Despite the numerous delays that had occurred earlier, the Artemis I mission was a great success made us start thinking about Artemis II and Artemis III already. In case you don’t remember, the Artemis program, launched by NASA under the Trump administration, is the US space agency’s most ambitious project since the Apollo program, matching it on one of its key points: returning to take a human being to the moon, more than fifty years after we entered our natural satellite for the last time.

Although they never came to fruition, more Apollo missions were originally planned than made history in the late 1960s and 1970s. Budget cuts and, above all, the feeling that the main goal had already been achieved (beating the Soviet Union in the space race) ended manned missions to the Moon and indirectly meant the end of any plans for manned missions to any other planet in our solar system.

Artemis, as I said earlier, agrees with Apollo about «shoes on the moon«, a phrase that has become popular to refer to a human presence on the moon, but goes further, with a still difficult but not impossible goal bring humans to the surface of Mars sometime in the next decade. There are many challenges that will have to be faced to make this goal a reality, but there is more than enough reason to be hopeful.

But for now, let’s go back to the immediate goals, which are also very interesting, and the fact that today there was an expected announcement, from NASA introduced the official crew of the Artemis II mission. Christina Hammock Koch, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen, three from NASA and one (Hansen) from the Canadian Space Agency, who will fly to lunar orbit in November 2024 on the back of SLS-mounted Orion. The goal is to reproduce the Artemis I itinerary, but this time in a manned mission.

At this point it is important to note that no, Artemis II is not aiming for the surface of the Moonsince such a milestone will be the task of Artemis III, still without a specific date, although tentatively sometime in 2025. The goal of Artemis II is to evaluate the Orion systems and confirm in this way that the ship is ready for launch Later, future crew members can put their boots on the moon .

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