NASA Artemis I Splashdown: Highlights From NASA’s Artemis I Moon Mission Return to Earth (Published 2022) (2024)

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Splashdown! NASA’s Orion capsule lands in the Pacific Ocean.

The Artemis program is the successor to Apollo, and after years of delays and a mounting price tag, the new rocket and spacecraft that will take astronauts back to the moon worked about as smoothly as mission managers could have hoped.

“This was a challenging mission,” Mike Sarafin, the Artemis mission manager, said during a news conference after the splashdown. “And this is what mission success looks like.”

The moon trip capped a year of spectacular successes for NASA. Its James Webb Space Telescope, which launched almost a year ago, began sending back breathtaking images of the cosmos this summer. Its DART mission showed in September that slamming into an asteroid on purpose could protect Earth in the future if a deadly space rock is discovered on a collision course with our planet.

With the conclusion of Artemis I, more attention will shift toward SpaceX, the private rocket company founded by Elon Musk. NASA is relying on a version of Starship, the company’s next-generation spacecraft that has not yet flown to space, to land astronauts on the moon.

On Sunday, just after noon Eastern time, the Orion crew capsule — where astronauts will sit during future flights — re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere at 24,500 miles per hour. This was the mission’s last major objective: to demonstrate that the capsule’s heat shield could withstand temperatures up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

By design, the capsule bounced off the upper layer of air before re-entering a second time. It was the first time that a capsule designed for astronauts had performed this maneuver, known as a skip-entry, which enables more precise steering toward the landing site. As expected, there were two blackouts in communications as the heat from the capsule’s encounter with the atmosphere created electrically charged gases that blocked the radio signals.

Before and after the blackouts, live video from outside Orion’s window showed impressive views of Earth getting larger and larger.

At 12:40 p.m. Eastern time, the capsule settled in the Pacific Ocean off Mexico’s Baja peninsula. Recovery crews aboard the U.S.S. Portland experienced brisk winds and choppy seas with waves four to five feet high.

Over the next few hours, recovery crews worked to pull Orion out of the water. It will then head back to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for detailed inspection.

The capsule and the Space Launch System, a giant new rocket, are key pieces of Artemis, which aims to land astronauts on the moon near its south pole as early as 2025.

During the 26 days of Artemis I, glitches popped up as expected, but the flight appeared to be devoid of major malfunctions that would require a lengthy investigation and redesign.

“It’s a great demonstration that this stuff works,” said Daniel L. Dumbacher, the executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, in an interview. Mr. Dumbacher oversaw early work on the Space Launch System more than a decade ago when he was a top human spaceflight official at NASA.

While the mission was years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, the flight provided some validation of the traditional government-run approach that NASA took for the development of the complex space hardware.

“From my standpoint, it certainly measures up to the expectations, if not more,” said Jeff Bingham, a former senior Republican aide on the Senate subcommittee that shaped legislation in 2010 directing NASA to build the Space Launch System, in an interview. “I feel good about the fact that what we intended is coming to fruition.”

Even Lori Garver, a former deputy administrator of NASA who favored turning to private companies to come up with more innovative rocket designs that might have been built faster and cheaper, acknowledged that the Artemis I flight went smoothly.

“It’s fantastic that it is working,” she said in an interview. “It’s a huge relief, and excitement, at NASA.”

The space agency now appears to be in good shape to launch the next mission, Artemis II, as planned in 2024. That flight will send four astronauts to the moon, without landing, and then back to Earth.

Vanessa Wyche, director of the Johnson Space Center, said NASA planned to name the crew members for Artemis II early next year.

The moon landing is planned for the third Artemis mission, in which the Space Launch System and Orion will ferry four astronauts to a large looping orbit around the moon. That task will not require capabilities beyond those demonstrated during Artemis I and Artemis II.

Manufacturing the hardware for those missions is already well underway. The Orion capsule for Artemis II is already half-built at the Kennedy Space Center. The service module for Orion, built by Airbus as part of the European Space Agency’s contributions to the moon missions, was delivered last year. This weekend, the bottom section for the rocket that will launch Artemis III arrived at Kennedy for installation of the engines.

“This isn’t just a one-flight-and-we’re-done,” said Jim Free, associate administrator of NASA’s exploration systems development directorate.

