Sciencetimes: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, Alan Shepherd, Edgar Mitchell, David Scott, James Irwin, John Young, Charles Duke Jr., Jack Schmitt, and Gene Cernan are the only 12 astronauts to ever touch the moon …
However, there is one more thing that unites them all: they are all men. So it is now said that the Apollo 11 moon landing was "one small step for a man and one giant leap for humanity." But isn't a woman capable of such a small step? NASA seems to think so.
At the beginning of the week, NASA announced an imminent and highly ambitious plan to return to the moon by 2024. The program itself pays tribute to gender equality: it is named after the Greek goddess and twin sister of Apollo Artemis. And, to the delight of many, there will be a special place for a woman in the 2024 lunar mission.
"Fifty years after Apollo, the Artemis program will take the next man and first woman to the moon," Bridenstine said during a press conference, CNN reported. Symbolically or not, this will be the first time a woman touches the surface of the moon.
However, some experts remain skeptical about the mission. While all of this is certainly ambitious - the time frame is very tight, which makes flight highly unlikely. Especially when you consider that Congress has yet to sign President Trump's updated budget, which includes an additional $ 1.6 billion for the agency this year and probably billions of dollars every year thereafter.
In addition to the necessary funding, the mission will also require the most powerful rocket ever designed, a new launch system, an updated method for lunar landing systems, a space station dangling between the Earth and the Moon that does not currently exist. New lunar spacesuits will also need to be developed.
It seems that the success of this mission is rather doubtful, but the head of NASA believes that such a tight and short time frame will only benefit the agency. Speaking to NASA staff today, he argued that any postponement of the goal set by Vice President Mike Pence in March this year is actually a more unwanted and risky alternative.
“In fact, the shorter the program, the less time it takes, the less political risk we endure. In other words, we can handle it. And if the program is not closed, America will have the first outpost on the way to Mars,”he said.
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Editorial comment
The idea of spending several tens of billions of dollars just to “pay tribute to gender equality” all the American media find very wonderful, however, it should be noted that the tribute will be incomplete. What about actively promoted transgender people? Transgender people will be offended if they don't fly.
Besides, it is not very clear what is meant by “astronaut man” and “astronaut woman”? NASA says nothing about the sexual orientation of the selected astronauts. Therefore, in order to pay, so to speak, a tribute of respect and not offend anyone, seven must be sent to the moon at once: a man of traditional sexual orientation, a woman of traditional sexual orientation, a gay man, a lesbian, two astronauts who changed their sex (a former man and a former woman), and also an astronaut who does not identify himself as either a man or a woman.
In addition, it is advisable to reserve the eighth seat for the cosmonaut, since until 2024 it is far away and anything can happen. What if another floor will appear on the planet by this time? Is it possible to wait 50 years again?
America, of course, is the most technologically advanced country, but send people to the moon in four years? Four years is a good time to shoot some cool space movie, but it won't be enough time to get a man to the moon.
When in the late 1990s the Americans thought about the imminent curtailment of the Space Shuttle program and began to plan its replacement, to the great amazement of the top managers of NASA it suddenly turned out that American engineers were no longer able to make large rockets.
"Saturn-5" was made by Wernher von Braun and others like him - specialists and engineers exported from Germany, trained already in the USA. In 2000, the youngest of these designers was 80 years old, while the younger generation of engineers was trained only on the Shuttle and had no idea about large launch vehicles.
As a result of solving this problem, the young Elon Musk and a group of the same young specialists who were trained almost from scratch appeared. Therefore, even if the Americans raise the old drawings of the Saturn-5 launch vehicle, the lunar module and Apollo, it is not a fact that they will cope on the first try. How many attempts can you make in 4 years?
In addition, according to NASA, the new rocket will be even larger than Saturn-5, which is even the largest launch vehicle in the world today: both the lunar module will be larger, and some “intermediate station” needs to be suspended, plus a boat that will fly to this station. So the huge, largest launch vehicle in history will have to be built from scratch. In four years, the rocket will, of course, be made, but who will send a man to the moon without samples? And who said that all starts will be successful? That is, it is impossible to bring such a grandiose product to mind in 4 years, and the rocket will be a little more complicated than the F-35.
Then there will be some kind of "intermediate station" dangling on the way to the moon. And it will not hang out in ISS orbit, but somewhere along the edge of the Van Allen radiation belt, where the radiation exceeds the natural background on earth by 100 million times. This is how much lead and armor will have to be lifted into orbit so that at least cockroaches could be on duty at the station?
In general, in four years the Americans will have to solve many, in principle, unsolvable technical problems, but we are confident that the Americans will cope. Elon Musk has already launched a trial balloon into space, which the public accepted with a bang, so this Artemis will be fine too. It is possible that the shooting of the flight is already going somewhere, and if everything goes well, the Americans will fly to the moon again almost tomorrow.