Nasa’s Artemis 1 launch is about to change the future of humanity in space

Nasa is finally just hours away from launching the first flight of its new and massive Moon rocket. It’s the first uncrewed test flight of Nasa’s Artemis Moon program that aims to put humans back on the Moon within the decade – and the space agency’s leadership is extremely excited about it.

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“Get ready for Artemis I – we are going!” Nasa administrator Bill Nelson tweeted after the space agency’s Moon rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), reached the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. The SLS, and the Orion spacecraft it carries will soon “soon embark on a test flight going farther than a spacecraft built for humans has ever gone before,” he added.

Nasa plans to launch the Artemis I mission, as the test flight is called, at 8.33am EDT on 29 August, with backup launch windows on 2 and 5 September.

“It does feel surreal, because for so long we have been anticipating this moment, and now it’s finally here,” Laura Forcyzk, the founder of the space analysis firm Astralytica and author of the book, Becoming Off-Worldly: Learning from Astronauts to Prepare for Your Spaceflight Journey, told The Independent.

But if Nasa officials and space fanatics are excited for SLS to blast off into the skies, it’s not clear that the American public at large shares their enthusiasm.

“Most of the United States has not been paying attention to NASA’s plan to return humans to the moon,” Ms Forcyzk said.

But she expects that will change, and soon.

The SLS will be the largest rocket ever to fly, a super heavy launch vehicle “that we have not seen the likes of since Saturn V,” Ms Forczyk says.

Standing 322 feet tall, with a central core stage flanked by two solid rocket boosters in a configuration similar to the now retired Space Shuttle, the SLS is somewhat shorter than the Saturn V, but more powerful, generating 8.8 million pounds of thrust to the Saturn V’s 7.6 million.

“It’s going to be something that blows peoples’ minds if they see it in person. It’ll be spectacular,” Ms Forczyk said. “I think it’ll be bigger than just a blip on CNN. I think it will be something that makes the world pay attention.”

And if the world keeps paying attention, Nasa has planned for them quite a show.

Artemis I will see SLS launch the 21^st century equivalent of the Apollo spacecraft, the Orion vehicle, to, around, beyond, and back from the Moon over the course of a 42-day long mission. Orion carries lunar science experiments and cameras to document its journey to the Moon in higher definition than the Apollo missions ever did.

“Rockets are just transportation. And what is it transporting? It’s transporting science. It’s transporting technology,” Ms Forcyzk said. “It’s going to be testing for radiation and taking observations of the Moon.”

Radiation levels are just some of the measurements that Orion will take through three mannequins on board for Artemis I, each designed to study how the flight may affect human astronauts. That’s because human astronauts are the next step.

Following a successful Artemis I mission, Nasa plans to follow up with Artemis II in May 2024, which will see as many as four astronauts fly a similar course to Artemis I around the Moon.

In 2025, Artemis III will see Nasa land the first humans on the Moon since the 1970s, including the first woman and person of color.

Several generations of people, millennial, Generation Z and the upcoming generation alpha, have never seen a human being set foot on another world, Ms Forczyk notes, herself included, and she believes a contemporary Moon mission is going to capture the world’s focus in a way that huge segments of the population cannot imagine.

The US, and the world, had now seen several generations grow up who have never seen a human step foot on another world, Ms Forczyk said, and Artemis I is the first step on a journey that will put human spaceflight front and center in the world’s imagination once again.

“If you remember back to May of 2020,  people were so excited about SpaceX launching people to the International Space Station, the first time Americans had gone back to orbit [on their own] since the retirement of the space shuttle,” she said. US astronauts flew to the ISS aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft for nine years after the shuttle retired in 2011, but “returning to the moon is an even more significant gap in time. It’s an even more monumental achievement because it’s so long, since 1972.”

Nasa will go on to fly additional Artemis missions through the end of the 2020s, eventually constructing a space station in lunar orbit, and outposts on the Moon’s South Pole. It’s a program designed to test out technologies and operational strategies Nasa wants to develop for future planetary missions, such as a crewed mission to Mars sometime in the 2040s.

“We want to open up the rest of the solar system so that we can continue to explore our natural environment around us,” Ms Forczyk said.

But the grand visions of the later Artemis missions and eventual human mission to Mars all depend on a successful Artemis I test flight. It’s possible something could go wrong, but Ms Forczyk doesn’t think it’s likely: Much like the James Webb Space Telescope, which like the SLS and Orion was delayed and more expensive than originally anticipated, Nasa has taken its time to make sure the agency got SLS right. Its future plans depend on it.

“All eyes are on the program,” she said. “NASA is a government agency that is well known and popular, but also heavily criticized when it comes to how much it spends. And so when all eyes are on this, you have to justify those expenses. You want to make sure the politicians and the public know their tax dollars are going to good outcomes.”