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It is no exaggeration to say that NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the Moon have faced several challenges. Since its inception, the Artemis Project has set itself some ambitious goals, including placing “the first woman and the next man” on the Moon by 2024. Aside from all the technical challenges this entails, there is also the question of budgets. . As the Apollo Era taught us, reaching the moon in a few years is not cheap!
Funding is an especially difficult topic right now due to the fact that we are in an election year and NASA may be grappling with a new administration in January 2021. In response, NASA announced a budget last week (Monday 21 September) that put a price on astronauts returning to the Moon. According to NASA, it will cost taxpayers $ 28 billion between 2021 and 2025 to make sure Project Artemis meets its 2024 deadline.
On the same day, during a conference call with reporters, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine noted that “political risks” are often the biggest obstacle to NASA’s work. This is perhaps a reference to the fact that NASA’s plans and goals have forcibly changed over the past decade in response to the changing priorities of the new administrations.
When he took office in 2009, President Obama and his cabinet inherited the Constellation Program initiated by the Bush administration in 2005. This program aimed to create a new generation of launch systems and spacecraft to return astronauts to the Moon in 2020 to latest. However, due to the economic crisis at the time and recommendations that the 2020 deadline could not be met, it was canceled.
A year later, the Obama administration initiated NASA’s “Journey to Mars,” which picked up much of the Constellation architecture but shifted focus to a manned mission to Mars by the 2030s. By 2017, Vice President Pence announced that the Trump administration’s focus would be on returning to the Moon within the 2020s. By March 2019, Project Artemis was officially unveiled and NASA was tasked with returning to the Moon in five years.
The approval of these funds now rests with Congress, which will be awaiting the elections for November 3. This year, in addition to deciding who will be president, will contest 434 of the 435 congressional districts in all 50 US states and 33 class 2 Senate seats. In January, NASA could be grappling with an entirely new government. .
According to Bridenstine, the first tranche of funding ($ 3.2 billion) must be approved before Christmas for NASA to remain “on track to a moon landing in 2024.” In total, NASA will require a total of $ 16 billion to fund the development of the Human Landing System (HLS), also known as. a lunar lander, which will allow the crew of the Artemis III mission (a man and a woman) to land on the surface of the Moon.
Today, three large companies are competing to see which of their concepts NASA will choose. They include SpaceX, which submitted to NASA a modified version of its Starship designed, altered to accommodate moon landings. Then there’s the Alabama-based Dynetics Human Landing System (DHLS), a vehicle that will provide both descent and ascent capabilities.
Completing the competitors is Blue Origin, meanwhile collaborating on the design of an integrated landing vehicle (ILV) that will consist of three elements: the descent, transfer and climb elements, designed by Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. respectively. The winning design will either be integrated with the Orion capsule that takes the crew to the moon or will launch itself on a company rocket.
Bridenstine also took the opportunity to clear things up regarding where the Artemis III mission would land. This was in response to an earlier statement he made during a Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) online meeting, which seemed to hint that Artemis crews might revisit the Apollo sites.
“If you are going to go to the equator again, how are you going to learn more?” he said. “You could argue that he will learn more by going to the places where we have placed the team in the past. There could be scientific discoveries there and of course the simple inspiration to go back to an original Apollo site would also be quite surprising. “
However, during Monday’s telephone briefing, Bridenstine emphasized that the mission will target the South Pole-Aitken Basin:
“To be clear, we are going to the South Pole. They don’t talk about anything more than that. The science that we would be doing is actually very different from anything we have done before. We have to remember that during the Apollo era, we thought that the moon was completely dry. Now we know that there is a lot of ice water and we know that it is at the South Pole. “
Investigations of this ice and other resources will be intrinsic to long-term plans to create Artemis Base Camp. The current schedule has the Artemis I flight (which will not be manned) that will take place in November 2021. This will be the maiden flight of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) flying with the Orion space capsule. Artemis II It is scheduled for 2023 and will carry a crew of astronauts around the Moon, but will not attempt a lunar landing.
In 2024, the long-awaited Artemis III mission will occur and see astronauts land on the surface for a week of operations and up to five operations on the surface. Beyond 2024, NASA plans to deploy the various segments that make up the Lunar Gateway, which will facilitate more long-term missions to the lunar surface and allow for the construction of the Artemis Base Camp.
Further reading: Phys.org
