How we’re putting astronauts on the moon — again

Giant steps are what you take, walking on the moon.

Only we haven’t taken any in a half-century.

The first big step to remedying this will happen Monday — weather permitting — when the Artemis I mission takes off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The capsule — named Orion — atop the rocket won’t have a crew on board. It’s a test flight.

But if all goes well, NASA is planning to have astronauts land on the moon by 2025 — the first time since December 1972, when Apollo 17, and the whole Apollo mission, ended.

In years to come, NASA plans to build a permanent moon base with the Artemis program. After that, maybe, Mars.

For many people, it’s long overdue.

“I grew up in the Apollo era,” said Bill Cloutier, of New Milford, one of the founders of the John J. McCarthy Observatory in New Milford. “I’ve been interested in the moon for as long as I can remember.”

“It was such a big deal, such a big story,” said Dan Wright, one of the directors of the Westport Astronomical Society. “You need to get off the ground, and start exploring:’’

And when the rocket — officially, the Space Launch System — blasts off people will notice. While shorter than the Saturn V used in the Apollo missions, it’s the most powerful rocket ever launched.

“It will hit home when people see this giant rocket take off,” Wright said. “Everybody likes to see a big rocket.”

The program is named after Artemis, twin sister of Apollo, and, in Greek mythology, the goddess of the hunt, of nature, of wild animals, of child-bearing and chastity. She is also one of the deities associated with worship of the moon.

NASA announced Artemis in 2017, with a budget of $93 billion. Both former president Donald Trump and President Joseph Biden have endorsed it.

It’s a program designed to link up with NASA’s moment of triumph — the Apollo 11 landing on the moon in 1969 and the six successful moon missions that followed — then further that work of space exploration.

Those glory years ended abruptly. Apollo got defunded.

“Nixon took credit for it,” Cloutier said. “Then he canceled it.”

NASA then began the Space Shuttle program, which had 135 missions from 1981 to 2011. While it had many achievements — the launch and repair missions of the Hubble Space Telescope among them — it never explored new worlds or boldly went where no man had gone before.

“It was loop-de-loop,’’ Wright, of Westport, said of its low-earth orbits.

“In hindsight, there are a lot of things I would have traded for the Space Shuttle program,” said Rick Bria, vice president of the Astronomical Society of Greenwich.

And while NASA has had many triumphs since Apollo — Hubble, its multiple missions to Mars, the Cassini mission to Saturn and now the James Webb Space Telescope — none have involved humans venturing out to other places.

The moon makes sense for such missions. It’s only a three-day flight from Earth. A trip to Mars is more like seven months.

Our moon is the only sizable satellite circling one of the four rocky planets of our solar system — nothing of any consequence orbits Mercury, Venus or Mars.

Scientists now believe a major object — something the size of Mars — collided with the earth about 4.5 billion years ago and the debris finally gathered together to form the moon. The moon rocks gathered by Apollo astronauts helped confirm this theory.

But despite the Apollo missions, and the moon rocks brought back to earth and mapping satellites that have circled it, our moon is still somewhat terra incognita.

This may be especially true of where Artemis astronauts will land and set up base camps — near the moon’s south pole.

Cloutier, who has photographed and studied the moon surface at length, said it’s a deeply-cratered, unexplored area. The Apollo astronauts all had landing sites near the moon’s equator.

Cloutier said the great advantage of landing there, despite its hazardous terrain, is that there is ice there.

“Ice means water,” Cloutier said. “It means oxygen. It means fuel.”

It is also in perpetual sunlight, which means astronauts can set up solar panels and generate power there.

Which means there’s future opportunities for a base, and science and explorations with Artemis. Starting Monday.

“This is the first baby step,” Wright said.

Associated Press file photos A combination of photos shows, at left, the Saturn V rocket with the Apollo 12 spacecraft aboard on the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center, in Cape Canaveral, Fla., in 1969. At right is NASA’s new moon rocket for the Artemis program with the Orion spacecraft on top, at the Kennedy Space Center on March 18. Liftoff for the first Artemis mission is scheduled for Monday.