In less than a decade, humans will establish living and work quarters on the moon, a top NASA official yesterday told the BBC.
NASA’s 2030 target follows the successful launch (third time lucky) of its uncrewed (aside from three mannequins kitted out in space suits) Artemis I rocket from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida last Wednesday. Onboard was the Orion spacecraft which is to be put to a 25-day test — including “re-entry, descent, splashdown, and recovery” — before Artemis II takes off with real humans on board. The crew will include the first woman and first person of colour to travel to the moon.
“We’re going to be sending people down to the surface and they’re going to be living on that surface and doing science,” NASA’s program manager for Orion Howard Hu said about the moon mission.
“It’s more than living, it’s really about science.”
NASA has dedicated its “deep-space exploration” to “the Artemis generation” — a “new generation of explorers” — and pitched the program as a win “for the world”, not just the US.
Japanese astronauts will live and work alongside American ones on both robotic and lunar missions as part of the Artemis program. They will take residence on the soon-to-be constructed Lunar Gateway space station and are set to be included in an Artemis moon landing mission once it’s up and running.
But NASA and co are not the only ones with lunar ambitions. China recently announced that a new rocket for manned missions to the moon could be ready for a test flight by 2027.
In the interim, NASA’s Artemis I will get within 100km of the moon, do a little fly-around, and then head back to earth for a Pacific Ocean landing on December 11. The 2.1 million kilometre journey is the farthest distance travelled by any spacecraft with the capacity to carry humans.
Neil deGrasse Tyson has been quite explicit why the US went to the moon, to beat USSR – but once the USSR crumbled and fell, well why spend all that money
when you could be building infrastructure and helping your citizensi mean, when you could be giving it to the richthankfully now we have China going to the moon, and so, of course, a new space race has begun
all politics is local politics, and so, while politicians and their paymasters in the One Percent control the purse strings, humanity’s quest for knowledge will only be allowed to move forward if there’s a dollar in it
It’s never about the science – it’s always about power and resources.
Oh pulease – not content with f…ing up the earth, they’re want to f… up the moon too now?
Why?
Because humans are too greedy about sharing their goodies and fixing up their mess on earth – viz climate and the environment. Go to the moon (or Mars) instead say the greedy ones who see another potential to make money from an exodus, which they will encourage.
The more the merrier. It’s just a shame they can’t get all 333 million of them on the rocket.