THE SPACESHIPS
Of course, having a space station orbiting the Moon is useless if you have no way of getting astronauts to it. That’s where the Orion MultiPurpose Crew Vehicle comes in. The crew module is being supplied by NASA via Lockheed Martin in the US, and can house up to six astronauts, but the heart of the spacecraft is the European Service Module (ESM) that sits behind the crew capsule. It’s being provided by Europe’s Airbus company. “ESM provides everything that the astronauts need to live,” says Siân Cleaver, who is the Airbus industrial manager for the ESM.
The ESM is based on the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), also manufactured by Airbus. ATV was one of the European Space Agency’s contributions to the International Space Station. It carried cargo to and from the facility in low-Earth orbit. To transform it into the ESM and get it to the Moon, however, requires one very obvious difference.
“It’s got a massive main engine on the bottom,” says Cleaver.
The first ESM is already on top of the Space Launch System rocket, in preparation for the Artemis 1 mission in 2022. The second has been shipped to Florida for mating to the crew capsule. This will be the first Orion to carry astronauts, on the Artemis 2 mission. Cleaver and colleagues are working on ESM 3, the one that will take the astronauts to the Gateway station, before their descent to the lunar surface.
“It’s definitely mind-blowing. I feel very lucky. It was always my dream to work in human spaceflight,” Cleaver says.
The astronauts of Artemis 3 will shuttle to the lunar surface inside a SpaceX Starship craft. After that, NASA is beginning to develop a smaller lunar lander for more routine missions to and from the surface.