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Artemis 2 is making progress toward its lunar liftoff, but a newly named backup astronaut notes that there is “always something new” to learn in development missions.
Development efforts such as Artemis 2, a mission around the moon set for September 2025, always put safety ahead of schedule. Although this is the first manned flight to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, reserve NASA astronaut Andre Douglas told Space.com that no spaceflight is actually operational — even crewed orbiting missions to the International Space Station that happen every a few months.
“If you think about the thousands and millions of components in these systems, right, between spacecraft and ground systems, there’s a high probability that something will change, and that could tear down and cause any sort of delay or retry cause,” said Douglas. .
Referring to the delays that often arise in development missions, he said: “We are pushing the limits of what we know, and our talent. It is never, that simple. So I think that things are always being developed.”
Related: NASA announces Artemis 2 lunar mission backup astronaut – Andre Douglas will support 2025 lunar transition
The Artemis 2 core crew includes NASA commander Reid Wiseman, NASA pilot Victor Glover and NASA mission specialist Christina Koch; Douglas stands by any of these people if necessary. The fourth crew member, Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen, is CSA backup to astronaut Jenni Gibbons.
The mission was originally expected to end in December 2024, but technical issues delayed the announcement in January of this year. A major concern (though not the only one) is issues with the heat shield identified in the last mission, Artemis 1. NASA’s Office of the Inspector General is among the entities that have scrutinized the matter, and the agency’s response and recovery is still ongoing.
But the heat shield is only one item among thousands that Artemis 2 is tracking, and in the past few days meaningful progress has been made on other critical items. The center stage is completed for the powerful Space Launch System launched from New Orleans on its way to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, as NASA builds the rocket there for its first manned launch.
Related: NASA rolls Artemis 2 giant moon rocket core off factory floor for astronaut mission (video)
Also at KSC, Orion was just attached to its service module, according to the European Space Agency. Water flow tests for the launch pad were also completed last week as part of a month-long campaign to prepare the area for a powerful lift.
“Crews practiced releasing about 400,000 gallons of water [1.5 million liters] from large tanks above the mobile launcher and the pad’s flame deflector,” NASA officials wrote in an update.
Douglas said the challenge with spaceflight in general is that the vehicles are almost unique, meaning engineers learn something after every spaceflight. The ongoing Artemis 2 and Boeing Starliner astronaut mission to the ISS are particularly in the “early stages” since these are new spacecraft for humans, he said. (That said, even mature spaceflight systems have their challenges, as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket for ISS missions is set to fail during a satellite launch earlier this month.)
Related: SpaceX’s launch to the ISS is under independent NASA review after a rare Falcon 9 rocket failure
“I think it’s important to understand that space exploration is kind of always on the leading edge of humanity,” Douglas said. “Technology is always evolving […] Let’s say you build a vehicle with some commercial, off-the-shelf components, right? Or even something that is available to the government. That [technology] it will probably disappear, or change [during the mission], or something is going to happen with the subcontractor. That’s the main theme when it comes down to [missions with] Artemis, Starliner or SpaceX.”
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Douglas has extensive experience with early development programs in space, as his resume includes serving as a senior professional staff member at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). Among its many missions there was NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART), which successfully redirected a moon around an asteroid or space rock in 2022.
At APL, he recalled, he spent five years in the ocean systems group learning how to “build something in four or five months, go out to sea, launch it, monitor it for a few months, bring it back, and then see what you did wrong or right.” He said his experience with that cycle is similar to what is going on with Artemis.
“Being at APL specifically […] we were just the person pulling the things that need to be built. We were not just the manufacturers. We took the concepts from the mind, put it into reality, worked it, recovered it, and built the logistics chain. We did everything for the system. That gives me a unique perspective from all the stakeholders involved.”