NASA’s Artemis mission: Next steps on the moon as humans finally return
Almost everyone alive knows the first words uttered on the moon. But the last words spoken are barely remembered.
Almost everyone alive knows the first words uttered on the moon. They would probably have been on Neil Armstrong’s headstone had the former navy pilot not been buried at sea.
But the last words spoken on the moon are barely remembered.
Almost 50 years ago, Eugene Cernan, the commander of Apollo 17, about to follow his fellow moon-walker Harrison Schmitt up the lunar landing module steps, said: “As I take man’s last step from the surface, back home for some time to come – but we believe not too long in the future – I’d like to just say what I believe history will record: that America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the moon … we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.”
With NASA’s budget slashed and what remained redirected to the Space Shuttle program and Skylab, Apollo 17 became the final manned trip to the moon. Cernan died in 2017. His command module pilot, Ronald Evans, died in 1990. Only Schmitt, at age 87, survives from that final Apollo crew and may live to see more human footprints in the lunar dust.
Indeed, of the 12 men who walked on the moon, just three others – Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, 92, David Scott, 90, and Charles Duke, 86 – are with us.
More than most of us on Earth, those four old men will have taken an acute interest in NASA’s Artemis program. This aims to put a male and female crew on its way to the moon by 2025. But it has suffered lengthy and expensive delays, the program racking up $34bn in rocket development costs alone.
The first Artemis spaceship was to have departed to circle the moon six years ago. Late last month, after a hydrogen fuel leak – the liquid hydrogen is under acute pressure and volatile – takeoff was delayed a few days as NASA teams tried to repair it on the launch pad. Days later a rescheduled launch, during a simulated countdown, was put back as the problems worsened.
But the Artemis rocket remains on the launch pad, which is a good sign. And fuel leaks and delays are routine hurdles in space exploration. From 1981, the Space Shuttle program saw 135 launches, 121 of which were called off at least once.
The rush to live up to president John Kennedy’s May 25, 1961, vow to congress that America would put a man on the moon before the decade was out led to some corners being cut and lives were lost.
Even in more careful times, two shuttle missions ended in disaster – in January 1986 the 25th flight blew up after 73 seconds killing the seven crew aboard. On February 1, 2003, the 113th flight broke up on re-entry over Texas at the end of its 16-day mission, killing its seven-member team. The Space Shuttle was a 1970s design using early ’80s era equipment. Infamously, towards the end, NASA turned to eBay to buy computer parts for shuttles that were out of date and no longer easily sourced.
Last week NASA said its next opportunity to launch Artemis 1 was Wednesday, September 28, and another window opens on Monday, October 3.
This Artemis (Apollo and Artemis were the twin children of Zeus, the god of the sky in Greek mythology) is due to round the moon at an elevation of about 100km before settling into a wide orbit for up to six days before returning to Earth.
Artemis II will carry four astronauts on a similar route in 2024. It is planned that a year later Artemis III will rendezvous with a separately launched Human Landing System that will take two of the four crew down to the moon for a six-day visit (and five subsequent missions are scheduled).
It will have been at least 53 years since anyone did that. Originally, the Apollo 17 mission was to have been followed by three more, and crews, alongside their backups, had been selected and were in training for Apollo 18, 19 and 20. These missions had been planned in detail.
But as Apollo 16 returned to from its troubled, foreshortened 11-day mission on April 27, 1972, NASA knew it could afford only one more moon shot. The others would be scrapped. Men who thought they were months off a moon walk would be disappointed. Schmitt was due to go on Apollo 18, but his slot was moved forward; only aviators, mostly test pilots and fighter pilots, had gone on Apollo flights and NASA was keen to get at least one scientist – Schmitt was a geologist – on board. Former test pilot Joe Engle made way for him, but Engle would command two successful Space Shuttle flights.
Its mandate and funding withdrawn, NASA put everything into a final, record-breaking moon shot. Apollo 17’s astronauts would spend more time on the lunar surface, drive the lunar rover farther and bring back more moon rocks than anyone else.
Remarkably, since Apollo 17, no human has left what is known as low Earth orbit. The International Space Station is in LEO at about 400km above sea level. The Hubble Telescope is higher at about 600km. The highest a Space Shuttle ever flew was 621km – that wouldn’t get you from Canberra to Melbourne. GPS satellites are in mid-Earth orbit at about 20,000km. But the moon is more than 383,000km away.
