“It got funded as a rocket to nowhere, and we at NASA had to figure out something to do with it,” Garver says. The rocket would be used to retrieve one with a robotic spacecraft, which would tug it closer to Earth for a human landing. Obama administration officials scrambled to find a place to send the rocket they were given. Though it was not part of the White House’s budget request, Congress holds the nation’s purse strings and had the power to hand out lucrative contracts to legacy companies like Lockheed and Boeing. Shortly after the program got the ax, however, members of Congress insisted on funding the rocket anyway, eager to keep the jobs attached to the effort after the shuttle era ended. Constellation would consist of a new, configurable rocket capable of launching to the moon or even to Mars, named Ares a new crew vehicle for low Earth orbit, called Orion and a new lunar lander, named Altair. In January 2004, less than a year after the Columbia disaster, Bush announced a Vision for Space Exploration-a reimagining of the space program that called for retiring the shuttle by 2011, scuttling the International Space Station by 2016, and replacing them with a new program called Constellation. Bush began work on a new way forward for NASA.Īrtemis has its roots in that effort. As the nation mourned the shuttle’s seven crew members, President George W. The bright objects were pieces of the space shuttle Columbia, which had broken apart during its 28th reentry through Earth’s atmosphere. On February 1, 2003, the skies over Texas flashed with what appeared to be a daytime meteor shower. This is a wobbly, uncertain start to an effort to return humans to the lunar surface for the first time in a half-century-and could make that return, if it does happen, a very brief one. If something goes wrong, or if SLS is deemed too expensive or unsustainable, there’s a chance the entire moon program will fail or at least be similarly judged. Where exactly that rocket is going has always been secondary-and the destination has changed multiple times. After multiple missed deadlines and criticism from Congress, multiple White House occupants, and NASA’s own auditors, space exploration fans and scientists were amped to go back to the moon.īut overshadowing Artemis is the uncomfortable fact that the rocket, not the moon missions it will carry, has long been the primary goal of NASA’s human spaceflight program. Towering 15 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty, the SLS consists of an orange main tank flanked by white boosters that make it resemble the space shuttle, its progenitor in both propulsion and programmatic style. It was carried into space by the most powerful rocket ever launched, the Space Launch System (SLS). The project’s first mission, an uncrewed test flight called Artemis 1, thundered to space in the middle of the night on November 16. Still others see it as a means to unlock a new era of scientific discovery and invention, first undertaken during Apollo but arguably begun the first time humans looked at the moon and wondered what it was. Some see Artemis as a way to reclaim American superiority in space, something that was most visibly lost when the space shuttle retired in 2011. For others, it represents a path to Mars. For some space enthusiasts, it’s simply a way back to the moon, a destination that will always loom largest in our collective consciousness. Its origins were rocky even before fueling problems and two hurricanes delayed its first launch in November.Īrtemis has many disparate purposes, serving very different groups. Its ancillary projects, spread throughout NASA and at university partners across the US, in many cases existed long before the Trump administration gave the program a name. Though the program is officially only three years old, elements of Artemis have been in the works for many years, even decades.
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