Monday to launch the mission, between 8.33 am and 10:33 am Eastern Daylight Time (about 6 pm to 8 pm in India). The launch was called off shortly after 8.33 am (6 pm India time) since the engineers who had been working on the problem for over two hours had been unable to resolve the issue.

The problem had been detected a few hours ahead of the launch. The flow of liquid hydrogen to one of the four engines of the rocket was not found to be optimal, which could have resulted in over-heating.

“We don’t launch until it’s right,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said on NASA TV after the launch was aborted.

“It’s just illustrative that this is a very complicated machine… They’re going to work it. They’re going to get to the bottom of it… We’ll get it fixed and then we’ll fly,” he said.