But Artemis III will hinge on a third requisite piece: a lander built by SpaceX. And for that part of the mission, Mr. Musk’s company will have to pull off a series of technological marvels that have never been achieved before.

“I think all eyes do start turning to the lander at some point,” said Ms. Garver, whose work during the Obama administration helped lay the foundation for SpaceX’s current program of taking astronauts to the International Space Station.

NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract in 2021 to develop and build the lunar lander, which is a variation of the giant Starship rocket, for Artemis III.

A long-promised test launch of Starship to orbit has yet to occur, although a hubbub of activity at the company’s development site in South Texas indicates that SpaceX is getting closer.

For Artemis III, the lander will dock with the Orion spacecraft above the moon.

Two astronauts will move over to the lander and head to the south polar region of the moon, spending close to a week on the surface.

But getting the lander to lunar orbit will be far from easy.

For one, it will require at least three different Starships. The Starship system is a two-stage rocket: a reusable booster known as the Super Heavy with the Starship spacecraft on top. After reaching orbit, the tanks of the second stage — the Starship spacecraft — will be almost empty, with not enough propellant to head to the moon.

Thus, SpaceX will first launch a Starship that will essentially serve as a gas station in orbit. Then, it will conduct a series of launches — Mr. Musk has said no more than eight will be needed — of a tanker version of Starship to carry propellant to the gas station Starship.

The final launch is to be the lunar lander Starship, which will sidle up to the gas station Starship in orbit and fill up its tanks. The lunar lander will then finally be ready to head to the moon.

While NASA’s Space Launch System rocket flies just once and all of the pieces fall into the ocean as litter, SpaceX’s Starship is designed to be entirely reusable. That will make the launches frequent and cheap, Mr. Musk says.

Before Artemis III, SpaceX is to conduct an uncrewed test first to show that it can indeed perform a quick succession of Starship launches, reliably transfer propellants in orbit and safely land on the moon.

The idea of refueling in space dates back decades but remains largely untested.

“Knowing what I think I know about the state of our research into microgravity propellant transfer, we have a long way to go,” Mr. Dumbacher said.

Rocket launches also remain risky, so the multitude of Starship launches needed for Artemis III raises the chances that one of them fails, scuttling the entire endeavor.

By turning over development of the lunar lander to SpaceX, NASA hopes that the innovative approach of Mr. Musk’s company will provide a lander more quickly at a lower cost than a NASA-led program could.

The flip side is that if SpaceX finds the technical challenges more difficult than expected, NASA will not have an immediate alternative to turn to. The agency just received proposals from other companies for a second lander design, but the second lander design is intended for later moon mission. (In November, NASA awarded SpaceX an additional $1.15 billion to provide the lander for Artemis IV.)

Mr. Musk has also added to his portfolio of companies with the purchase of Twitter, where the turmoil that has followed his takeover of the social media company is now consuming much of his time and attention.

“That is new,” Ms. Garver said. “The Elon concerns have escalated,” although she said she was not sure how much those directly affect work at SpaceX.

The Information and CNBC reported last month that SpaceX has shaken up the leadership of its Texas Starship operation with Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, and Mark Juncosa, the company’s vice president of vehicle engineering, now overseeing the site.

Last week, Mr. Musk said on Twitter that he continues to oversee both SpaceX and Tesla, his electric car company, “but the teams there are so good that often little is needed from me.”

Mr. Bingham said he hoped for Starship to succeed, but “It’s a lot of uncertainty in there, and it’s worrisome.”

During the news conference, Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said he asked Mr. Free all of the time whether SpaceX was on schedule. “And the answer comes back to me, ‘Yes, and in some cases, exceeding,’” Mr. Nelson said.

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The next very big launch: SpaceX’s Starship.

Starship will also — unlike any previous orbital rocket — be entirely reusable. That fact has the potential to cut the cost of sending payloads to orbit — less than $10 million to take 100 tons to space, Elon Musk, the company’s founder, has said.

While Mr. Musk first set out to build Starship with eventual trips to Mars in mind, NASA will use a version of the rocket to ferry astronauts to the surface of the moon from its orbit. Beating out two competitors, SpaceX won a $2.9 billion contract for the mission, Artemis III.

