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Under the directive of the Trump administration, NASA has been tasked with landing astronauts back on the moon by the year 2024. That would be the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
From there, the space agency will use these new moon missions as a stepping stone to a much more difficult mission — to put boots on Mars.
Enter the Artemis Program, which will be executed in three parts over the next five years to land our next lunar astronauts on the moon's south pole.
One of the major components of accomplishing this is the Orion capsule, which is the spacecraft that will take the crew up to another craft that orbits the moon, called the Lunar Gateway.
Houston Matters producer Joshua Zinn recently visited the Johnson Space Center to find out more about the Artemis Program and was able to sit inside a scale mock-up of Orion in the center's Space Vehicle Mockup Facility.
There, NASA’s John McCullough explains the three phases of the Artemis Program and how these missions will lead to Mars.
You can hear their conversation in the audio above.
- NASA's Orion capsule, part of the Artemis Program, which will take humans back to the moon and eventually to Mars. (Photo Credit: Joshua Zinn/Houston Public Media)
- The rover NASA astronauts will use on future missions to the moon. (Photo Credit: Joshua Zinn/Houston Public Media)
- In NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, teams are in the early stages of evaluating how astronauts would live and work on the Moon. (Photo Credit: Bill Brassard/NASA)
- In mission control at Johnson Space Center in Houston, flight controllers simulated part of Orion’s uncrewed flight to the Moon for Artemis 1. (Photo Credit: James Blair/NASA)
- The logo for NASA's Artemis Program, which will take humans back to the moon and then on to Mars. (Photo Credit: NASA)
