Stari dobri satellite He circled the earth as many as 638 times planet since humans, on the last Apollo 17 mission, walked on its surface of sharp and sticky powder (called regolith and smelling like gunpowder). Unfortunately, the Moon will have to wait another two full months for its long-awaited visit from Earth. After missing the January and then February launch windows, NASA announced that the start of the Artemis 2 mission is being pushed back to April.
The double cancellation of the launch of the ship that will fly to the moon, around it and back with four astronauts is not a surprise for those in the know. A similar series of delays was arranged by NASA for the launch of the first test mission, Artemis 1, then unmanned. Although in the 1960s people had already done it in the Apollo project, in the middle of the Cold War and with huge sacrifices and monstrous financial investments, the undertaking of sending people to the moon 400.000 kilometers away, even if only to go around it in this mission, today requires solving no less complex problems, with a huge number of trials and an acceptable risk that is much lower.
The monstrous machine that will lift a ship with astronauts into Earth's orbit and send them to the moon, the largest and most powerful rocket that exists on the planet today, known as SLS Block 1 (Space launch system) since the beginning of the year has been standing on launch pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, symbolically, the same ramp from which Apollo 10 took off for a similar test tour of the moon. This monstrosity, which is almost 100 meters high and weighs about 2500 tons with fuel, was subjected to a series of extreme tests in the previous weeks and - it did not pass.
A TRIP AROUND THE MOON
If the Saturn V rockets, say the cynics, had been tested in this way in the Apollo program, we would never have gone to the moon. Some of these tests were unsuccessful due to fuel leaks from the giant SLS rocket. Unlike side boosters that use solid fuel, the main engines of the SLS are powered by liquid hydrogen. It is a fuel at an extremely low temperature and a very small molecule that easily passes through gaps and welds that are not perfect. That is why it is quite characteristic for this fuel to leak, but when the leak is already established, the risk is obvious, so it must be patched.
That's why last week NASA made the not-so-happy decision to not only cancel Saturday's liftoff, but to return the SLS monster from the launch pad back to the hangar to repair the rocket and prevent leaks. But, although it was not a surprise, the news caused sadness among astronomy lovers around the world. It is true proof that although Artemis and the return of men to the moon is certainly the greatest American scientific and technological undertaking of the 21st century, it is not just an American thing. As the traditional Japanese master of haiku poetry, Matsuo Basho, says:
"The moon shines the same:
only the clouds that float by
make it different”.
Today, 640 months after the Apollo program, it can be done in many ways. The most banal way, the one described in the novels of Jules Verne, and used by the Soviet Luna probes, is to fly straight to the moon and hit it, without orbital maneuvers, but it is certainly not the wisest way. As powerful as the SLS is, a direct takeoff requires too much fuel for the payload being carried. That's why the various probes that people send to the moon like they are CubeSats they take a much slower route, far beyond the Moon's orbit and use the Sun's gravity to save fuel. The next Artemis, number 3, takes a different path. On Artemis 3, there will be astronauts who will land on the moon (now it will be the first woman), they will not go 1,5 million kilometers in a circle like small probes, but will use the so-called NHRO, an elongated orbit, and this will also be the trajectory for the station Gateway, which is part of an ambitious plan to prepare for a trip to Mars (which is also the main motive for people returning to the moon).
Unlike the next in the series, this year's Artemis 2 mission only needs to send the Orion spacecraft with astronauts into orbit around the moon and bring them back, without landing, so it uses a so-called free-return trajectory (free-return). It is a trajectory designed in such a way that, after the engines are turned off, the spacecraft will naturally describe a "figure of eight" around the Earth and the Moon in their gravitational fields and thus return back. This is done by SLS lifting the ship to a height of 185 kilometers above the planet, where it "injects" it into the path towards the moon at an incredible speed of 39.000 kilometers per hour. The ship travels there and back for ten days, while the astronauts, confined in the command module, look around, eat, sleep, listen to podcasts and wave at the moon as they fly by at an altitude of about 4000 kilometers above it.