The lunar mission will require about 10 Starship launches. First, SpaceX plans to launch a propellant depot version of Starship — think of it as a gas station — into orbit around Earth. Then, a tanker Starship filled with liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellants will sidle up to the propellant depot Starship. Once the tanker has transferred its load, it will return to Earth.

According to Mr. Musk, no more than eight Starship tanker flights are needed to fill the propellant depot. Then, the lunar lander Starship will launch from Earth, meet up with the propellant depot and fill its tanks before departing for lunar orbit. There, it will wait for the arrival of four astronauts riding in NASA’s Orion spacecraft.

When Orion and Starship dock above the moon, two astronauts will move to Starship and head to the lunar south polar region, while the other two will stay in orbit on the Orion spacecraft.

Starship and the two moon-walking astronauts will spend about a week on the surface. They will then blast off to dock again with Orion, and Orion will take the astronauts back to Earth. SpaceX has not said what it plans do with the lunar lander Starship once its NASA mission is complete.

The moon landing is scheduled for 2025, but it is expected to be delayed. Before then, SpaceX is to conduct a demonstration landing of Starship, without any astronauts, on the moon. (That uncrewed demonstration is to show that Starship can land, but taking off again is not a requirement.)

Before SpaceX can even think about getting to the moon, it needs to get to low-Earth orbit. Short test flights of Starship prototypes went to high altitudes and exploded before one successfully landed undamaged in May 2021. The next test flight will go into space, with the booster trying a controlled landing in the Gulf of Mexico, while the Starship stage will try to set down in the Pacific Ocean off Hawaii after flying to orbit.

In June, the Federal Aviation Administration granted environmental approval for the test flight from a site in South Texas, and detailed actions SpaceX must complete before launching. Spacecraft and booster tests are occurring on a regular basis, and in October, a NASA official told a NASA Advisory Council committee that SpaceX was aiming to launch Starship to orbit for the first time in early December.

Since then, Mr. Musk added to his portfolio of companies with the purchase of Twitter, which is now consuming much of his time and attention. CNBC reported last month that SpaceX has shaken up the leadership of its Texas Starship operation with Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, and Mark Juncosa, the company’s vice president of vehicle engineering, now overseeing the site. Last week, Mr. Musk said on Twitter that “little is needed from me,” at SpaceX.

On Nov. 29, SpaceX conducted a test of the booster, firing 11 of its engines on the launchpad. It is not known when the company plans the orbital test launch.

Artemis II, Artemis III and beyond.

Mr. Nelson said that years ago, to save money, NASA decided to reuse some of the electronics equipment, known as avionics, from the Artemis I Orion capsule in the new Orion capsule for Artemis II. “It takes them two years to take the avionics out and redo them,” Mr. Nelson said, “which is very frustrating to me, but it is what it is.”

There will be four astronauts aboard Artemis II. Three will be from NASA, and one will be Canadian, part of the agreement spelling out the Canadian Space Agency’s participation in the Artemis program. NASA has not yet announced who will fly on the mission.

The trajectory of Artemis II will be fairly simple. After launch, the second stage of the Space Launch System will push Orion into an elliptical orbit that loops as far out as 1,800 miles above Earth, giving the astronauts time to see how Orion’s systems work.

Then, when Orion speeds around again, its engine will fire to send it toward the moon. For Artemis II, the Orion spacecraft will not enter orbit around the moon; it will instead use the moon’s gravity to sling back to Earth for a Pacific Ocean splashdown. The entire trip should take around 10 days.

The big event will be Artemis III, currently scheduled for no earlier than 2025.

During the Apollo moon landings in the 1960s and 1970s, the lunar lander was packed into the Saturn V rocket. The lander for Artemis III will be a version of a Starship rocket built by SpaceX. The lunar Starship will be launched separately. Additional Starships would then launch to refill the propellant tanks of the lunar Starship before it left Earth orbit.

At the moon, the Starship lander will enter what is known as a near-rectilinear halo orbit, or N.R.H.O.

Halo orbits are influenced by the gravities of two bodies — in this case, the Earth and the moon — which help to make the orbit highly stable, minimizing the amount of propellant needed to keep a spacecraft circling the moon. A spacecraft in this orbit also never passes behind the moon, where communications with Earth are cut off.

