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Hi, I'm Cypher, producer Kathleen Davis, and you're listening to Science Friday. >> 10, 9, 8, 7, RS 25 engines, 4, 3, 2, 1, booster ignition, and lift off the crew of Artemis 2 now bound for the moon.
Humanities next great voyage begins. [BLANK_AUDIO] >> Good role pitch. >> Good role pitch. >> Right here, right at pitch.
>> That was Wednesday's launch of the Artemis 2 mission. Four astronauts are now well on their way towards the moon. They're planning to swing around in a lunar flyby, before heading back to Earth about a week from now. This flight has been a long time coming.
The Artemis program has faced several delays, and the overall Artemis program to return to the moon is in flux as well. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman recently announced a shift in focus to building a moon base. Here for an update on the Artemis 2 mission and longer term plans
for the moon is Brendan Burn of Central Florida Public Media. He's also hosted the Are We There Yet Podcast. Welcome back, Brendan. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Okay, so you were at the launch that we just heard.
“I'm so jealous, step-as-scene for us, what was that like?”
>> It was a scene that I have never seen before.
There were so many people out there watching this launch countdown. I got there probably about nine hours before Team Minus 0, and it was already buzzing with energy. The launch itself was also like nothing I had ever seen before. You know, SLS is a massive rocket.
And as we heard that countdown there, we saw the engines light, we saw the solid rocket boosters light, and then we saw the vehicle start to move off the pad, but quite silently, right? You know, we see things faster than we can hear things.
But once the sound of that those SRBs hit us, it's just, it shook your body. You don't see a launch, you don't hear a launch, you feel a launch, and that was certainly the case with SLS. SRBs cracked the air, it sounded like a flapping flag.
And just to watch this bright orange beam followed by this puffy cloudy tail behind it, had eastwarded and downrange was just an incredible sight. And they think all of that power, 8.8 million pounds of thrust, all of that noise, and forces, we were feeling four miles away. It was wild to imagine that there were four people
a top that rocket making this incredible journey. Right.
“I mean, as a space nerd, were you extremely jazzed?”
Absolutely. Absolutely. Can't think any launch is really, really cool, right?
They never get old, I probably covered at least 100 of them at this point.
But whenever there's people on board, there's a little extra special jazz, as you would say, in these missions, but especially knowing that there were four people on top of this one leaving this planet and whipping around the mood for the first time over 50 years was just really, really incredible.
Well, give us a thumbnail of the mission plan for this trip. Who are the astronauts? What are they going to be doing? Yeah, you've got three NASA astronauts in one from Canada. Commander Reed Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist,
Christina Cook, and then Canadian Space Agency astronaut, and mission specialist, Jeremy Hansen. This is a test flight. They are really going to be checking the Orion Space capsule out for future missions. This is the first time it is flying with a human crew.
The first hour or two, they were in space. They began doing these tests, right? One of the stages of the rocket that they used to actually boost it into that higher orbit. When it was all at a fuel, they decoupled from it. So the capsule and service module came apart from it.
In Victor Glover, grabbed the controls of Orion, and started flying around the this bent rocket stage. This was to test the manual controls of Orion. Really see how it handles in space.
“And this is important because future Orion Space capsules are going to need to dock”
with the lunar landing vehicle that will take astronauts down to the surface of the moon. They're also testing the life support systems. So the oxygen, the water, the toilet, which they ran into a bit of an issue with. The toilet is very important, but they were able to get it fixed. And then they'll be flying around the moon, as you mentioned.
Sling, shodding around the moon at around 5,000 miles above the surface of the far side of the moon.
So this is a viewpoint that human eyes have never seen before.
And they've got training from geologists. It's actually look for certain geological features on the moon, take photos, and then send them back.
All of that is happening, and while they're going to and from, they'll be doi...
Really, we're learning a lot about the effects of deep space travel on human beings,
because we haven't done it in a half a century. Wow.
“I mean, if all goes according to plan on this flight, what are the next steps for the Artemis program?”
So the next steps of all goes well will be Artemis 3. And this is a bit of a shift from earlier plans. Artemis 3 will not head to the moon. It's going to head to low earth orbit, NASA says by mid 2027, to test commercial landers. Now, there are two companies that are building landers that will eventually take
humans to the surface of the moon, SpaceX and blue origin. If these vehicles are ready, they're going to launch them into low earth orbit and Orion will dock with them. So Apollo did this early in the program as well. They proved that they could dock with the lunar lander.
