This year’s SXSW featured a plethora of riveting panels from famous casts to famous musicians, and for a moment it seemed as if every celebrity in the world was in the Lone Star State. As if the festival couldn’t get any more exciting, NASA decided to hold a keynote session with the astronauts who will be embarking on NASA’s first attempt at landing on the Moon since 1972. After the successful Artemis I Flight Test in 2022, NASA plans to head into space later this year with the Artemis II Mission, and the astronauts came to Texas to talk about it. Astronauts and panelists Christina Koch, Jeremy Hansen, and Reid Wiseman spoke in detail about preparing for the upcoming mission and NASA’s latest goals for space travel.
Get To Know The Panelists
One thing this panel made clear right away is that these astronauts (save for one) are no strangers to space travel. Koch spent a record-breaking 328 days aboard the International Space Station back in 2020 and Wiseman previously spent 165 days on the ISS back in 2014. The crew’s pilot, Victor Glover, who unfortunately couldn’t make it to the panel, spent 168 days aboard the ISS during NASA and SpaceX’s 2020 Crew-1 Mission. However this will be Canadian Astronaut Jeremy Hansen’s first time going into space, and he is thrilled, “So I’m pretty pumped.” The Astronaut cheered.
As moderator Courtney Beasley said, “So now we know the crew, let’s get to know a little more about the mission.”
The Artemis II Mission Broken Down
Artemis II is a 9-day mission that will take the four astronauts from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the Moon. Upon a successful launch, the Orion spacecraft will orbit Earth for 90 minutes while the astronauts confirm everything is working correctly, “And if everything looks good,” Wiseman states, “We’re gonna burn an apogee raise burn that’s gonna take us out for our second orbit of Earth.” As the crew goes through the 24-hour-long second orbit, they will be moving even further away from Earth, “The point of that entire orbit is to check out all of the systems for the first human flight on the Orion spacecraft–how is our environmental control system working, how is the life support system working, and how are we doing?” Wiseman explains.
If anything happens during those two orbits the mission is cut short and the astronauts are returned back to Earth. However, if everything goes smoothly, the spacecraft is then pushed out to the far side of the Moon on a four-day travel. Using the Moon’s gravity, the spacecraft will wrap around and start heading back to planet Earth, “We will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere just off the coast of San Diego, California, and we will be doing 39 times the speed of sound when we hit the atmosphere.” This mission is, as Wiseman says, the first step in traveling to Mars, “We’ve been working on the International Space Station for the last 25 years, we know how to live and work off of our planet, and now let’s go extrapolate that out to the Moon and then let’s push onto Mars.”