The Trip to the Far Side of the Moon
When NASA is new The moon rocket will lift off as early as April 1, its massive core stage will mix 537,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen with 196,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and ignite propellant in four eight-foot-wide engines, producing some 1.7 million pounds of thrust. Shortly after these main engines fire, two solid rocket boosters, one on each side, will ignite their gunpowder-like propellant to add 3.3 million pounds of thrust each.
This immense force will lift the 322-foot-tall rocket, dubbed the Space Launch System (SLS), on the first stage of Artemis II, a more than 600,000-mile round-trip journey to the Moon.
“It’s like an entire building is rising into the air,” says Nathalie Quintero, SLS core stage operations manager at Boeing, which built the central part of the rocket. “Its size alone is enormous. »
The SLS rocket destined for Artemis II, a 10-day lunar flyby mission, recently departed the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) and was positioned on the launch pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. NASA initially launched the rocket on the pad in January, but the agency had to return it to the VAB to resolve a problem loading helium on the upper stage. The next mission launch window is between April 1 and 6.
Artemis II comes more than three years after Artemis I, the first and only uncrewed test flight of the SLS and Orion spacecraft. This first flight carried two dummies named Helga and Zohar to measure radiation doses, but this second flight will carry flesh-and-blood astronauts, the first people to travel to the Moon since Apollo 17 in December 1972.
The four-person crew includes Commander Reid Wiseman, a Navy pilot who has lived aboard the International Space Station and completed two spacewalks; pilot Victor Glover, also a naval aviator who lived and worked on the ISS; mission specialist Christina Koch, a field scientist and space instrument engineer who holds the female record for longest space flight at 328 days; and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen, a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot who will be the first Canadian to venture to the Moon.
These four will join 24 others and be the only people in history to fly to the Moon, an average distance of about 240,000 miles. When Artemis II launches, the Moon will be near its farthest point, more than 250,000 miles away. And because the Artemis II astronauts will fly at a higher altitude above the lunar surface than the Apollo astronauts, they will travel farther from Earth than anyone has before.
“We will most likely see, depending on what launch window we launch in, things that no human has ever seen,” Wiseman said at a pre-launch press conference.
NASA plans to follow Artemis II with Artemis III in mid-2027. This mission will test a lunar lander from SpaceX, Blue Origin, or both in low Earth orbit, practicing rendezvous and docking maneuvers. Artemis IV, which NASA hopes to launch in 2028, would then land astronauts on the lunar surface. The long-term goal of the Artemis program is to pursue a series of missions aimed at establishing a crewed lunar station in preparation for missions to Mars and beyond.
