Artemis takes aim at the Moon

As Artemis I goes through its final preparations, Niamh Shaw looks at this first step in a programme to return humanity to the Moon permanently

- By Niamh Shaw. Photographs by NASA, Radislav Sinyak X2, Liam Yanulis, Steve Marsh, Alberto Bertolin

Back in 2019, the year of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo lunar human space programme, Jim Bridestine, then NASA Administrator announced details of Project Artemis and with it the commitment to a single monumental goal: to establish a permanent human Moon base. With the project costing an estimated $93 billion by 2025, NASA's first milestone in this programme is the Artemis I mission, which is due to launch from Kennedy Space Center in mid 2022.

A four-week return mission to the Moon, Artemis I will be the first integrated test flight of NASA's Deep Space Exploration System, which includes the Orion spacecraft, Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Exploration Ground Systems (EGS) at Kennedy Space Center. There will be no lunar landing for Artemis I, but it will lay the foundation for the future Artemis missions to build on.

The Artemis spacecraft has a launch window of two weeks every month when the Moon is in the right position relative to Earth. As of writing, the earliest of these runs from 7-21 May, but launch windows from 6-16 June and 29 June to 12 July are also being seriously considered.

Once the mission has made its way off the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center, though, it won't be short of objectives. Over the course of the mission Artemis I will deploy science CubeSats, the Orion craft will travel thousands of kilometres beyond the Moon in a retrograde orbit as well as conducting two flybys, skimming just 100km over the surface.