“We choose to go to the moon.”
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy spoke these immortal words, kicking off the space race which would culminate in Neil Armstrong becoming the first man to walk the moon.But three years after Armstrong’s landing, the Apollo programme was cancelled, and we left the moon behind, seemingly never to return.
After more than half a century of absence, humanity is finally returning to the moon. On Wednesday evening, the skies around Cape Canaveral in Florida lit up as Artemis II roared into life, carrying four intrepid astronauts outside our planetary boundaries.
During the ten-day flight, the crew will fly away from the Earth, looping around the moon, before returning to splash-land in the ocean. While this mission won’t actually land on the moon’s surface, this is the first time since 1972 that humanity is leaving low Earth orbit. Artemis II will also break the record for the farthest distance from the Earth, a testament to the new frontiers this mission is exploring.
The four-person crew is made up of Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Kristina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen. The crew is more diverse than their 1960s counterparts, with Koch becoming the first woman and Glover becoming the first person of colour to go to the moon.
Koch has already made headlines. On her previous mission to the International Space Station she participated in the first all-female spacewalk, before going on to break the record for the longest continuous time in space by a woman.
Hansen is an astronaut from the Canadian Space Agency, which will make him the first non-American astronaut to go to the moon. He’s also unique among the crew in that this will be his first spaceflight.
Over their ten-day mission, the crew will live, work, eat, and sleep inside the Orion capsule, a space roughly the size of a garden shed. To get used to these cramped conditions, they’ve trained for years to work together. The crew have chosen to name the capsule Integrity, which they say “embodies the foundation of trust, respect, candour, and humility,” upon which the mission is built.
The crew will do a variety of experiments, including photographing the moon, especially its poles and the face which is not visible from earth. They have been told to keep a look out for potential habitable areas for a future moon base. But at its core, this is a test flight, and the main aim of the mission is to test all the hardware and software with humans inside.
Their health will also be constantly monitored as NASA hopes to study how humans are affected by deep space radiation, without the Earth’s atmosphere’s protection.
NASA’s overall aim of landing people on the moon remains steadfast, with the future Artemis III designed to be a rehearsal for a future landing with Artemis IV in 2028. Beyond Artemis, the goal of Mars remains ever-present: the red planet represents what many think of as the future of space travel.
There will no doubt be critics who say this mission is a waste of time and money, questioning the need of sending people to orbit a barren, distant rock. And, for many it will be difficult to look past the involvement of an increasingly unpopular US government.
But on a personal note, I cannot help but disagree with these criticisms. With all the current turmoil and destruction in the world, spaceflight remains one of the few things that can truly unite us all. Beyond borders, politics, and conflicts, this mission represents a desire to adventure and discover. Artemis II begins the next chapter of human exploration. As Hansen said in the minutes before launch, “we are going for all humanity.”
The fact remains that, as this is being published, four astronauts are on a journey that quite literally transcends the Earth and all that it contains. And for those of us who remain Earthbound, we can look up at the sky in awe, and know that once again, humans are slipping the surly bonds of Earth and touching the face of God.
“Artemis 1” by DLR_next is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.