Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav NASA is apparently pretty serious about building a base on the Moon, and the astronauts who just flew there say it is “absolutely doable.”
Within two days of landing on Earth, the Artemis II astronauts were already back in spacesuits, working as if they had just landed in a gravity well and had ventured outside onto the lunar surface for a spacewalk.
“We were in surface spacewalk suits, doing surface geology tasks, and doing them well,” said Christina Koch, a mission specialist on the Artemis II mission. “(We were) able to complete an entire battery of very challenging surface tasks.”
Koch made her comments on Thursday during the crew’s first news conference since returning to Earth on April 10. Their mission, a smashing success, tested a NASA rocket and spacecraft on the first human flight into deep space in more than five decades. It represents the opening salvo of NASA’s Artemis campaign and comes amid significant changes to the program.
Only a week before the Artemis II mission lifted off, when the crew was already in quarantine, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced that the space agency was pivoting away from a lunar space station to a surface base. Moreover, he said NASA would aggressively work to develop this lunar base in three phases over the next decade.
Koch said this announcement energized the crew and the mission.
“We were very much lifted up by the notion that we would get to contribute to astronauts doing this all over again, much sooner than we thought, and that we were going to be focused on the Moon base, on surface operations,” Koch said. “We are feeling even more excited and just ready to take that on as an agency.”
Koch said one thing she and her fellow astronauts learned was that they were well-trained to handle whatever issues arose.
“This mission taught me that the unknown is way scarier than the known,” she said. “Every single time we accomplished a mission test objective, we all looked at each other and were like, ‘ That actually went pretty well.’ That was actually not necessarily easy, because it took a ton of work, but it was easy to accomplish as a team because we had put in the work.”
Another crew member, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, said that as NASA takes further steps into deep space, including setting up a lunar base, astronauts and the teams supporting them on the ground must be ready for a potentially bumpy ride. And, he said, astronauts have to be willing to embrace that risk.
“We have to be willing to accept a little more risk than we were willing to accept in the past, and to just trust that we will figure it out in real time,” he said. “We’re not going to be able to pound everything flat before we go; we’re going to have to trust each other. It was very evident to us out there that this one went really smoothly. I’m not surprised—extraordinary team. But it was also very clear to us that it could get real bumpy, real fast.”
The mission’s commander, Reid Wiseman, said he had a technical epiphany 250,000 miles from Earth. He felt a strong urge to land on the Moon, and if they’d had a lander, they would have eagerly done it. The Moon, he said, was right there for the taking.
“It’s not—oh, I’m gonna eat these words—it’s not the leap I thought it was,” Wiseman said. “If you had given us the keys to the lander, we would have taken it down and landed on the Moon. It’s going to be extremely technically challenging, but this team needs to show up every day knowing it is absolutely doable, and it’s doable soon.”
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