NASA predicts humans living on the moon within this decade

Humans could remain on the Moon for long periods this decade, a senior NASA official told the BBC.

Howard Hu, who leads the agency’s Orion aerospace program, said habitats will be needed to support science missions.

He told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg program that Wednesday’s launch of the Artemis rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft was a “historic day for human spaceflight”.

The Orion capsule is currently about 134,000 kilometers from the Moon.

The Artemis rocket, 100 meters high, took off from the Kennedy Space Center – located in Cape Canaveral, on Merritt Island, in the USA – as part of a NASA mission that intends to take astronauts back to Earth’s satellite after 50 years.

At the top of the rocket is the Orion spacecraft, which, on this first mission, is unmanned, but is equipped with a “dummy” that records the impacts of flight on the human body.

Wednesday’s flight followed two previous launch attempts in August and September that aborted on countdown due to technical problems.

Hu said seeing Artemis take off was “an unbelievable feeling” and “a dream”.

“It’s the first step we’re taking toward long-term deep space exploration, not just for the United States, but for the world,” he said.

“And I think this is a historic day for NASA, but it’s also a historic day for all of the people who love human spaceflight and deep space exploration.”

“I mean, we’re going back to the moon, we’re working on a sustainable program, and this is the vehicle that will get the people that will get us back to the moon again.”

Hu explained that if the current Artemis flight is successful, the next one will be manned, followed by a third, in which astronauts would land on the Moon again for the first time since Apollo 17 in December 1972.

The current mission is going well, he told the BBC, with all systems working and the mission team preparing for the next firing of Orion’s engines (known as a burn) on Monday (21), to place the spacecraft in a distant orbit of the Moon.

According to Hu, watching the mission from Earth makes him feel like an anxious parent, but he said seeing Orion’s images and videos “really gives that thrill and feeling of ‘wow, we’re going back to the moon’.”

One of the most critical phases of the Artemis I mission will be getting the Orion module safely back to Earth. It will re-enter the planet’s atmosphere at 38,000 km/h, or 32 times the speed of sound, and the shield at its bottom will be subjected to temperatures close to 3,000°C.

Once the safety of Artemis’s components and systems has been tested and proven, Hu said the plan is to have humans living on the Moon “within this decade”.

A big part of the motivation for going back to the moon is finding out if there’s water at the satellite’s south pole, he added, because that can be converted to provide fuel for spacecraft going deeper into space — to Mars, for example.

“Let’s send people to the surface [da Lua] and they will live on that surface and do science,” Hu said.

“It will be really important for us to learn a little bit beyond our Earth’s orbit and then take a big step forward when we go to Mars.”

“And the Artemis missions allow us to have a sustainable platform and transportation system that allows us to learn to operate in that deep space environment.”

The Orion capsule is due to return to Earth on December 11.

This text was originally published here.