Chapter 1: What is the significance of NASA's Artemis II mission?
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It's devastating when you see a game that you could have won. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Nearly six decades after the United States put men on the moon... That's one small step for man... It is returning to that mission. And today, a major step in that process will begin in Florida.
My colleague Ken Chang is there and explains why it is that the United States wants to go back to the moon. It's Wednesday, April 1st. Ken, welcome back to The Daily.
Good to be here again.
So we always turn to you when something big and meaningful is happening in space, and something big and meaningful is happening today, weather permitting. So does the weather permit this big and meaningful thing to happen on Wednesday?
Hopefully, it looks good. The forecast says 80% chance death is going to go, but that means there's 20% chance that something doesn't quite clear up.
Right. Okay, those are pretty good odds. So start by describing this mission.
This is the first time that anyone's going close to the moon in more than 53 years. Wow. Four astronauts are going to be blasting off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. And they're going to head out to the moon. They're not going to land. They're just going to swing around the moon and then head straight back to Earth and splash down in the Pacific Ocean 10 days later.
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Chapter 2: Why does the United States want to return to the moon?
Right. So Artemis 1, back in 2022, it sent this spacecraft to the moon and spent several weeks there without any people aboard. So that sort of established that the basic machinery works. Now we're on the next step, which is Artemis II. This time they're including the four people aboard. And that's critical because the main task of this mission is to test the life support systems.
And it's impossible to test it without actual people producing carbon dioxide, producing water and poop and everything else that you need to clean up.
Right. So that's this mission. Step one was, can we get an aircraft around the moon? Step two is, can we get people on this craft to live?
Yes. The biggest goal for the astronauts on this mission is to not die. And if Artemis II succeeds, NASA can move on to the next steps, which will lead to attempts to land astronauts on the moon in a couple years.
Okay, and at this point, I may sound like a broken record, but why? I mean, what is the rationale for trying to do this thing that we did with great fanfare 50-something years ago?
What NASA says is that this time, we're not going to just go there and then forget about it. That this will be the first step to building a moon base, A moon base. Yeah, so that they're going to start putting a power plant, some habitats to allow people to stay there for days, weeks, months.
Hmm.
So at first, it will probably be a scientific research station, much like what we have in Antarctica near the South Pole. Beyond that, people will start thinking about how we can take advantage of the moon's resources. They might even start trying to mine valuable materials that could be found there. such as helium-3. And what's helium-3, and why do we want to mine it on the Moon?
So helium-3 is a light version of helium, and it's quite rare on Earth. It's a little bit more prevalent on the Moon's surface, and this is a version of helium that could be very useful in future fusion reactors. It's also thought to be useful for future quantum computers, which... people are very excited about because it could be used for artificial intelligence, among other things.
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Chapter 3: What challenges does NASA face in landing on the moon again?
We just need to go execute this mission and bring a little bit of each of our own personalities in.
He's a former fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy. He served in the Middle East on two deployments. And he was the head of the astronaut office before he stepped down, which allowed him to be assigned to the moon mission.
I was outside last night and I was looking up at the moon and thinking, the next time I see this site, there's a good chance that we will have been around the far side and back.
And there's also a point in detail about him. His wife died a few years ago. Him going to moon means leaving his daughters behind for 10 days. Well.
And so I hope there's a piece of it that extends beyond human spaceflight as well. Victor Glover, he's also a former naval aviator. 10 years from now, when the next challenging thing happens, maybe we can look back on this and go, hey, guys, remember we did that? We had our own moonshot, remember? And it was global. It was international. And we did it together.
He was the first Black man to serve and extend his stay on the space station. And now he'll be the first Black man to go to the moon. Next is Christina Koch.
None of us can be as big as what we're asked to do, but we can contribute the part and bring our best selves and come together to do it.
She's an electrical engineer by training. And she actually worked on NASA missions on the ground before she was selected by NASA to become an astronaut. And she now holds the record for the longest single space flight by a woman of 328 days. So that's almost a full year.
All these things that we talk about first are really not about any one individual's accomplishment, but more about celebrating where we are at.
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Chapter 4: What are the primary objectives of the Artemis II mission?
On the moon, there's no streetlights. So the last time an astronaut passed over these parts, it was completely dark.
So Ken, as these astronauts are moving along the far side of the moon, you had said that the moon's gravity was going to be holding them down. How much power will they have to actually direct the craft that they're in during this period?
The trajectory that they're on, NASA designed it specifically that they actually don't need to use the engines to bring them back to Earth. It's going along a path that the gravity of the moon basically is going to sling them around and throw them right back toward Earth without them doing much of anything.
So in a sense, they're kind of powerless to do much themselves. They're at the mercy of the moon's gravitational push and pull.
Which is a good thing because it's much easier to be headed back to Earth than into deep space where who knows where you would end up.
Right. So assuming this gravitational slingshot system brings these four astronauts safely home, what happens?
So once they complete their lunar flyby— They have to spend another three days just sitting around waiting to get back to Earth. This is probably the boring part of the trip. It's basically, are we there yet?
On the very last day, Earth's gravity is going to be pulling them around Earth, and they'll be on a path to re-enter the atmosphere, and they'll splash down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego. They'll be plucked out of the ocean, taken to a ship, and then flown back to shore where they'll be checked out by doctors. And then they'll get to fly back to Houston.
And that will be the end of Artemis II.
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