So that will be Artemis 3. That's another very critical test.
Artemis 4 is going to send humans to the moon using one of these landers. They will fly into lunar orbit, head down to the surface of the moon, and then come back and then from there on, Artemis 5 and beyond will be missions to the surface of the moon. I mean, this program has had a fair number of setbacks and delays. Is that all behind us now, or is that thinking a little too optimistically?
I will say we've got some recency bias here. The launch of Artemis 2 did go really, really well. Artemis 1, there was an uncrewed mission of the Orion Space capsule using the same rocket SLS.
“A lot of issues with that launch, you might remember that there was hydrogen leaks.”
There was an issue with Artemis 2 when they did a fueling test. This was a practice run of launch day. There was that hydrogen leak as well. They were able to fix it during that test. But then they found another issue with the helium system that pressurizes all those tanks.
But on launch day, April 1, there was the first attempt and the countdown went extremely smooth.
So if Artemis 2 does set the pace for kind of smooth operations, then we are looking very good. The issues that we are going to be looking at and things that could slow this down is the development of those lunar landers. So the rocket looks good. We are seeing the Orion Space capsule. All indications are looking pretty good. Now we just need those landers to be developed, which could be a bit of a challenge or a hang-up in this whole Artemis plan.
So let's zoom out a little bit. I mentioned at the top that there has been this change in the overall structure of this program, NASA's scrapping plans for a space station that was supposed to be a staging point for a mission to land on the moon. Why the change? So new NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, in just his first few weeks here, he mentioned that he wanted to see these Artemis flights happen far more frequently than they actually are.
Artemis 1, the last launch of this was in 2022. So you can see there's a lot of time in between in between these launches. He said we need to increase the cadence. He changed the design of the rocket to make them a little less complicated to allow that to happen. And then there was plans for a tiny lunar orbiting lab in space. And those plans have been scrapped in order to build a science base on the surface of the moon. Now in order to do this,
NASA is going to partner with commercial companies to just send this armada of payload and robotic missions to the moon to get that going. So essentially, he wants to go to the moon to stay the gateway, which is what the orbiting space station is called. It was very tiny. It was really only meant to transfer astronauts from the Orion space capsule to their lunar landers. Now with a permanent science base, they'll be able to keep astronauts there for four weeks at a time.
Essentially, reproducing what they do in lower orbit on the international space station for science.
“I mean, it's changing the plan kind of mid-course, like bad. How do you read that?”
I mean, this plan has been changed mid-course so many times. I mean, pretty much every president since the Apollo program has had a plan for the moon. Really, going to the moon takes a lot of money. It takes a lot of congressional buy-in. And we really haven't seen that quite just yet. And really, Kathleen, this is a change in course. This is disruptive, but it needed to happen. I mean, we were seeing Artemis was becoming kind of stale and not going where it needed to go.
And now this has really given it a big push. It seems to have congressional buy-in. I spoke with the subcommittee chairman of the Space and Aeronautics Committee in Congress. Mike Herodopoulos, he was at the launch as well. And he loves this new direction and said that the success of Artemis II is going to develop whether or not Congress is going to move forward with this. So that's a good sign.
Mm-hmm.
Do you think it's realistic?
“That's a very good question. I think so.”
NASA and other international partners have accomplished really incredible things. You know, if you would have asked me in 1995, is the International Space Station realistic? You know, I may have been a bit skeptical there because that was a huge undertaking. And it did happen to get done. The moon base is going to be an absolutely incredibly difficult undertaking. I spoke with one of the engineers who
helped build the International Space Station and he said just that. But he's also optimistic that this will happen. You know, we have the technology, we have the ability to do this. The moon has so many things that we really want to get. But the moon is also a witness plate to what has happened in our cosmic history. And if we want to understand, you know, where we came from,
where life came from and whether or not we may be alone in the universe, we always seem to be
looking outward at that question. But the moon holds critical clues to that. We just need to get
“there and find the science. So yes, it is a very, very difficult task. Will it happen?”