ARTEMIS' PASSENGERS
NASA chose four astronauts for this mission who, judging by their biographies, are not only extremely educated and capable, but also unusual people. Of course, political and other correctness was taken into account: two white men, one woman and one dark-skinned man. Three American citizens and a Canadian.
Mission Commander Reed Wiseman, for example, is a single father of two, a widower. A native of Baltimore, this Navy veteran became a NASA astronaut back in 2009. As one of the greatest career achievements, Wiseman states in his biography that in 2014 he was a flight engineer on the International Space Station, where during 165 days, together with other crew members, he performed more than 300 scientific experiments in various fields - human physiology, medicine, physical sciences, Earth science and astrophysics. By the way, Wiseman completed his basic studies at the "Polytechnic" in New York, a master's degree in systems engineering at the "Johns Hopkins" University in Baltimore and the post-graduate school of the US Navy. As a Navy pilot, he was trained on several fighter planes. He was, for example, the pilot of the F-14 Tomcat, the legendary supersonic two-seater made famous by the movie Top Gan and Tom Cruise. However, Wiseman flew this plane in the Middle East operations "Southern Surveillance", "Enduring Freedom" and "Iraqi Freedom".
Artemis pilot Victor Glover was also the pilot of the SpaceX Blood-1 mission to the International Space Station. Primarily an athlete, he graduated from California Polytechnic State University and earned a master's degree in flight test engineering from California Air Force University. And then he finished three more schools and also entered the Navy where he was a pilot in the F/A-18 Hornet, Super Hornet and EA-18G Growler aircraft and participated in various missions achieving about 3.500 flight hours in more than 40 aircraft, more than 400 landings on aircraft carriers and 24 combat missions. He has four children.
Mission Specialist Christina Koch is a researcher and engineer with extensive experience on the International Space Station, where she spent almost all of 2019 – a total of 328 consecutive days in space – on Expeditions 59, 60 and 61. For this mission, she flew on a Russian Soyuz rocket and trained extensively in Russia. She participated in the first all-female spacewalks. She has been a NASA astronaut since 2013. Before becoming an astronaut, she developed instruments for space missions and remote science engineering in the field, in Antarctica and the Arctic. Of course, like the rest of the crew, he has an exceptional education. She attended North Carolina State University where she received her undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and physics and her master's degree in electrical engineering, and studied at the University of Ghana. She also received an honorary doctorate from North Carolina State University.
In his free time – does he surprise anyone – he surfs, rocks and ice climbs, programs, participates in triathlons, hikes, practices yoga, does community service, woodworking, photography, and loves to travel.
While these three work for NASA, mission specialist Jeremy Hansen comes from the Canadian Space Agency. A born aviator, he joined the 614th Royal Canadian Air Cadet Squadron in Ontario at the age of 12 and thus began his pilot training. Already at the age of 16 he became a pilot - but that was only the beginning: he continued his training and positions to graduate in 1999 with a degree in space science from the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario. He then trains on CF-18 fighters.
He was one of two recruits selected by the Canadian Astronaut Recruitment Agency in 2009. For a while, he worked at the Mission Control Center as a captain in charge of communications between earth and the International Space Station. In 2013, he spent six days underground on assignment with the European Space Agency's CAVES program in Sardinia, Italy, and was a crew member of NEEMO 19, which spent seven days on the ocean floor in the Aquarius habitat off Key Largo, Florida, simulating deep space exploration.
If you are disappointed in so many NASA checks and delays, imagine yourself in the place of one of these four people with extraordinary biographies. The mission they are going on is more extreme than anything any of them have experienced - they have to climb a hundred meters high chemical bomb where thousands of tons of hydrogen explode and not only lift them into orbit, but accelerate them to a speed that only 24 people from the Apollo mission reached before them. For the next ten days, their life will be in the Orion ship, which consists of the European Service Module and the Command Module, which is a capsule with a diameter of five meters and a height of 3,3 meters, with the sole purpose of firing from a slingshot to "make a circle", fly around the Moon and return back.
