Next moon landing will be harder, says Apollo astronaut

Artemis mission will be riskier because of the rougher terrain at the lunar south pole, according to Charlie Duke, who took part in the 1972 Apollo mission.

Charlie Duke, 88, at the Starmus science festival in Bratislava, with a photo of him on the moon in 1972. He is advising NASA ahead of the Artemis II and Artemis III missions. Picture: Starmus

The Artemis mission to land people on the moon for the first time in more than half a century will be “a lot more difficult” than the Apollo landings in the 1960s and 70s, according to one of the few ­astronauts to have been there.

The first trip to the lunar south pole, scheduled for 2026, will be beset by dangers, Charlie Duke, who piloted the lunar module on Apollo 16 in 1972, said.

He is working with NASA to prepare for the new missions.

Airforce Brigadier General Duke said that the astronauts would have to land a much larger ship in an area with deeper shadows and rougher terrain than those faced by the Apollo crews, making it a bigger challenge ­despite advances in technology.

Only 12 people have set foot on another celestial body and four of the moonwalkers are still alive: Buzz Aldrin, 94, Dave Scott, 91, Harrison Schmitt, 88, and General Duke, 88.

No one has returned to the moon since Apollo 17’s lunar module left on December 16, 1972. NASA will send a crew aboard ­Artemis II to orbit the moon late next year, and another crew to land on the surface the year after on the Artemis III mission, with the ultimate aim of establishing a base.

General Duke, who spent three days exploring the lunar highlands in April 1972, has been offering advice to the astronauts involved. He has visited an Artemis simulator and examined photographs of 13 possible landing sites around the south pole, selected because of a greater chance of finding water ice.

Speaking before a talk at the Starmus science festival in Bratislava on Tuesday, he said: “With Artemis, the first landing mission is going to be extremely difficult. They’re going into a very rough area of the moon, the south pole region, where the shadows are very deep, there are a lot of craters and hills.

“The landing site is going to have to be selected very, very carefully. And with the architecture of the mission – assembling it, fuelling it and getting it there and starting this descent – it is going to be, I think to me, a lot more difficult than Apollo was. Apollo was a very simple approach. With Artemis the vehicle is huge, it’s 30m tall or more … They’ve got an airlock and then an elevator that they’ve got to deploy to get down on to the surface.”

He said the technology would be “a lot more complicated than what we had on Apollo”, and the spacecraft would be like an Apollo craft “on steroids”, adding that the Artemis simulator was “really hi-tech compared to what we had” but that the mission was “going to be a lot more difficult to pull off, in my opinion. But they’re working hard.”

On stage in Bratislava he said of the moonwalkers: “There’s not many of us left alive who’ve had that experience.

“I’ve been volunteering to help the present crew to think about some of the things that they ought to be thinking about, that might have escaped them in 50 years of going back and reviewing the (Apollo) missions.”

As well as landing with Apollo 16, General Duke sat in the Capcom chair in mission control for the first moon landing with Apollo 11, talking to Neil Armstrong as he guided the lunar module while looking for a safe place to land as the world waited anxiously.

After Armstrong uttered the famous words: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed,” it was General Duke who replied: “Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again.”

The Times