I certainly hope so. And there's a very good reason for it too. Well, Brendan, thanks so much for filling us in. Anytime. Thank you. Brendan Bern, host of the R. We There yet podcast and assistant news director for Central Florida Public Media in Orlando. After the break, turning to a simple, but deep question,
what if we didn't have a moon? Stay with us. Recently, we got to call in the listener line that really made us think. This is Hollis, Tucson, Arizona. It's my opinion that if the earth lost its moon for some reason the weather, it would soon be as there as Mars. Thank you for all your education. Thank you, Hollis. What would happen if the moon disappeared? It's a great question.
And here to help us with that is Rebecca Boyle. She's a science journalist and author of the book our moon, how earth celestial companion transformed the planet, guided evolution and made us who we are. Rebecca, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. I am dying to hear
“your thoughts on Hollis's question. But I think we need to tackle this maybe in two parts here.”
So maybe first, let's start in like an alternate dimension where let's say the earth never had a moon.
What would be different? I mean, basically everything. So I don't even really know where to begin. Like it would be, it would be Hollis's right, man. I mean, why is that? There are so many things. The moon does to this planet that we take for granted. The primary one we all know is the tide. And that just is the way that the moon is pulling on earth and we're pulling back on the moon as the moon is moving away from us and our rotation speed is slowing down. And if those things were
not happening, earth would spin a lot faster. And that means that the wind speeds that go around earth, jet stream would be super fast. So it would be really horrible windy all the time. And you wouldn't
have this like crucial mixing of the oceans that happens all over the earth, which makes nutrients
sort of rise to the surface, might have dragged the first life forms from the sea floor up to encounter the sun for the first time and invent photosynthesis. So if we'd ever had a moon, I don't know that we would be here. Okay, interesting. So let's assume that we did have a moon and then it was suddenly eliminated. What do you think would happen if we already had, you know, life on earth and then suddenly the moon was gone? I think it would be very confusing to start for every form of life. We have
in ourselves these circadian clocks. And we learn about these for a long time. And it means that our body is synchronized to the day and night cycle, which is primarily driven by the sun, sunlight. But we also have a circle lunar clock. And this has been shown to exist in marine animals. It's been shown to exist in plants. Like life forms on earth know the moon is there and they respond to it, whether it's through its light or through its gravity or both. And so I think it would
just be like really messy and confusing initially. And then after a while, depending on how long of time skills you want to, you know, think about it would be pretty horrific actually. Like the
Tilt of earth would change pretty dramatically.
axis is tilted 23.5 degrees with respect to how we orbit the sun. And if we didn't have the moon
over like thousands of years or hundreds of thousands of years earth would wobble like a top. That's about to fall over. And so it would be really erratic. So we have huge changes in our climate.
“So it would be, it would be pretty ugly. I think for a while. And it would be sad. There would be”
no other elimination at night other than ones that we provide. And I think that would be sad.
So over time it would be pretty devastating and sounds like over time it would be pretty devastating. And I actually do think we would notice it pretty soon. There are biological rhythms that would shift pretty quickly that may be less obvious to a person like, you know, looking at their phone
“on the subway at night or something, but pretty soon you're going to try to feel it. And I think”
we don't really know how horrible it would be how quickly. What would the impact be of gravitational force suddenly stopping, right? Like what would that be like? Do we know? We don't really know. There would be some sort of rebound effect because, you know, I guess if you made the moon go poof. And by the way, it didn't poof in such a way that like pieces of it sort of falling onto earth in a hard rain to borrow a phrase from the novel Seven Eaves
where this happens. If the moon just was whisked away some later, choose your own adventure.
“Yeah, you know. Then I think there would still be this like some sort of reflex, you know,”
rebounding effect that would happen. And Earth's crust deep, I would think that there would be Earthquakes. I would think there would be, you know, I don't know if a tsunami is the right word for the force of water that would move around very suddenly, but there would be this sudden change in title patterns that would be really disruptive. So, Hollis is right, Earth would potentially be as
barren as far as if we lost our moon. I definitely think if we'd never had one, it would be a
sad barren dry, lonely planet. I think if it went away, that would eventually still happen, but it might take a little while. Rebecca Boyle is a science journalist and author of the book our Moon, how Earth's celestial companion transformed the planet, guided evolution, and made us who we are. Thank you, Rebecca. Thanks for having me. And if you're like Hollis and you have a big question that you need the answer to, give us a ring, 8774 Cyfry, that's 8774 Cyfry. This episode was produced
by Charles Berkwist and if this podcast has you over the moon, please rate in review us, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kathleen Davis. Thanks for listening.
