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Humanity takes the first step for a woman to walk on the Moon

2022-08-28T10:46:27.507Z


The United States and Europe rehearse this Monday the mission in which an astronaut will step on the lunar south pole in 2025


Humanity said goodbye singing to the Moon half a century ago.

Astronauts Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt began humming, over a jolly nineteenth-century tune, "I was walking on the Moon one day, in the merry month of December."

It was December 1972. Cernan and Schmitt were the last people to set foot on the satellite.

In total, 12 American men walked on the Moon in six NASA Apollo Program missions between 1969 and 1972. This Monday, the first mission of the Artemis Program is scheduled to take off, named after the twin sister of the god Apollo in the Greek mythology.

The ultimate goal, as the US space agency repeats over and over again, is to take "the first woman and the first non-white person" to the Moon within three years.

The Artemis I mission is the dress rehearsal for the crew capsule —in which this time only three mannequins and two dolls of fictional characters, Shaun the sheep and Snoopy the dog— and the so-called Space Launch System (SLS) will travel. , the most powerful rocket ever built.

The ship, called Orion, will take off on Monday from 8:33 local time from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida (United States).

After a journey of 42 days and a flyby of 100 kilometers from the lunar surface, the mission will return on October 10, parachuting over the Pacific Ocean.

The plan is to repeat a similar trip, Artemis II, already with four crew members on board, in 2024. The third mission, Artemis III, would land on the Moon in 2025. Two American astronauts, a woman and a man, will then walk on the lunar face,

A Spanish engineer, Eduardo García Llama, directs the guidance and control system of the Orion spacecraft, from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“It is a historic mission, the one that opens the second chapter of the human exploration of the Moon: this time we return to stay”, proclaims this man from Madrid born in Valencia 50 years ago.

NASA's plan, after the first moon landing in 2025, is to launch manned missions every year and build a lunar base by the end of this decade.

"It reminds me of the case of Antarctica, which after being discovered, it took a long time until there was a permanent human presence", illustrates García Llama.

Spanish astronaut Pedro Duque, former Minister of Science, applauds the mission.

“There are many degrees of historical days, but this is one of them.

It is a very important day for the future of space exploration”, he celebrates.

Duque, who traveled on the space shuttle Discovery in 1998 and also visited the International Space Station in 2003, defends manned missions.

"The exploration of the solar system, to be really comprehensive and achieve great results, has to include explorers," he says.

NASA, the main organizer of the Artemis Program, proclaims that these missions are a warm-up for its great goal: to step on Mars.

Pedro Duque shows his skepticism about current resources.

“If 400,000 people worked in the Apollo Program, now we might need 100,000, because with electronics and miniaturization everything is more efficient, but I don't see that there are 100,000 or 10,000 or 1,000.

So, right now, we don't know how long it's going to take to get to Mars, until we put people to work,” he muses.

"I think that going to the Moon and being there for a while is essential from an engineering point of view to be able to think about sending people to Mars."

The aeronautical engineer Pedro José Herráiz, born in León 35 years ago, is one of the 30,000 people who have participated in the Artemis I mission. As a child, he used to play with Lego pieces to build rockets.

He is now a propulsion engineer in the world's largest space program.

Herráiz has worked within the European Space Agency on the service module, which supplies oxygen, water, electricity, temperature control and propulsion to the crew capsule.

“The United States is not going to the Moon alone this time.

We are going together.

Without the European Service Module, the Crew Module would not be able to reach the Moon.

It is the heart of the mission”, says Herráiz.

01:41

The mission details of the Artemis Program

NASA's Artemis I rocket sits on launch pad 39-B at the Kennedy Space Center. Photo: Joe Raedle (Getty Images/AFP) |

Video: NASA

No European, however, will set foot on the lunar surface at the moment, as the director general of the European Space Agency, the Austrian Josef Aschbacher, acknowledged on Tuesday at a virtual press conference.

“Europe wants to see the footprints of European astronauts on the Moon before the end of this decade, but it is not yet guaranteed.

It is part of the negotiations we are having with NASA,” Aschbacher explained.

In an interview with EL PAÍS less than a year ago, the director general of the agency assured that he would like the first European person on the Moon to be a woman.

The European aerospace giant, Airbus, has been the main contractor for the service module of the Artemis Program, with 3,000 workers dedicated to it.

At its facilities in the Madrid town of Tres Cantos, Airbus has developed the thermal control units for the Orion spacecraft, which will guarantee an adequate temperature for the astronauts and for the electronic systems themselves.

NASA published last week 13 possible landing points for the Artemis III mission, around the south pole of the Moon, a region where there is frozen water.

A committee of experts has assessed criteria such as the slope of the terrain and the lighting conditions, so that there is both light, a necessary source of energy, and shade, which is more suitable for moonwalks.

Astronauts on the Artemis III mission are scheduled to spend six and a half days on the Moon's surface in 2025.

The last two men to walk the satellite, Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt, landed on Taurus-Littrow, a lunar valley, on December 11, 1972. The two made three exploratory excursions to nearby craters and mountains in the southeast of the Sea of ​​Serenity, on the visible side of the Moon.

After three days of exhausting work, but with time to record himself humming, Gene Cernan, who was the last to board the ship, left a sentence for history: "We leave the Moon and Taurus-Littrow as we came and, if God willing, we will return with peace and hope for all humanity."

Cernan passed away in 2017 at the age of 82, with no one following in his footsteps.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-08-28

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