Artemis II: We’re Finally Going Back to the Moon

Wednesday, April 1st not an April fools joke). Four astronauts strap into the Orion spacecraft, sit on top of the most powerful rocket NASA has ever flown, and head toward the Moon. The first time humans have traveled beyond Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in December 1972.

The ten-day mission carries NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, on a free-return trajectory around the Moon and back to Earth. WikipediaThey won’t land. That comes later. But they will fly farther from Earth than any human has gone in more than half a century, reaching roughly 4,700 miles beyond the Moon before heading home, hitting reentry speeds around 25,000 miles per hour. Wikipedia

Launch window opens at 6:24 p.m. EDT with two hours to work with. NASA Weather is looking favorable, around 80% go, with the main concerns being cloud coverage and winds. NASA

I have some personal history with this rocket.

Back in September 2009, I drove about an hour north of SLC Utah to watch ATK Space Systems fire the ARES-1 DM-1, the world’s largest solid fueled rocket motor, in a static test at their Promontory facility. They had nearly a football field of concrete anchoring the motor assembly to the ground and 650 sensors recording acoustic, pressure, and strain data through the entire burn. That motor puts out 3.6 million pounds of thrust and burns through over a million pounds of solid propellant in about two minutes.

Standing in the viewing area, you experience the firing in a very specific order. Flash. Then the heat. Then, about five seconds later, the sound rolls over you like thunder that doesn’t quit. It gets into your chest. The smoke plume was thousands of feet tall. A commercial passenger jet flew over it during the test. I can only imagine what those passengers were thinking.

After the burn, engineers went in to assess the area around the motor. They found a rattlesnake alive underneath the sand directly behind the rocket. The snake was completely unharmed. Some of the sand nearby had been fused into glass by the heat. The snake did not care about any of that.

They had also placed a video camera with a mirror setup directly behind the motor to capture footage of the ignition. It survived only a few seconds before the blast sent it up the mountainside. The concrete footing it was mounted on went with it.

I went back in 2015 when NASA invited a group of us out for the DM-1 certification test at the same facility, now operating as Orbital ATK. That test was gathering performance data to certify the motor design for the Space Launch System. After the burn cooled down, they took us in to walk the area. I was hoping to find rocket glass from the heat like I’d heard about from earlier tests. Didn’t find any this time, just pieces of plug material scattered across scorched ground. I did get to have lunch with astronaut Stanley G. Love afterward, which was a bonus. Genuinely funny guy and as sharp as you’d expect a scientist-astronaut to be.

All of those tests, all of those sensors, all of that data fed into the certification of the hardware that is sitting on Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center right now.

This mission also breaks some historic ground for the crew itself. Victor Glover will become the first person of color, Christina Koch the first woman, and Jeremy Hansen the first non-US citizen to travel beyond low Earth orbit. Wikipedia

Artemis II builds on the uncrewed Artemis I flight in 2022 and will test Orion’s life support systems for the first time with people aboard. NASA Get that right and the path to a lunar landing with Artemis IV in 2028 gets a lot more real. The comparisons to Apollo 8 in 1968 are fair. That mission proved humans could make the trip. This one proves the new hardware can do the same.

I watched those motors fire from the press area in the Utah desert in 2009 and again in 2015. Both times were unforgettable. Wednesday is going to be something else entirely.

Watch it live on NASA+ and Amazon Prime. NASA 6:24 p.m. Eastern. Don’t miss it.

Cheers,

Shaan