Travelling and learning about the mysteries of space has been a human fascination for centuries. Today, a series of technological advances are making this dream of unraveling the secrets beyond the clouds increasingly tangible. At this moment, they are fine-tuning all the details of the Artemis program, which through the HLS (Human Landing System) mission, aims to land two people on the Moon, something that has not happened since 1972, with the “Apollo 17” mission. SpaceX a company owned by Elon Musk, has the honor of winning the contract bid.
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Official announcement
A few days ago NASA, (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) announced that SpaceX will take astronauts to the Moon with a lunar lander; they made a selection last year between this company, Blue Origin (known through Jeff Bezos), and Dynetics (based in Alabama) but none of their studies and efforts were enough to win over SpaceX’s proposal.
Unexpected selection
The surprise of this choice was that NASA chose only SpaceX when usually the agency selects two contractors to have two options in case of critical missions and to continue with the programs in case one of them fails; this shows the great confidence they deposited in SpaceX, but we can also associate it with money since the proposal was cheaper than those of its competitors.
A contract does not mean exclusivity
They stipulated this plan with SpaceX only for Artemis III, since for future missions the company in charge of the following programs has not yet been defined; being NASA interested in several contractors bidding to carry crew members to and from the Moon; so Elon Musk’s company does not have exclusivity with NASA, but it is part of its options for its projects.
One small step for man
This is a several-stage mission; initially, it is an exploration mission. Artemis I is the first unmanned test flight to be carried out at the end of 2021 in the Orion capsule and the SLS; Artemis II will work with these same two components, but with a crew, and they will be in charge of orbiting around the Moon and returning to the Earth; Artemis III will use Orion, SLS, and SpaceX’s spacecraft to complete the journey to the lunar surface.
Conquering space
This announcement signifies yet another success for the already long list of Elon Musk, whose technology conglomerate includes electric cars and roads, spaceflight, and more. SpaceX will continue to develop safe travel to the lunar surface using commercial landers.
Do you have any opinion about this topic? What do you think about this new mission to the Moon?
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Image by Ponciano via Pixabay.com under Creative Commons license.
