After more than 50 years, Man returns to orbit the Moon. The Artemis II mission is made up of four astronauts, three Americans and one Canadian.
More than 50 years later, the trip repeats itself. This time on the rocket Space Launch System (SLS) the most powerful of which takes flight from the same one from which the Apollo 17 mission departed in 1972.
“We’re not going to go to the Moon right away. We’re going to remain in an impressively high orbit, reaching a peak of tens of thousands of miles while we test all of Orion’s systems and even see how it maneuvers in space. And then, if everything goes well, we’ll head to the Moon,” says astronaut Christina Koch.
It is a mission to lunar orbit that has, for the first time, a womanone African-American and one Canadian.
“We’re ready. The rocket is ready. We’re ready. NASA is ready. This vehicle is definitely ready to go. We’ve gone through the flight readiness review. We’re ready to launch,” says astronaut Reid Wiseman.
On the trip to 10 diasthe astronauts will fly over the far side of the Moon and can become the humans who have traveled the furthest from Earth.
“This time, we’re going to the South Pole. No one has ever been to the Moon’s South Pole before, and it’s very different. The rocks and environment at the South Pole are very different from the terrain that our Apollo astronauts saw near the equator. So we’re going to gain new insights into the Moon itself,” says Dr. Lori Glaze, NASA’s acting director of the Exploration Systems Development Directorate.
The return journey must take three or four days and ends with the spacecraft landing in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of California.