Once Starship is in orbit around the moon, the Space Launch System rocket will send four astronauts in an Orion capsule to the same near-rectilinear halo orbit. The Orion will dock with the Starship. Two of the astronauts will move to the Starship rocket, landing somewhere near the moon’s South Pole, while the other two astronauts will remain in orbit in Orion.

After about a week on the surface, the two moon-walking astronauts will blast off in Starship and rendezvous with Orion in orbit. Orion will then take the four astronauts back to Earth.

In August, NASA announced 13 potential landing sites near the moon’s south pole.

The astronauts aboard Artemis IV will head to Gateway, a space station-like outpost that NASA will build in the same near-rectilinear halo orbit used for Artemis III. That mission will use a Space Launch System rocket with an upgraded second stage, providing enough power to take along Gateway’s habitat module.

Originally, NASA planned for Artemis IV to focus on construction of Gateway. But this year, it decided that the mission would also include a trip to the lunar surface. Last month, NASA announced SpaceX would provide the lander for Artemis IV.

For Artemis V and later missions, the lunar lander will be docked at Gateway. Astronauts will arrive at the Gateway on Orion, then move to the lander for the journey to the lunar surface.

NASA is now considering bids for a different company to provide the lander for Artemis V.

Among the companies that may be bidding to build a competing lander are Blue Origin, the rocket company started by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.

NASA would then run a competition for future lunar landers similar to how it hired companies to take cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station.

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Why NASA is trying to return to the moon.

“It’s a future where NASA will land the first woman and the first person of color on the moon,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said during a news conference earlier this year. “And on these increasingly complex missions, astronauts will live and work in deep space and will develop the science and technology to send the first humans to Mars.”

NASA is also hoping to jump-start companies looking to set up a steady business of flying scientific instruments and other payloads to the moon and to inspire students to enter science and engineering fields.

For scientists, the renewed focus on the moon promises a bonanza of new data in the coming years. There is a particular interest in the amount of water ice on the moon, which could be used for astronauts’ water and oxygen supplies in the future and could provide fuel for missions deeper into space.

Scientists do not really know how much water is on the moon or how easy it will be to extract the water from the surrounding rock and soil. Future missions could help to resolve that question.

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Water landings are often NASA’s preferred way to get astronauts home.

When the Apollo era ended, NASA switched to the space shuttle, which launched like an upright rocket does but landed like an airplane on a runway does. When the space shuttle program ended, NASA eventually replaced it with smaller astronaut capsules.

Crew Dragon, built by SpaceX, has safely completed water landings in the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico for five NASA astronaut missions as well a pair of private astronaut flights.

Another capsule, Starliner, which Boeing built for NASA, will return its astronaut crews on land in New Mexico. While Boeing has safely landed two uncrewed Starliners, problems with testing and launching the capsule have delayed its first astronaut flight to 2023.

One difference between the new Orion spacecraft and the Apollo command modules of the 1960s and 1970s is that it will perform what NASA calls a skip re-entry. During the skip re-entry, the capsule will enter the upper atmosphere, oriented at angle where the capsule generates enough aerodynamical lift to bounce back up out of the atmosphere. It will then re-enter a second time. It’s almost like throwing a rock that bounces off the surface of a pond before sinking.

A skip re-entry has not been attempted before for a spacecraft made to carry humans. The maneuver reduces the peak heating and the forces that future astronauts will experience. But because of the longer duration passing through the atmosphere, the total amount of energy absorbed by the heat shield will be greater. The maneuver also allows more precise steering toward a landing site closer to the coast.

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No astronauts were aboard this mission.

The moonikin, wearing the same spacesuit that astronauts will don in future missions, was equipped with two radiation sensors. Additional sensors behind its headrest and under its seat recorded the vibrations and forces that astronauts will experience during the mission.

Two other seats are occupied by model female torsos, named Zohar and Helga, that consist of 38 slices of plastic that mimic the density of bones, muscles and organs. Each torso contains 5,600 tiny crystal sensors to measure the amount of radiation absorbed during the mission. The torsos also contain battery-powered sensors that measured radiation exposure moment by moment.

