For the crew that’s going to return humanity to the Moon, the Artemis 2 mission astronauts recently said they were fully ready and focused on the task at hand, with everything else being just noise.
Everything else is a lot, since Artemis 2 represents a lot. It will send the first Black Man and the first woman to the Lunar environment. It will set a new record for distance in a human voyage beyond Earth. It is being undertaken in what some are calling a space race with China.
In short, there’s a lot to think about, but Mission Commander Reid Wiseman says they are ready for “every scenario.”
“We might go to the Moon—that’s where we want to go—but it is a test mission, and we are ready for every scenario as we ride this amazing Space Launch System on the Orion spacecraft, 250,000 miles away,” he said on a September 24th media event. “It’s going to be amazing.”
September also saw the naming of the Orion capsule for the Artemis 2 Mission as Integrity.
Joining Wiseman will be NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Victor Glover, both of whom have spent over 100 days (over 300 in Koch’s case) on board the ISS. From the Canadian Space Agency there’s Jeremy Hansen, a first-timer, who admitted the chance to fly on Artemis II will be “an absolute privilege.”
Following an almost perfect Artemis 1 test flight of the Orion spacecraft back in November 2022, several delays have prevented its follow-up with Artemis II set to be a 10-day flight around the Moon and back to Earth, paving the way for a crewed Lunar landing.
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The flight will also mark the farthest trip by humans into deep space, and will travel as many as 9,000 miles beyond the Moon, even farther than Apollo 13 traveled on its near-disastrous flight.
Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy mentioned how competitive he and the agency felt in getting to the Moon before China and winning the “second space race,” but Artemis 2 Mission pilot Glover said he wasn’t focusing on that race—nor his own race, but a different race altogether.
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“The race that I think the most about is the relay race that we’re in,” he said. “We are going together, and our mission success is built on handing off, starting off with Artemis 3—that sets up our country and our partners to go back to the surface of the Moon.”
The first astronaut flight of NASA’s Artemis Program, which seeks not only to land humans on the Moon a second time, but also to conduct sustained crewed exploration of the lunar south pole and beyond to prepare for an eventual trip to Mars, is hoping for an early February launch date.
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