New York Times by Joey Roulette 1/1/2022
Debut rocket launches and robotic lunar missions will make the New Year a crucial prelude to putting astronauts back on the moon.
Robotic missions to Mars and advances in space tourism dominated the space activities of 2021. But in 2022, the moon is likely to stand out, as companies and governments launch various moon-bound spacecraft.
Most of those missions revolve around Artemis, NASA’s multibillion dollar effort to return astronauts to the moon later in the decade and conduct routine science missions on its surface in preparation for farther treks to Mars (a far more ambitious endeavor that will likely not happen in this decade). But before astronauts make the moonshot, a series of rocket tests and science missions without humans will need to be completed.
2022 is the year for those initial steps toward the moon. Two new rockets central to NASA’s lunar plans will launch to space for the first time, each with more power than the Saturn 5 rocket from the Apollo program. And other countries are expected to join the march to the moon as well.
NASA’s Gigantic Moon Rocket DebutAfter years of development delays, NASA’s Space Launch System, or S.L.S., could make its first journey to space — without any humans — as early as March 2022.
The mission, called Artemis 1, will mark the first in a series of flights under NASA’s Artemis program by S.L.S., NASA’s centerpiece rocket system for getting moon-bound astronauts off Earth. For Artemis 1, S.L.S. will launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to send a capsule named Orion around the moon and back, rehearsing a trajectory that will be performed by Artemis 2, the subsequent mission that is scheduled to carry astronauts sometime in 2024. The third mission, Artemis 3, will result in a moon landing.
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