NASA's first lunar mission of the 21st century has been a success, now what?

Bill Nelson, the supreme head of the US Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, has called the Artemis I mission, the first in 50 years to orbit the Moon, reach a few thousand kilometres beyond it and return to Earth, a "resounding success".

The excellent preliminary results of the maiden, unmanned flight of the ambitious Artemis lunar programme confirm the viability of the Agency's plans. The next step, the Artemis II mission, this time with astronauts on board, is not scheduled until at least May 2024, although there is already speculation that NASA is considering rescheduling its liftoff for the end of that year.

The first manned flight of the 21st century to our blue planet's natural satellite will be limited to another round trip. Artemis II will not yet mean a new landing of American astronauts on the lunar surface. Setting foot on the Moon again is reserved for the first woman and the first man of colour to fly on Artemis III, towards the end of 2025 at the earliest. It will be the seventh lunar landing, as the sixth and last of the 20th century was 50 years ago, in December 1972, with the Apollo 17 mission.  

Whether it is towards the middle or end of 2024, this means that between 18 and 24 months will elapse between the first and second flights, and that is if there are no incidents that delay NASA's second lunar mission even further. Prudence and safety are the basic premises when it comes to taking humans to outer space and bringing them back safe and sound.

The Artemis I mission has taken 25 days and almost 11 hours precisely to collect a huge amount of parameters, data and images, many of which are already being analysed by NASA technicians and their subcontractors across the United States. 

The results of the checks and analyses will take many months to yield conclusions that can be translated into concrete engineering tasks that will result in significant improvements, "which must be addressed and resolved before Artemis II launches with astronauts on board", according to the Agency. 

The crew will consist of four astronauts; neither the astronauts nor their reserves have yet been designated. But the director of NASA's Johnson Space Center, Vanessa Wyche, confirmed a few days ago that the names of those chosen "will be announced in early 2023". Their official appointment is paramount, because from then on their exhaustive training will begin. Where?

At Wyche's estate, the Johnson Space Centre. Located in Houston, Texas, it is NASA's astronaut headquarters, where the facilities, laboratories and simulators for full training are located. With more than a hundred buildings, it was renamed in 1973 in honour of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who took over the White House after the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy and continued the Apollo programme to reach the moon. 

Vanessa Wyche has also confirmed that all remaining active men and women in the Agency's Astronaut Corps, numbering 42, are candidates to fly on the first manned mission to the moon in the 21st century. It confirms what Chief Astronaut Reid Wiseman, who in August scuttled the plans of former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, a Donald Trump appointee, who had shortlisted a group of nine men and nine women for the first Artemis missions.

All that is known for certain is that three astronauts will be American and one Canadian. It is the result of an agreement signed in December 2020 between NASA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) for the Ottawa government's contribution of a robotic arm - Canadarm 3 - to the future Gateway cislunar orbital complex on which NASA is also working. 

The CSA has four active astronauts, three men and one woman. She is Jenni Sidey-Gibbons, a 34-year-old mechanical engineer. Two others are military, Royal Canadian Air Force colonels Jeremy Hansen - a 45-year-old fighter pilot - and Joshua Kutryk, a 40-year-old test pilot. The fourth is the only one to have flown in space. He is David Saint-Jacques, 52, an engineer, astrophysicist and family doctor.

The first firm step towards America's reconquest of the moon was completed ten days ago, when the Orion capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on 11 December. It was recovered by the US Navy's USS Portland and deposited two days later at the San Diego Naval Base in California, from where it is travelling by road by night in a special convoy to the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on Florida's Atlantic coast. 

NASA had set a total of 124 major checks for the Artemis I mission. But of these, only four were labelled "critical". The first was to verify that the SLS launcher is reliable for launching a mission to the Moon and beyond. The second was to evaluate each and every system on the Orion spacecraft in space.

The third was to recover the capsule intact after splashdown. And the fourth and most important: to verify that Orion's heat shield is capable of ensuring the survival of astronauts during re-entry into the atmosphere at speeds in the order of 40,000 kilometres per hour. NASA's Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development, Jim Free, is waiting for Orion to arrive at the Florida facility, where it will undergo detailed analysis of its interior, exterior and software. 

Engineers will closely examine the heat shield made of phenol formaldehyde epoxy resin tiles with special additives and fibreglass that protected Orion from temperatures of more than 2,600 degrees Celsius as it passed through Earth's atmosphere. At KSC, work is already underway to fine-tune the SLS launchers and the Artemis II and III Orion capsules, which must lift off before China's first astronaut attempts to set foot on Earth's natural satellite.

NASA Inspector General Paul K. Martin, in his report to Congress at the end of 2021, has estimated that the total cost up to 2025 will cost the federal coffers $93.1 billion. To this must be added the costs of Artemis IV, starting in 2027, Artemis V (2028) and even Artemis VIII, which is the one that will begin to place the first links of a permanent lunar base at the lunar South Pole by 2031. But these missions are still a long way off, and many incidents may occur.