This Monday (29), after half a century, NASA will again launch a rocket designed to take humans to the Moon. The Artemis 1 mission marks the first step towards the resumption of manned exploration of deep space by the United States, nearly two decades after the American space agency received instructions to do so.
Named the Space Launch System, or SLS, the giant rocket (98 meters) is a mix of novelty and heritage. Problematic, he at least now ceases to be a mirage. If all goes well, its engines could be activated at 9:33 am (GMT) in a climb that will take it to Earth orbit and then, in a translunar injection, propelling the Orion capsule towards the Moon.
The launch window this Monday lasts for two hours. If it is not possible to fly on this date, there are others reserved, on the 2nd and 5th of September. If it goes beyond that, things get more complicated, due to the certification of the self-destruct device to be activated if the rocket goes off course.
To say that there are uncertainties is to be kind. NASA has not launched such a rocket since 1973, when the last Saturn 5, the rocket responsible for the first human expeditions to the Moon, in the Apollo program, was launched. (By the way, at the time, he served as a transport for an orbiting laboratory, Skylab; the last lunar flight with a Saturn 5 took place in December 1972, on the last Apollo 17 mission.)
No one working at the agency today was there. In addition, the SLS has gone through many technical, programmatic, and budgetary difficulties to reach platform 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, from where it must ascend into space.
Understanding the route is realizing that NASA’s new lunar rocket was already born old and obsolete, in part because its gestation had to meet political demands at the expense of technical choices.
One step back, two steps forward
The choices made for the SLS today seem absurd: a disposable rocket based on technologies and methods originally developed in the 1970s for a reusable vehicle, at an exorbitant cost (between US$ 2 billion and US$ 4 billion per flight) and with a of drowsy flights (it’s reasonable to expect a launch every two years, although NASA says the frequency could increase in the future).
The biggest icon of this apparent madness is the use of the space shuttle engines in the new lunar rocket. You see: the four RS-25s that power the SLS on this first flight are not merely identical to those used on the buses. They are the same, unscrewed from an old vehicle in which they were used again and again and plugged into another in which, after just a few minutes of use, they will end up at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
It is surprising that something like this could have gone ahead, but it is also worth remembering that we are currently experiencing a revolution in the space industry.
Rocket stages for orbital flights didn’t return and land smoothly until 2015, when SpaceX first demonstrated the capability with its Falcon 9. Since then, Elon Musk’s company has not only made first stage reuse routine, it has also demonstrated the Falcon Heavy, a high-capacity vehicle that is not quite as powerful as the SLS, but manages to carry more than half the mass of its public rival, for at most one-twentieth the cost.
And even that comparison pales in the face of SpaceX’s next high-capacity vehicle. The Starship will carry more mass than the SLS, at a fraction of the cost, 100% reusable and capable of flying at least dozens of times a year. It’s such an absurd scale change that it will make the Apollo program, responsible for putting humans on the moon between 1968 and 1972, look like a joke.
For now, however, the Starship still has a lot to prove, and the SLS is on the launch pad. We can see the Artemis 1 mission as the unmanned rehearsal of a “vitamin” return to the Apollo era.
Although the rocket itself, in its first version (there are others on the drawing boards, but it is doubtful that they will materialize), is less capable than the Saturn 5, Orion will fly farther than any spacecraft intended to transport humans ever has, by almost half million kilometers from Earth, in a distant lunar orbit.
In addition, it will perform the longest deep space flight by a manned spacecraft. The longest of the lunar missions, Apollo 17, lasted just over 12 days. Artemis 1’s Orion, if launched this Monday (29), could spend up to 42 days in deep space. It will be a great experiment to measure the level of radiation astronauts will be subjected to when flying so far from Earth.
If all goes well on this long journey, NASA’s plan is to carry out the Artemis 2 mission with astronauts aboard in 2024 (although 2025 is already starting to look more likely, even with everything else going to perfection). It would be a similar flight, just orbiting the Moon, before returning to Earth. The first landing would be reserved for Artemis 3, possibly in 2026 or 2027. But that still hangs on the successful development of the Starship.
For the first time, in addition to seeing women going to the moon, we will have non-Americans on board: the Europeans, who developed the Orion propulsion module, are entitled to three seats on future Artemis lunar missions. And just around the corner, around 2030, the Chinese plan to perform their first manned lunar landing. In short, a lot of people should go to the moon in the next few years.
All this, of course, is still future history. But at this point it would be difficult to imagine that we are not really at the dawn of a new era of manned lunar exploration, after a hiatus of half a century. If the weather and telemetry help, it starts this Monday (29).