Apollo 17’s journey there was different from the start. It was the program’s only night launch, lifting off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre 33 minutes after midnight on December 7, 1972, watched by 500,000 spectators, not all of whom understood they were witnessing the end of an era. The furnace of rocket propulsion lit the night sky and could be seen 800km away.
Public interest in moon landings had waned, but the fact was that with each of them the science was improving in giant strides, expanding our understanding of the history of the solar system.
Starting at 2.55pm on December 11, Cernan and Schmitt spent 75 hours on the lunar surface, emerging for three moon walks lasting a total of 22 hours. Cernan was first out and Schmitt followed, becoming the 11th and 12th men to walk on the moon. Three days later, Cernan – who in May 1969 had been commander of Apollo 10 and had flown within 10km of the moon in a dress rehearsal for Apollo 11 – became the last man on the moon.
Schmitt later talked of the launch, struck by the sudden isolation of the crew dropped off at the rocket by a driver in a van who immediately departed. “What was different about launch day was that the launch pad was empty. There’s nobody else there but you.” Until then at every rehearsal and training session there had been hundreds of people – “like ants” – all over the place. They took a lift to the top of the rocket, more than 110m up. “It is still the largest ever vehicle to put humans in space. It weighed about 6.8 million pounds.”
They looped around the Earth twice, gaining speed, until they were travelling at 40,000km/h and headed away. The Apollo 17 photograph of Earth from 45,000km became legendary. It showed a day-lit, blue planet – from Madagascar, left across to the African continent and north to where the Red Sea cleaves it from the Arabian plate – on which all mankind shared a ride.
After Apollo 17, no one on Earth could be quite as confident about our future. Our planet looked lonely and vulnerable, fragile even. The bond between mankind had long been broken, and anyone who believed this uniquely compelling image might help unify us has been proved wrong year after year.
The craft headed for a spot in a lunar valley surrounded by mountains created almost four billion years ago when something big collided with the moon, left a deep crater, pushing the land around it up and hemming in the depression with rock walls higher than the Grand Canyon. Later, lava flows and landslides would partly fill it.
The astronauts landed about 200m from the target, a distance that would shame a cigarette paper. The lunar rover took them more than 34km around the site (hitting 18km/h on one downhill stretch), collecting the oldest and youngest moon rocks – more than 700 of them, 110kg – returned to Earth. They drilled 3m deep for a core sample of the moon’s surface.
They deployed a mass spectrometer to measure the unusually thin gases that make up the lunar atmosphere, a machine to detect any “moonquakes”, and small explosive devices that would be set off from Earth weeks later to help measure the seismic repercussions.
About 7km from their compact lunar landing module beds they chanced upon lines of orange dust, perhaps the greatest discovery on the moon. The geologist knew what this might mean, and his conversations with mission control become excited. “Oh man, that’s incredible. That is really orange.” The moon had once been volcanic. The minuscule orange glass beads had erupted from near its core.
Meanwhile, Evans, circling the moon alone in the lunar command module, was photographing the lunar surface creating maps of its pock marks that guide researchers to this day. The boys below took 2400 close-ups.
When the moon walkers returned to their little getaway craft at the end of the last day, their mood changed. The Apollo program was ending with them.
Cernan had Schmitt’s hammer that had been used to dislodge rocks and was about to sling it. Schmitt pleaded with his boss to let him launch it into space. “Let me throw the hammer,” said Schmitt. Cernan gave it to him. Schmitt wound himself like a discus champion and unloaded – “It looks like it’s going a million miles,” commented Cernan, as the hammer spent more time aloft than anyone had seen at an Olympic Games. Back in Houston, mission leaders just hoped the hammer wouldn’t hit the spacecraft.
Cernan parked the lunar rover about 50m away. Its mounted camera, operated from Houston, would film their departure. He stepped from the driver’s seat, walked part of the way back towards Schmitt and fell to his knees. He had remembered an earthly pledge. With his forefinger he drew three letters in the moon dust: TDC. They were his nine-year-old daughter’s initials – Tracy Dawn Cernan.
He had just led the most productive, treacherous, thrilling scientific experiment the world had seen. The Chicago son of Slovak and Czech migrants had achieved as much as a human can. He would tell Tracy to dream big. After all he had: “Look where I’ve ended up. I’ve done the moon.”
Asked about her father earlier this year, Tracy said: “He didn’t like being the last man on the moon.”
And neither do we.
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