Why NASA Wants to Go Back to the Moon
WiredAug 12, 2022
NASA brought home its Orion capsule astronaut craft on Sunday after a nearly 26-day mission to orbit the Moon. It landed in the Pacific Ocean after a fiery reentry into Earth's atmosphere and descent by parachute.
The gumdrop-shaped capsule, carrying a simulated crew of three mannequins wired with sensors, plunged into the ocean off the Baja, Calif. peninsula. It was a major step forward to America's return to lunar exploration and eventual human missions to Mars.
Eventually, NASA will return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972, including the first female crew member. As part of a long-term plan for a Moon-to-Mars exploration in the next 20 years, the Artemis project is an exciting test to see how close humanity is to reaching much further than the Moon in the decades to come. This is an exciting step in the evolution of the US space program.
This is an exciting development, but there are serious management problems in NASA's lunar program. Despite the long-term plan for the Artemis program this decade, only now is NASA creating a single management structure to handle the entire operation. Time will tell if this will have an adverse impact on the goal to land humans on the moon in 2025. The clock is ticking.
There's a 50% chance that NASA will next land astronauts on the Moon by March 2029, according to the Metaculus prediction community.