NASA Prepares To Launch First Manned Mission to Circle Moon in Decades

The final preparations are underway for NASA’s first manned moon mission in more than 50 years.A four member crew of astronauts are set to launch as early as Wednesday for a 10 day mission to take them around the moon in a lower orbit flyby. Artemis II will test NASA’s deep space capabilities as humans fly on the SKS rocket and an Orion spacecraft for the first time.The mission marks a key step forward in the plan for a long-term return to the moon and future missions to Mars. NASA hopes to eventually build a base on the moon for astronauts to conduct long-term missions. That base could be used as a training ground for new technology needed for Mars missions.The Artemis I mission in 2022 tested the new spacecraft with an unmanned trip to circle the moon before returning to Earth.NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, have been in quarantine for nearly two weeks to limit the chance any of them get sick ahead of the launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.“Things are starting to feel real,” Ms. Koch said during a virtual press conference on Sunday.The crew will spend a day in Earth orbit to test systems before firing a separate rocket to push it into a four-day trip to the moon. The spacecraft will use the moon’s gravity to bend the ship’s path back toward Earth.The crew will manually fly the ship, named Integrity, in a test of its maneuvering system for future planned dockings with landers or a space station. “We are essentially going to make sure that the vehicle flies the way we think it does,” Mr. Glover, the mission’s pilot, said.The launch window opens on Wednesday at 6:24 p.m. The weather forecast shows an 80 percent chance of favorable weather conditions for the launch, with cloud coverage and potential for high winds at ground level as the primary weather concerns.The mission was initially scheduled for February but was delayed due to hydrogen fuel leaks and issued with a pressurization system. NASA says both of those issues have been fixed.If all goes as planned with a Wednesday launch, the capsule will splashdown in the Pacific Ocean on April 10.NASA has pushed back the date for a lunar landing until early 2028 after scrapping a planned Artemis III mission later this year. The Artemis III phase will be for astronauts to dock in lower-Earth orbit with new moon landers being built by SpaceX and Blue Origin. NASA hopes that mission will take place sometime next year.America is in a new space race with China with each trying to put the first humans on the moon since the Apollo 17 landing 53 years ago. NASA is accelerating plans to build a mini-nuclear reactor to deploy to the lunar surface. The space agency has been studying using fission systems to provide power on the moon and eventually Mars. They are relatively small and lightweight and are powerful enough to enable “robust operations,” NASA says.

NASA Prepares To Launch First Manned Mission to Circle Moon in Decades

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