GATEWAY TO THE FUTURE

2022 will see NASA, with help from its international partners, take the first major step on humanity’s journey back to the Moon, and the start of a mission to establish an outpost alongside Earth’s natural satellite

- DR STUART CLARK

If all goes to plan, sometime in 2022 NASA’s Space Launch System rocket (SLS) will blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, for its maiden flight. The giant SLS rocket, fully 111.25m tall, is set to launch no earlier than February, but probably not until the summer, and will send an uncrewed capsule on a test mission around the far side of the Moon and back again. Known as Artemis 1, it will truly mark the beginning of humanity’s return to the Moon.

The Artemis 2 mission, currently scheduled for May 2024, will repeat Artemis 1 but this time with a crew of astronauts. In their looping journey around the Moon, they’ll go further into space than any previous astronaut. Then comes the big one: Artemis 3, which will carry the next astronauts to land on the Moon.

In between these tent-pole, missions will be a sequence of other launches to ensure the astronauts have everything they need to complete their missions when they reach lunar orbit. Absolutely critical to the long-term success of the Artemis programme is the Gateway lunar space station.

Gateway will be a multimodule space station in orbit around the Moon. It will act as a staging post for visits to the lunar surface, provide an orbital platform from which to conduct remote observations of the Moon and provide laboratories to analyze Moon rocks and conduct other scientific studies. It’s an international effort between the US, 10 European countries, Canada and Japan.

It may sound like science fiction, but it’s very real. And very, very cool…