Can Artemis Bring Manned Spaceflight Out of Hibernation?
After 50 years without progress in manned space exploration, NASA has now managed to send four LEGO astronauts into orbit around the Moon.
The small space explorers will not travel alone since the $100 billion space programme has also made room for three mannequins and two tiny wool dolls — Snoopy and Shaun the Sheep.
“This is an exciting time for Shaun and for us at ESA. We’re woolly very happy that he’s been selected for the mission and we understand that, although it might be a small step for a human, it’s a giant leap for lambkind” says Dr David Parker, Director for Human and Robotic Exploration at ESA.
For everyone else it may have seemed like a washed-out event as Orion finally drifted into a distant retrograde orbit around the Moon. And yes, we have seen it all before: the canceled and postponed space programme, the rescheduled launches and the pixelated images from the surface of the Moon.
In a few days the Orion spacecraft is scheduled for the usual plunge into the Pacific Ocean and at a first glance it may seem that the only difference between Artemis and the Apollo programme will be that this time we didn’t actually land on the Moon and the crew was mainly made out of wool and plastic.
But while Artemis 1 may look like a bleak achievement, it could actually be the injection needed to wake up the manned spaceflight from its 50 year long hibernation.
Think about it for a while and one will soon realize that since the early 70s we haven’t visited the moon or any other objects outside Earth. Compared to the very successful unmanned missions, manned spaceflight of the last 50 years has been a big disappointment without clear goals and visions.
The early achievements of manned spaceflight
Human spaceflight made a quantum leap during the 60s. The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first human in space in 1961. Alan Shephard became the first American in space later that same year.
The Soviets followed with a day-long orbital flight by sending up Gherman Titov. The Americans responded in 1962 by sending up John Glenn, performing three orbits around the Earth.
By 1963 both nations had sent six people into space. In 1965 Alexei Leonov became the first human to perform a spacewalk. Major milestones were achieved throughout the 60s as astronauts performed space rendezvous, dockings, breaking multiple speed- and endurance records and finally, in 1969, managed to land and safely return two astronauts on the moon.
Before the enormous Apollo program closed down they had put twelve astronauts and three roving vehicles (LRV) on the Moon. The first ten years of manned spaceflight was a remarkable achievement.
During the 70s the Space Race started to fade away. People in general started losing interest already after the first Moon landing and funding was cut short by the government. The United States had spent almost $30 billion to land astronauts on the Moon up to 1973, that corresponds to approximately $300 billion today. And even more important; the Soviet was already defeated. After that, crewed spaceflight went into hypersleep for 50 years.
The Era of unmanned space exploration
The focus gradually shifted to unmanned flights. The European Space Agency (ESA) was founded in 1975 and several big nations such as China, Japan and India followed after that. In the 21st century private companies such as Boeing, Northrop, SpaceX and Blue Origin pushed space technology forward.
Revolutionary technology achievements, fruitful collaborations and remarkable exploratory missions have provided stunning images, useful technological aids and delivered valuable knowledge about the universe as well as our own planet. Over the last 50 years we have explored every planet in the solar system and sent spacecraft all the way out to the Kuiper belt and in 2012 Voyager 1 became the first probe to enter interstellar space.
We have landed spacecraft on Mars, Venus, asteroids, comets and even on Titan. We have sent thousands of satellites into Earth orbit providing us with global positioning, communication, observation and great new possibilities to explore the universe by telescopes, measuring instruments and observatories.
But as for manned spaceflight the achievements have been sparse since the end of the Apollo program. The space shuttle was another technological achievement but it never met the targets of cheap and safe transports to space. The old Soviet Soyuz rockets do their job at least as good as the now retired American shuttles.
It is also hard to be enthusiastic about the ISS. 400 km is not much of a spaceflight and the scientific use of the laboratory can be questioned and the platform is pretty useless for astronomical observations.
Artemis, the comeback?
50 years later NASA appears to be back on track again, albeit with a very different crew. The booster rockets are more powerful and reliable, the instrumentation and software are based on technology that has made huge advances since the Apollo missions and people can follow the endeavors live on youtube.
Assuming that Artemis 1 will be successful (we’ll know in a few days), other missions will follow. Artemis 3 is planned to be NASA’s first manned Moon landing missions since Apollo 17 in 1972. The following missions will deliver modules to the Lunar Gateway — the first extraterrestrial space station in lunar orbit.
The Lunar Gateway is intended to serve as a solar-powered communication hub, science laboratory, and short-term habitation module for government-agency astronauts, as well as a holding area for rovers and other robots. It is one of many collaboration projects with other agencies around the globe.
However, NASA’s long-term goals are more ambitious than Moon explorations. By using the technology and research developed during the Artemis flights, NASA intends to launch a future crewed mission to Mars. And the first step to achieve this very ambitious goal is to go back to the Moon.
