It’s third time lucky for the Artemis Moon rocket mission
IT TOOK five years of planning and three launch attempts to finally get the first Artemis Moon mission off the ground yesterday morning.
During a hair-raising few hours, the launch team at Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre dealt with a fuel leak and a kill switch problem that would have destroyed the rocket if it veered off course. But at long last, the Orion spacecraft, which separated from Nasa’s Mega Moon rocket just 18 minutes after launch, is now on a 26-day voyage that will see it skim over the lunar surface and travel nearly 300,000 miles from Earth, before sling-shotting home.
However, getting it down again might prove even more challenging.
If the trajectory is too shallow, the capsule could bounce off the atmosphere and hurtle into deep space. Too steep and the heat shield may fail.
The unmanned crew module is packed with sensors to measure radiation and heat to ensure astronauts will be safe when they go up in 2024.
Astronomer Dr Daniel Brown, at Nottingham Trent University, said: “If the wait for the final go-ahead was tense, just wait another 26 days when the Orion capsule returns to Earth.
“The big test will be to see how the new heat shield withstands the high entry speeds into our atmosphere that are 32 times faster than the speed of sound. That matches the fastest speed a human has ever travelled, achieved during the re-entry of the Apollo 10 crew in 1968. The heat shield will have to withstand temperatures close to 3,000C.”
The spacecraft, a joint venture with the European Space Agency (ESA), has suffered months of delays. It is the first time that humans have tried to get back to the Moon since the Apollo programme was cancelled in 1977.
Orion will orbit 60 miles above the Moon it on its closest approach, then travel 40,000 miles out, the furthest any spacecraft capable of carrying humans has ever gone. It is due to splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego on December 11.