American Military News August 07, 2022 Richard Tribou - Orlando Sentinel
Beyond Artemis I, NASA plots cheaper rocket rollout while Congress calls for more flights
NASA has yet to get its next-generation moon rocket off the ground, but this week announced a shift in how it plans to pay for future launches while also falling under a new directive from Congress to increase the number of flights each year.
Artemis I, a combination of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule, is set to roll out from Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building on Aug. 18 to Launch Pad 39-B ahead of a potential liftoff as early as Aug. 29. The uncrewed test flight will send Orion on a mission that could last up to 42 days traveling more than 1 million miles including several orbits around the moon.
The primary goal is to sign off on Orion’s ability to support crew for future missions, including testing a heat shield that can endure the stresses of an intense re-entry.
“Orion will come home faster and hotter than any spacecraft has before,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson during a press conference Wednesday. “It’s going to hit the Earth’s atmosphere at 32 times the speed of sound.”
If all goes well, NASA will progress toward the crewed Artemis II mission no earlier than May 2024 that will orbit but not land on the moon followed by Artemis III no earlier than 2025 that aims to return humans, including the first woman, to the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.
The SLS and Orion hardware for the first three Artemis missions are either done or in the works, but NASA’s Office of the Inspector General last November estimated that the Artemis program will have topped $93 billion through 2025. That includes years of production delays from SLS’s primary contractor Boeing and to a lesser degree Orion’s Lockheed Martin.
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https://americanmilitarynews.com/2022/08/beyond-artemis-i-nasa-plots-cheaper-rocket-rollout-while-congress-calls-for-more-flights/
