For the first time in 50 years, Nasa on Monday is planning to launch a rocket that can ferry humans to and from the moon.
The giant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket is scheduled to take off from Nasa’s Cape Canaveral, Florida, complex at 8.33am ET (1.33pm UK time) atop an unmanned Orion spacecraft that is designed to carry up to six astronauts to the moon and beyond.
The 1.3m mile Artemis I test mission – slated to last 42 days – is aiming to take the Orion vehicle 40,000 miles past the far side of the moon, departing from the same facility that staged the Apollo lunar missions half a century ago.
Nasa’s Space Shuttle program in the intermediary launched manned missions orbiting the earth in relatively near outer space before its discontinuation in 2011. Private American space companies such as Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX have since flown missions similar to the shuttle program. But Artemis I’s job is to begin informing Nasa whether the moon can act as a springboard to eventually send astronauts to Mars, which would truly bring the stuff of science fiction to life.
US taxpayers are expected to put up $93bn to finance the Artemis program. But in the days leading up to Monday’s launch, Nasa administrators insisted that Americans would find the cost to be justified.
“This is now the Artemis generation,” the Nasa administrator and former space shuttle astronaut Bill Nelson said recently. “We were in the Apollo generation. This is a new generation. This is a new type of astronaut.”
For Monday’s debut, the only “crew members” aboard Orion are mannequins meant to let Nasa evaluate its next-generation spacesuits and radiation levels – as well as a soft Snoopy toy meant to illustrate zero gravity by floating around the capsule.
