Artemis II Crew Ready to Fly Around the Moon on “Integrity”

Today the four Artemis II crew members announced the name they have chosen for their Orion capsule — Integrity. During an hour-long news conference, they conveyed readiness for their mission to fly around the Moon a few months from now and hope that it might bring about “peace and hope for all humankind.”

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen shared their thoughts about what Artemis II means to them and to U.S. led-human space exploration overall as the clock ticks down to liftoff sometime between February and April of next year.

They emphasized this is a test flight. The goal is to fly around the Moon, but the spacecraft and life support systems first must pass tests in Earth orbit before NASA decides to execute the Trans-Lunar Injection (TLI) burn. Once that happens, the crew is on its way beyond the Moon, a distance of about 250,000 miles. They’ll be on a free-return trajectory that will bring them back to Earth even if Orion’s propulsion system doesn’t perform as planned, but after TLI it’s a nine-day trip.

“When we get off the planet we might come right back home,” mission commander Wiseman explained. “We might spend three or four days around Earth.  We might go to the Moon. That’s where we want to go, but it’s a test mission as we are ready for every scenario.”

If they do go around the Moon, it will be the furthest human beings have ever been into space, but Koch said they’re not focused on records. “It’s not about farthest, first, fastest, longest, it’s about the teamwork, and the work that went into” the mission and the “dedication” it took to overcome challenges.

The international character of the mission came up repeatedly. Glover cited the oft-quoted saying “if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.” NASA has worked hard to differentiate Artemis from Apollo by including commercial and international partners. Hansen is Canadian and Orion’s Service Module is provided by the European Space Agency. Japan and the United Arab Emirates also are participants in Artemis, building components of the Gateway lunar space station along with NASA, Canada and ESA. The U.S. already has agreed to fly European and Japanese astronauts to Gateway or the lunar surface.

That’s all in the future. Artemis II has to be a success before Artemis III can land the first American astronauts on the Moon since Apollo. The crew said today enabling Artemis III is their measure of success.

We look through the lens of mission success, which is Artemis III getting back to the surface of the Moon. We do all this training, all this preparation. We’re buying down all this risk, always thinking about what are we handing off to the next crew? Is what we’re developing going to help them achieve that objective. That’s just a really neat way to look at this.  — Jeremy Hansen

Hansen went on to say Artemis II also is about the pursuit of excellence and more broadly still a feeling of hope. “We know that Artemis II is not the solution for humanity on planet Earth,” but “we hope that just for a moment that people will pause and say, wow, it’s extraordinary.”

Wiseman built on that theme when revealing the name they’ve chosen for their spacecraft. The four of them plus their backups, NASA’s Andre Douglas and CSA’s Jenny Gibbons, “locked ourselves in” a quarantine facility until they agreed on something that conveyed “core values.”

“We started with the NASA core values. And then we looked at the Canadian Space Agency core values. And then we talked about what matters to us most in our core values. And then we looked out at what is going on with Artemis II. What do we want this to be? We want it to be a success for Artemis III. But Jeremy hit it, you know, peace and hope for all humankind. That is what we really want.

And so we are bringing together the world. We are bringing together an amazing workforce. And they are bringing together an amazing vehicle. And at the end of all that, when you squeeze it all down, it created magic.

So we’re going to fly around the Moon in the spacecraft Integrity.” — Reid Wiseman

 

In a separate news conference yesterday, Lakeisha Hawkins, acting Deputy Associate Administrator of NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said February 5 is the first possible date for the launch, but April remains the official target. Many factors will decide when it actually occurs. First among them is when the rocket, spacecraft and crew are ready, but weather — on Earth and in space — are just as important.

Space weather is caused by coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from the Sun that create breathtaking auroras on Earth, but also can disrupt electrical systems and orbiting satellites. Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field protect humans on Earth from ill effects, but astronauts flying beyond Earth orbit are exposed to the radiation. Coincidentally, three space weather satellites were launched this morning that will help in detecting and forecasting CMEs: NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) and Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and NOAA’s Space Weather Follow on-Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1). The Artemis II crew can shelter in Orion’s storage compartments if there is a CME during their 10-day flight.