The Artemis II mission lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday, beginning a roughly 10-day flight around the moon and back to Earth.
It is the first time humans have headed beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972, and a major test of the systems NASA plans to use in later missions.
The crew consists of NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, the commander, Victor Glover, the pilot, and Christina Koch, a mission specialist, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, also a mission specialist.
The flight carries several milestones. Koch is the first woman to travel to lunar distance, Glover the first Black astronaut to do so, and Hansen the first Canadian.
Unlike the Apollo landings, Artemis II is not designed to touch down on the moon. Its purpose is to test the Orion spacecraft, its life-support systems, communications, navigation and the crew’s ability to handle key maneuvers in deep space before NASA attempts a landing mission.
Soon after launch, the astronauts carried out manual flying exercises around the rocket’s upper stage, practicing close approach and separation procedures.
Long way from home
Grzegorz Wrochna, former head of the Polish Space Agency and now director for global affairs at Creotech Instruments, a Polish space technology company, said that kind of training is essential because astronauts must be able to take over from automated systems if needed.
He said the mission would take the crew to nearly 400,000 kilometers from Earth, putting them on track to break the record for the greatest distance humans have traveled from the planet.
He also said the Artemis II crew would be the first people to get an unprecedented glimpse of the far side of the moon.
He described the flight as a necessary step before any return to the lunar surface.
“These are extremely difficult conditions,” Wrochna said, pointing to vacuum, radiation, weightlessness, heavy vibrations during launch and the extreme heat of reentry.
He said that is why lunar exploration still has to proceed in stages, even with modern technology.
Dark side of the moon
Tomasz Barciński, an expert at the satellite company IceEye and former head of the Mechatronics and Satellite Robotics Laboratory at the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences, said the mission profile is built around crew safety.
Orion is flying what specialists call a free-return trajectory, meaning the spacecraft loops around the moon in a way that allows gravity to help bring it back toward Earth even if major propulsion problems arise.
He said the mission will give astronauts a view of the moon’s far side, the hemisphere that cannot be seen from Earth, while keeping the overall route relatively simple compared with a landing mission.
The most dangerous moments, he added, remain launch and reentry, though deep-space radiation and the strain on onboard systems are also serious concerns.
NASA’s updated timetable now puts Artemis III in 2027 as an Earth-orbit test of systems needed for a landing.
The next lunar landing is planned for Artemis IV in 2028.
Poland eyes lunar exploration
Wrochna said that Poland is not just watching from the sidelines. He pointed to the planned Twardowski mission, being developed by Creotech with the European Space Agency, as one example of Polish involvement in future lunar exploration.
The orbiter is intended to map the moon’s surface and look for resources that could support later missions and possible long-term infrastructure.
Instruments for the project are also expected from the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Space Research Centre and other Polish partners.
For now, Artemis II is a test flight. But it is also NASA’s clearest sign yet that human journeys to the moon are back underway.
(rt/gs)
Source: PAP