The uncrewed dress rehearsal around the moon will clear the trail for a crewed moon-bound flight test with 2024's Artemis 2, and an actual lunar landing by 2025 as part of Artemis 3. It is the beginning of the new beginning.NASA is delivering comprehensive coverage of prelaunch, launch and postlaunch activities for Artemis 1. "Today we go not only with international partners, but commercial partners. "Fifty years ago we went as a country, as a government," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said on Sunday, after Orion's landing. And as of this year, the program is fully funded. Artemis also sought to build in international cooperation from the beginning through a series of multilateral agreements known as the Artemis Accords. Whereas the Constellation program had a purely government-led architecture, Artemis has leaned increasingly on commercial space. It has been far from perfect, but more than functional. This led to the formulation of the Artemis Program in 20. That changed in late 2017 when Vice President Mike Pence announced that NASA would land humans on the Moon. The development of these programs meandered along for much of the last decade, consuming in excess of $30 billion, with no clear destination. At that point Congress stepped in and saved the Orion spacecraft, which had been started in 2005, and set the design for a new rocket, the Space Launch System. And then neither the president nor Congress fought for the full funding the program would need to survive.Ĭonstellation was years late, and far over budget, when President Obama canceled it in 2010. International partners were largely ignored. NASA's new administrator, Mike Griffin, picked a large and particularly expensive architecture-the Ares I and Ares V rockets-to get humans back to the Moon. This vision was well received in the aerospace community, but then three bad things happened. Like his father, Bush envisioned a bold plan to send humans back to the Moon, where they would learn how to operate in deep space and then go on to Mars. They would lie dormant for nearly a decade and a half before President George W. As Congress had no appetite for such a budget, the Moon plans died. Infamously, NASA conducted and leaked a 90-day study that suggested Bush's plan might cost half a trillion dollars or more. They worried that the lunar plans would disrupt the space station. Some people at NASA, including administrator Dick Truly, were not entirely on board with Bush's idea. What happened next was not particularly pretty. The plan was to complete a space station and then, by the turn of the century, have humans on the Moon starting to build a base there. On the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, in 1989, President George Bush announced the Space Exploration Initiative, a long-range commitment toward the human exploration of deep space. For a time, US presidents and the space agency were content to focus human exploration on low-Earth orbit, with development of the US space shuttle and plans for building a large space station.Įventually, however, some people started to get restless. ![]() The final Apollo mission ended this month, in 1972. But on Sunday there could be no denying that this process has brought NASA, the United States, and dozens of other nations participating in the Artemis Program to the point where its human deep space exploration program is a very, very real thing. The political process that led NASA to this point in recent decades was messy and motivated by parochial pork projects. NASA's progress back toward the Moon, and one day potentially Mars, has been at times lethargic. But now, it is most definitely happening. At times, it seemed like it might never happen again. This brought to a close the Artemis I mission, a 25.5-day spaceflight that demonstrated NASA is just about ready to begin flying humans back into deep space once again. So it is worth pausing a moment to celebrate that NASA just took the essential first step on the path toward establishing a permanent presence in deep space.Īmidst a backdrop of blue skies and white clouds, the Orion spacecraft dropped into the Pacific Ocean on Sunday a few hundred kilometers off the Baja Peninsula. The first step of a journey is often the most difficult one.
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