Artemis 3 is scheduled for 2025 but may not take place until 2026 at the earliest, according to an independent audit of the program. Previous Moon landings took place near the equator.
NASA, for the first time, will land a crewed spacecraft on the southern pole of the Moon, where water in the form of ice has been detected. The third Artemis mission will be the first to put astronauts on the Moon since Apollo 17 in December 1972. The four members of the crew will be named before the end of the year. Planned for 2024, Artemis 2 will be a crewed flight that will orbit the Moon but not land on the surface, similar to what Apollo 8 did. Orion will orbit the Moon before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. Mannequins equipped with sensors will take the place of crew members on the flight, recording vibration, acceleration and radiation levels. Here's an overview of the Artemis program:Īrtemis 1 is a test flight of the 322-foot (98-meter) Space Launch System rocket and the Orion crew capsule that sits on top. NASA last sent astronauts to the moon in December 1972, closing out the Apollo programme. That would be followed by a two-person lunar landing in 2025. NASA's top priority for the USD 4.1 billion mission is to verify the capsule's heat shield during re-entry, so four astronauts can strap in for the next moonshot in 2024. This first test flight was expected to last three weeks, ending with a splashdown in the Pacific. The debut of the Space Launch System rocket, known as SLS, had three test dummies but no astronauts inside the crew capsule on top, which NASA hoped to put into lunar orbit. The space agency had two hours to get the rocket off, before standing down until Saturday. NASA expected 15,000 to jam Kennedy Space Centre for the launch in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, with thousands more lining the beaches and roads outside the gates. After more than four hours, the core stage was fully loaded and fuelling was underway on the upper stage. The rocket was being gassed up with nearly one million gallons (3.7 million litres) of super-cold hydrogen and oxygen. "So far, everything is going very smoothly," said assistant launch director Jeremy Graeber about an hour into fuelling.
It seemed to work, with no major leakages reported during the early stages. NASA added an hour to the operation to account for the slower fill-up, vital for reducing pressure on the fuel lines and keeping the seals in place. The latest forecast called for an 80% chance of favorable conditions during Wednesday's two-hour launch window, NASA said. Weather is always a factor beyond NASA's control. While engineers never pinpointed the cause of the escaping hydrogen, they altered the fuelling process to minimise leakage and were confident that all the plumbing in the 322-foot (98-metre) rocket would remain tight and intact. Previous launch attempts on August 29 and September 3 were aborted because of fuel line leaks and other technical problems that NASA has since resolved, then a pair of hurricanes caused more delays.
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