NASA just picked astronauts to go to the moon on Artemis mission

NASA has announced the public names of four astronauts who will participate in the Artemis II mission, the first manned lunar mission since the final Apollo flight in 1972. The mission is planned to serve as a stress test of Orion’s life-support systems, the new passenger spacecraft NASA hopes will shuttle astronauts to the moon to establish permanent research facilities. The flight is expected to reveal how the spacecraft handles air supply, exercise and waste removal, carbon dioxide and water vapor among other challenges. NASA’s mega rocket, the most powerful in the world, will shoot the astronauts up with 8.8 million pounds of thrust or a force equivalent to that of 160,000 Corvette engines.

The crew includes U.S. astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, Victor Glover, and G. Reid Wiseman, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. They will lead a pivotal spaceflight before humans return to the lunar surface. For years, NASA had very few women in space because female applicants did not meet the highly stringent requirements for crew assignments, but the agency has gradually allowed women to participate in more important roles.

NASA’s ultimate goal is to establish a permanent base on the moon for research, and to use the moon as a test bed for a future mission to Mars. The space agency is spending around $93 billion on the moon project in its bid to become multiplanetary. To achieve this goal, NASA requires a host of spacefaring nations and commercial partners to share costs with. The Artemis Accords standards for safe and collaborative international space exploration developed by NASA further demonstrates its commitment to international partnerships through the Artemis program.

The journey to become multiplanetary would require significant technical and technological know-how, objectives that are harder than maintaining the Apollo program. It will require a high level of collaboration between multiple nations and commercial partners who will have to bear the costs. Despite this, the team that NASA has assembled on this mission is aimed at demonstrating that the diverse crew assignments are a representation of the immense cultural shifts that have taken place within the agency during the decades-long quest into space. The Artemis II astronauts represent the best of humanity, as put by Vanessa Wyche, Director of NASA Johnson Space Center.



Source link