Photo from earlier in the unloading process.
For those who didn’t read the article. This is Artemis II. It’s a 10‐day flight around the moon (no landing). Flight is currently slated for Sept 2025. Flight date is contingent on an investigation into a failure of the Artemis I mission’s heat shield.
Additional interesting tidbits that I know about the Artemis project as a whole. Artemis III, the first manned flight to the lunar surface, has serious outstanding logistical issues that need to be addressed before flight can even be considered. This was brought to the public’s (and maybe NASA’s) attention by Destin Sandlin, creator of the YouTube channel Smarter Every Day
Artemis will also create a manned space station around the moon, and is the platform that will be used to establish a permanent base on the lunar surface.
I mean, the first and foremost logistical issue and more information about the follow-up stuff (unless the Artemis program is simply dramatically scaled back for the foreseeable future) is simply building a fully working prototype of Starship/Super Heavy and the HLS. Until that happens Artemis 3 as planned is completely out of the question regardless of logistics scale and it will be hard to have a really good understanding of the scale of the logistics issues. Fingers crossed for IFT-5 going perfectly next month.
Currently NASA simply does not have a way of landing people on the moon and taking back off again, period.
Artemis III, the first manned flight to the lunar surface, has serious outstanding logistical issues that need to be addressed before flight can even be considered.
Eh, for better or for worse, the entire Artemis program was kind of designed to be “politically incancellable”, not an “efficient lunar exploration program”. Some of the logistical issues (like Gateway) are a “feature, not a bug”.
Further discussion of Destin’s video was had over in this thread.
Really? How did I miss that. Can we have a moonbase yet? Just need to take Scrabble and Jenga or something because I don’t think there’d be much to do.
