The American space agency NASA this morning the slow and delicate process of removing its most powerful rocket, the SLS, from the hangar and taking it to the takeoff platform. The shuttle, as tall as a 32-story building, will be responsible for taking four astronauts to the Moon for the first time in more than half a century. Among them will be the first woman, the first black and the first Canadian to travel to the satellite. If everything goes well, takeoff can happen.
The Artemis 2 mission will last about 10 days. Its four crew members – Reid Wiseman (commander), Victor Glover (pilot), Christina Koch (mission specialist) and, from the Canadian Space Agency, also a specialist – will travel to the satellite, will be trapped by its gravity, will circle around its hidden side and return to our planet. The last time a human crew did something like this was the Apollo 8 mission, launched in 1968 in the context of the Cold War and the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Then there would be a series of landings on the Moon that have not been repeated since 1972.
The current race is now being fought between the country chaired by Donald , which has set its plans for a lunar landing before 2030. The US space agency is accelerating as much as possible to reach the south pole of the satellite before that, with , the year in which two American astronauts, one of them the first woman in history, will set foot on the Moon for the first time in 54 years (date of the last mission of the Apollo program).
The story now is that humanity goes to the satellite to stay and test all the technologies necessary to reach Mars for the first time. NASA administrator, billionaire Jared Isaacman, has turned around the Artemis program to accelerate the conquest of the Moon and possibly achieve the last working year of Trump’s term. This plan rests on an important unknown: whether the rival companies of magnates Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos – SpaceX and Blue Origin – are capable of developing lunar landers and rockets with enough power to send them to the Moon in time.
NASA’s own rocket is also highly questioned. It has been four years since the first and only launch of this device, which sent an uncrewed Orion capsule to the Moon. Artemis 2 is the first test of this ship with crew members. It will also be the first time that they are put to the test, such as the system that provides oxygen and water to the astronauts, purifies the air and provides heat in the cabin while outside extreme temperatures of more than 100 degrees are reached in the areas illuminated by the sun and more than 100 below zero in the shade. For the first time, these systems and also the ship’s propulsion are carried out by a non-US entity: the European Space Agency, which has coordinated the construction of the European Service Module, in which companies from Spain and nine other European countries have participated.
Artemis 2 should have lifted off in early February, but the rocket leaked fuel during the tank filling test. In a second, apparently successful test, a new leak occurred in the upper stage, in this case of helium, which forced the mammoth rocket to be taken back to the hangar to repair the leaks. After several weeks of repairs and tests, those responsible for the mission assure that it is ready for launch.
There are critical voices that see this rocket as an overly expensive relic of the past, and that it is not prepared for a short cadence of launches, as would be desirable for the new conquest of the Moon. But it is also true that the Space Launch System (SLS) is the only rocket with the power and safety necessary to send humans beyond Earth orbit.
The four crew members of Artemis 2 entered quarantine this Wednesday to prevent contagion from delaying the launch. Since this morning, the shuttle has traveled aboard a special vehicle that moves much slower than a person walking, and which took 12 hours to reach launch pad 39B, where it arrived on Friday afternoon, peninsular time.
