NASA’s much “anticipated” return to the Moon, the Artemis project—which is technically a reboot of the previously cancelled Constellation project that was announced with much fanfare by the Bush administration—suffered another setback with its second delayed launch on September 3, after first being delayed because of a faulty sensor, and then because of a hydrogen leak that could not be fixed. This was to be an uncrewed test flight with the Orion spacecraft attached to the Space Launch System (SLS) for the first time. This particular mission is supposed to fly to the Moon in a dry run for the second Artemis launch in 2024, which is to be the first crewed flight to reach the moon since the last Apollo mission in December, 1972. However, it won’t be until the third Artemis flight, presently scheduled for 2025, that will actually place astronauts on the surface of the moon.
Of course, we could ask what is the point of all of this is, besides “because it’s there.” The Moon does have plentiful iron and silicon deposits, although frankly it would appear that the cost of setting up a mining operation simply isn’t worth the time and effort unless the technology becomes a bit more advanced. For the moment, “furthering science” is the main excuse, but NASA also has “plans” on using the Artemis program to establish a “permanent” base camp on the Moon in preparation for a crewed mission to Mars. Who knows when that will happen (“tentatively” scheduled for the “mid 2030s”); will NASA actually chance a crewed mission on the first flight to Mars because of cost concerns? In any case, as this NASA-provided image appears to suggest, first things first; you have set up that base camp first, and then we’ll think about how the hell we’re going to get to Mars:
But then again NASA can take up this suggestion from this sick cow:
Well, one thing we do know is that unless some extraterrestrial being with technology far beyond human capabilities pays the planet a visit and is willing to share that technology to a life form not noted for its sobriety, getting from A to B may be just too hard in the end; after all, there is no “Planet B,” and we’d better think of what to do to keep this planet going. But that doesn’t mean that people still can’t dream “big”—even it is for relatively little things. NASA has contracted with Boeing to create its Starliner program, which is basically the government side of missions to the International Space Station (ISS) and others of a “low orbit” nature; the Starliner naturally has had problems getting off the ground, with its first uncrewed launch in May, and did successfully dock with the ISS.
Then there has been those private enterprises, the most successful being Elon Musk’s SpaceX project, which built the first U.S. “human-rated” crewed spacecraft (“Crew Dragon”) since the end of the space shuttle program in 2011. The craft is approved for use for the transport of live astronauts and supplies to the ISS, previous to which NASA was paying the Russians billions of dollars to get seats on their Soyuz spacecraft.
Meanwhile, there was the U.S.-based Virgin Galactic’s suborbital flight by the spaceplane “Unity 22” in 2021, carrying British entrepreneur Richard Branson, who boasted about being an “astronaut"; here he is receiving his Virgin "wings" just for being there:
However, his spaceplane was 20 km below the 100 km high “Karman Line,” which is generally regarded as where the Earth’s atmosphere “ends” and “space” actually begins, insofar as going above that “line” allows a spacecraft to at least briefly stay “afloat” instead of falling straight back down to Earth due to gravity, as the Unity would have if its engines were shut off. Due to “infractions” from that first flight (failing to notify NASA about venturing outside its flight path), and concerns from a previous test flight that ended in a fatality, there hasn’t been a Virgin Galactic flight since then, or scheduled.
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin project with its “New Shepard” spacecraft has been more successful, probably because Bezos has more money to build the more powerful propulsion system needed, and the spacecraft itself is just a capsule and not a glorified airplane. Each of its half-dozen flights rose above the Karman Line and thus were "orbital" in theory; of course like Virgin Galactic this project at present is nothing more than a vanity affair for people with lots of disposable cash to spend a few minutes in wonderment and put themselves in the select company of “astronauts.”
This brief overview of the current state of the U.S. space program probably reflects the overall public interest in it at this point. Back in the 1960s, JFK pronounced that the country was committed to sending a man to the Moon by the end of the decade not because it was “easy,” but because it was “hard,” and after all we couldn’t let the Russians beat us there. A significant percentage of the federal budget was devoted to getting the job done, and from the outside it looked rather “easy.”
Today it looks really “hard,” probably because of all the complicated computer programs to make things “easier.” I mean, why couldn’t they just improve upon the systems that worked just fine in the past? Of course it didn’t help that by the time of the last Apollo mission, Richard Nixon decided that it was a waste of money and cut NASA’s budget to a fraction of what it was, and laid-off tens of thousands of experienced engineers.
Perhaps people have a “been there, done that” attitude about space travel, and won’t get “excited” about it until something actually worth being excited about happens. I mean that would be “exciting” to see a crewed mission go to the Moon and actually come back alive at least. But for now it is just a lot of hype and if it happens, it happens. We’ll see.
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