Last night’s historic moon landing – now it could happen very quickly: Americans’ crazy moon and Mars plans

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Minutes of trembling, then the big celebration: On Friday night, the US lander Nova-C touched down in the southern region of the moon. For the Americans, this is their return to the Earth’s satellite, 52 years after the last Apollo mission.

Historical: It was also the first commercial moon landing in space history; US company Intuitive Machines worked closely with the American space agency Nasa.

An unmanned return to the Moon is an important step for Americans. They want to land astronauts on the Moon again very soon, with the Artemis missions initiated by former President Donald Trump (77). And America’s plans are even bigger. Blick introduces them:

The Artemis-1 mission launched in November 2022 and was successful: the unmanned “Orion” capsule circled the moon several times. In September 2025, the Artemis 2 mission is planned to enter partial orbit of the moon with four US astronauts. And a year later, in September 2026, Americans want to send people to the moon again.

As part of the Artemis 3 mission, two astronauts are planned to spend a week in the south polar region; The other two astronauts are planned to fly on the Orion spacecraft but not set foot on the moon.

With its Artemis program, the US space agency NASA wants to establish a permanent presence on the moon as a stopover point for planned missions to Mars. The first two modules of the planned space station can be placed into lunar orbit in 2027 using the Falcon rocket of Elon Musk’s (52) space company SpaceX.

Annual expeditions to the Earth’s moon are planned starting in 2028 to establish America’s remote station; The sight of people on the moon will become routine. By the way: the Chinese also want to build a lunar research station together with the Russians; The target is the early 2030s.

From Earth to Mars via the Moon; That’s NASA’s plan. The space agency doesn’t want to say exactly when that will happen. This specifies the 2030s for manned Mars missions, which must result in a “landing on the Martian surface.”

The biggest challenge will be the journey itself: Experts assume the return flight and stay are 400 to 450 days. On the one hand, astronauts are always trapped in a very small space, and on the other hand, long-term weightlessness causes health problems such as loss of bone mass. The cosmic radiation that astronauts will be exposed to on their way to Mars also poses a problem.

Source :Blick