The Background of the Artemis 1 Mission

On July 21, 1969, the first human walked on the moon and 11 more people would follow in his footsteps on its dusty surface between 1969 and 1972, during six missions of NASA's Apollo program. The conquest of the moon was a by-product of the arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War, the desire to show their technological might in the form of powerful rockets aimed at the moon hid the real message, if you are able to carry a rocket with people to the moon you are also capable of taking a rocket with thermonuclear warheads to the center of Moscow or Washington, thus maintaining the permanent threat of mutually assured annihilation.

The United States won, it reached the moon first and the priorities changed after the Apollo 17 mission in 1972 humans would not leave the earth and its low orbit again, the competition in space now materialized in the form of space stations we built the skylab , the permanently manned Russian space station MIR and finally in an international effort we would arm the international space station in orbit and China would arm several space stations on its own the latest Tiangong 3.

But the international climate is heating up again and now the goal is to get Humans to Mars, but since Mars is so far away that the shortest manned mission would take months to arrive, we need to go back to the moon first and establish a base there that will serve as a base for us. springboard to facilitate further missions to Mars and to return to the moon we need a rocket that is at least as powerful as the Saturn 5 that took us to the moon 53 years ago. Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer and supporter of human exploration on Mars, in 1996 wrote the book Allegation to Mars where he proposed a mission to Mars with a vehicle made basically of parts of the space shuttle, its gigantic tank and 4 instead of two of its engines. solid fuel. In the 2000s, NASA took this idea seriously and proposed the constellation program, in which various vehicles and specialized capsules would be built for different uses, from transporting humans and cargo to the international space station to returning from missions. manned to the moon and later to Mars.

Ares 1 would transport the Orion manned capsule to Mars and Ares 5 would transport cargo to the red planet, but in 2009 and with El Ares one practically ready, the constellation program was canceled and replaced by one that in theory would be cheaper, in In theory, the Artemis program is basically a redesign that rethinks the idea of using space shuttle parts for your vehicle the SLS or Space Launch System whatever boring name they could give it, Ares which is the equivalent of the god Mars in mythology greek was very appropriate and poetic, they should have left that name even though it was a different design but hey it's called sls and it has nothing to do. The sls can carry as much cargo as the orion manned capsule, which continues its development despite the cancellation of the constellation program, in this way they saved the cost of designing, building and testing two different vehicles, they saved in quotes, because they spent a lot of money and besides, the sls has suffered all kinds of delays and cost increases in all phases of its implementation.

In the original plan we should have reached Mars in 2020, with that I tell you everything and in fact the delays and inflated costs are not the worst, if SpaceX's StarShip succeeds in its next tests being a reusable vehicle it would automatically convert to sls in an obsolete vehicle, The sls is the most powerful rocket ever built and we saw it take off today, of this there is no diary, this mission called Artemis 1 will take the uncrewed Orion capsule to orbit the moon and back, in this way it is checked if everything is ready for Artemis 2 that will take the same Orion capsule but this time with a crew to carry out a similar tour around the moon and back and if successful, it will open the door to Artemis 3 in which the crew of the capsule will step on lunar soil for the first time in decades and They will come back alive to tell the tale.

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