Moon with a view
People will be living in lunar bases by 2030
HUMANS could be living on the moon before the end of the decade, a NASA official has said following the successful launch of Artemis I.
The uncrewed test flight of the Orion spacecraft paves the way for further Artemis missions with the aim of building a Lunar Gateway – a space station on the moon where astronauts can live and work.
Orion programme manager Howard Hu said: “Certainly in this decade we are going to have people living for durations... they will have habitats, they will have rovers on the ground.
“We are going to be sending people down to the surface, they are going to be living there on the surface and doing science.”
Hailing last week’s launch a “historic day for human space flight”, he told BBC1’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme: “It’s the first step we’re taking to long-term deep space exploration. We are going back to the moon, we’re working towards a sustainable programme and this is the vehicle that will carry the people that will land us back on the moon again.”
He said the Lunar Gateway planned by the US space agency would act as a staging post for lunar missions and as a step towards manned trips to Mars.
He added: “That is a bigger stepping stone, a two-year journey, so it’s going to be really important to learn beyond our Earth orbit.”
The Artemis I mission is expected to last 25 days, including outbound transit, the journey around the moon and deployment of satellites, followed by a return transit before splashdown in the Pacific Ocean next month.
The test flight is carrying a manikin – a model of the human body to measure the impacts of the flight.
Its launch last Wednesday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, US, followed a series of failed attempts earlier in the year. Artemis is named after the Greek goddess of the moon, sister to the god Apollo – the name of NASA’s first moon missions.