Bill Nelson, former senator from Florida and current administrator of the space agency, indicated that the objective of the program is to establish a permanent presence on the Moon “to go further into the cosmos.”

NASA administrator Bill Nelson described Artemis I on Sunday as “an extraordinarily successful mission”, which also represents “the beginning of a new beginning” in terms of space exploration.

During a teleconference after the arrival this Sunday of the Orion unmanned spacecraft, the former Florida senator recalled that the Artemis program intends to establish a permanent presence on the Moon “to go further into the cosmos”, including sending to Mars from a crewed mission towards the end of the next decade.

Together with other NASA executives, Nelson pointed out that they are keeping the Artemis II mission from taking off by 2024, which will make a similar journey but with a crew, and to that extent he assured that the program still has bipartisan support and the US Congress.

At his side, Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, pointed out that if the information provided by Artemis I, which after landing will be transferred to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is satisfactory, they could in that case be giving meet the crew of the next mission towards the beginning of next year.

The Artemis I unmanned mission concluded this Sunday after the arrival of the Orion capsule in the Pacific Ocean, off the Mexican coast of Baja California, after 25 and a half days of mission, during which it made a round trip to the Moon in which it covered 1.4 million miles (2.2 million km.).

During the entry journey at 25,000 miles per hour (40,000 km/h), equivalent to 32 times the speed of sound, the 22,000-pound ship (just over 9,900 kilos) and about five meters in diameter (16.5 feet) experienced about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,800 degrees Celsius), half the temperature on the Sun.

It faced that fire test protected by a thermal shield that has been used for the first time on this mission and has performed well, according to the first observations, although a more in-depth analysis remains to be done, according to the mission manager, Mike Sarafin, said in the teleconference. .

“This is what a successful mission looks like,” said the NASA executive.

The director of the Orion program, Howard Hu, meanwhile, pointed out that the spacecraft fell some 2.1 nautical miles from the target, located near the island of Guadalupe, and the requirement was that it do so within 5.4 nautical miles.

He also said that they met 122 targets throughout the flight test and added about 20 more in real time.

Jim Free, NASA Associate Administrator for Exploration System Development, said the successful closure of Artemis I gives them confidence to tackle “increasingly complex” missions seeking to establish a permanent presence on the Moon.

“Initial indicators are very favourable,” Sarafin said of Artemis I, one of whose milestones was coming to a distance of 434,522 kilometers (almost 270,000 miles) from Earth, the maximum achieved by a spacecraft designed to carry humans and above. to the record achieved in 1970 by the Apollo 13 mission.

Upon arrival in Pacific waters, supported by eleven parachutes that opened progressively as the ship descended at 325 miles per hour (about 200 km/h), the recovery team aboard the USS Portland US Navy , had to wait about six hours before towing the ship to take it to a naval base in San Diego, California, and from there to Florida.

During that time, NASA collected information on how the high temperatures it experienced during re-entry impacted Orion and whether it had an effect on the temperature of the crew cabin, now occupied only by mannequins.

NASA’s plans are to launch the crewed Artemis II mission in 2024, and the following year Artemis III, in which astronauts, including a woman and a man of color, would finally touch down on the satellite for the first time since 1972. .

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