Zohar wore a protective radiation vest made by an Israeli company; Helga did not. The experiment tested how well the vest is for shielding the greater amounts of radiation astronauts were exposed to, especially observing the effects on radiation-sensitive organs, like the breasts and ovaries of women.

“What I like to say is that the vest is a gender equalizer,” said Oren Milstein, the chief executive of StemRad, which manufactured the vest. The vest should reduce the radiation exposure by half, Dr. Milstein said.

Another passenger is a small Snoopy, the Peanuts character, wearing an orange spacesuit with gloves, boots and a NASA patch. Snoopy served as the zero-gravity indicator, a tradition of bringing up an object — often a stuffed animal — that starts floating once the spacecraft has reached orbit.

And although there are no people aboard, there are living organisms. Orion carried experiments to measure the effects of deep space radiation on yeast, algae, fungi and plant seeds.

While most test flights have been uncrewed, the debut journey of the space shuttle was a notable exception. Two astronauts flew Columbia during its first trip to orbit in 1981.

At the request of the Trump administration in 2017, NASA studied whether to put astronauts on the first Space Launch System mission, then known more blandly as Exploration Mission-1 instead of Artemis. NASA concluded that it would be feasible, but it would add between $600 million and $900 million to the cost, and the mission, which was scheduled for 2020, would be delayed.

Flying Artemis I without astronauts gave NASA more flexibility. The mission stretches into December — longer than the Orion spacecraft is designed to work in deep space. NASA would have been able to continue with the mission if circ*mstances arose like a partial failure of a power or propulsion system. If there were astronauts aboard, mission managers would regard that as too risky.

During a news conference this summer, Mike Sarafin, the Artemis I mission manager, said NASA would have proceeded with the engine firing to send the spacecraft toward the moon “unless we’re sure that we’re going to lose the vehicle.”

As an example, if Orion’s solar array did not fully deploy, “We would proceed,” Mr. Sarafin said. “And that is something that we wouldn’t necessarily do on a crewed flight.”

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Highlights and hiccups from Orion’s journey around the moon.

That does not mean nothing went wrong, but mission managers generally described issues that they encountered as “funnies” — systems that did not quite work as expected, necessitating some investigation and sometimes some adjustments in their procedures.

NASA had three primary objectives during this Artemis I mission:

• Demonstrate that the new giant Space Launch System rocket works to deliver the Orion crew capsule into orbit.

• See how Orion operates during three weeks in space, enveloped in vacuum and pelted by radiation.

• Verify that Orion’s heat shield can survive the re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, arriving at a velocity of 24,600 miles per hour. As it slams into the air, the heat shield will reach temperatures up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

By Sunday, almost all of the objectives had been achieved except the last one: a safe return to Earth. Mission managers even added more test objectives. For example, Orion is designed to fly with its tail end, where the solar panels are, pointed at the sun. One of the additional tests was seeing how the spacecraft behaved when it was about 20 degrees out of this alignment, in particular how the angle affected the warming of the spacecraft by sunlight.

As Orion swung behind the moon, it fired its engine to be captured by moon’s gravity. It passed within 80 miles of the surface before heading toward what is known as a distant retrograde orbit. (Distant because the orbit was 40,000 miles from the moon, retrograde because the direction was opposite the moon’s motion around the Earth.)

Another engine firing pushed Orion into the distant orbit, and it then circled halfway around the moon. Then the process was essentially reversed: an engine firing to push Orion out of the distant retrograde orbit to another close powered flyby of the lunar surface that sent the spacecraft on a slingshot trajectory back to Earth.

The small glitches that occurred included star trackers that were momentarily confused when the thrusters fired and produced sparkles of propellant and a 45-minute loss of communication because NASA’s Deep Space Network of radio antennas was configured incorrectly.

With modern video cameras, Orion was able to capture sharp images of itself with the moon and Earth in the background.

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Watch a rerun of Artemis I’s launch to the moon.

The delays also caused NASA to lose prime viewing hours — the August and September launch attempts were scheduled for the daytime when most people in the United States could be expected to be awake.

If there was any consolation for the late-night flight, the rocket’s blast really popped in the dark.

“I’m telling you we’d never seen such a tail of flame,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said after the flight in November.

You can see it for the first time the video above — or enjoy it again if you managed to catch the launch live.