Why is NASA going back to the moon?

0:02Thomas Moore:Sky News, the full story first.

0:11Thomas Moore:A mission to the moon has got me starstruck with space once again. And this is why.

0:28Thomas Moore:T-minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, three, two, one, zero, ignition.

0:42Thomas Moore:Almost. The Artemis II mission is on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. ready to go, hopefully, on April the 1st. If you can believe it, this will be the first time that NASA has sent astronauts to the moon since the 1970s. And like the Apollo missions of that era... It's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. This one is shaping up to be a bit of a space race. Our destiny beyond the Earth is not only a matter of national identity, but a matter of national security. See, Donald Trump is as aware as anyone else that China has its own lunar ambitions. So there's a lot invested in this launch.

1:26Thomas Moore:And yeah, that includes me. Back when I was a kid, I wrote to Houston inquiring about what it might take to become an astronaut. Hey, we've had a problem here. Ever since then, I've been slightly obsessed with staring at the stars. So let's find out what this mission really means and why it might just be the biggest step forward in space exploration in over 50 years. I sat down with Sky's science and technology editor, Tom Clark, and our science correspondent, Thomas Moore. Thomas, Tom, a rare treat to have you both on the podcast, but here's the thing. We can talk the science in just a second, but I have been a space geek since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, and I suspect similar for the pair of you.

2:06Thomas Moore:How are you feeling about it all, Thomas? Ah, hugely excited. I mean, this is a new era in space exploration, and we're there on the ground seeing it happen. Yeah, well, some of you will be there to stop.

2:18Tom Clarke:It's a bit of a sensitive point for that, for me.

2:21Thomas Moore:You're going out a little bit later, aren't you?

2:22Tom Clarke:Yeah, for reasons to do with the Easter holidays and having children, I can't go to the launch, which is the whole, the big moment. And like you were saying, like, when I was, I think I was four years old and we went to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, my dad took me there. You could still feel the influence of the moon landings and the missions. They'd only just stopped, you know, in the early 70s. And I have longed for this moment. And as a journalist, you're meant to be sceptical and always question the stories. It's going to be very, very hard.

2:55Thomas Moore:Let's distill it down. Artemis II, what exactly are we talking about here? We are talking about a mission to road test the technology, the rocket, the capsule, that will be a huge part of landing people back on the moon. It is going to take people further from Earth than any humans have gone before. they will fly faster than any humans before. It is packed with jeopardy and pictures are going to be mind-blowing. Back to the moon is the thing that really grabs me because it's been how long, Tom, since we actually had people there?

3:26Tom Clarke:It has been 54 years. 1972, Apollo 17 was the last mission to land on the moon. It's a long time. And within that comes a question, right? We've done this before. So why risk, you know, human lives, spend tens of billions, probably hundreds of billions by the time they're over to get humans back. And times have changed. And now, you know, this is about a race. It's a race with China.

3:51Thomas Moore:When did this develop into a space race? And, you know, because, of course, for those who don't remember, you know, back in the 60s, it really was. The Soviet Union versus the United States, a projection of power through space exploration. It was a real race to get people into orbit and then to the moon. I haven't heard this one characterised as a space race, at least until relatively recently.

4:12Tom Clarke:I think it's Trump, really. That's it. I mean, there was an awareness within NASA that China were making designs on the moon. I mean, the reason also, so yeah, it's a shift in domestic politics in the US, but also China has advanced its human spaceflight program much faster than I think a lot of Americans first factored in. it's a little bit akin to the Apollo era when America was in a single focus race with a sort of unlimited budget. Here's your objective to deliver it. Chinese politics works a bit more like that all the time. You know, we're going to do the moon. This is the thing. Whereas what the American program has suffered from is democracy and budgets, you know, new president coming in cancels that bit of budget, moves this bit of money around.

4:57Tom Clarke:So every four years, effectively, NASA's having to kind of reorder all the pieces. And we're seeing this really rapid pivot. There's going on, you know, even while this rocket's heading off to the moon, they're still trying to reorganise the whole Artemis programme to try and speed it up to make sure they get there. Because it's going to be incredibly tight, if not impossible, actually, to get humans on the South Pole by 2028. I mean, that's looking, you know, very, very ambitious. Yeah, massively ambitious. I mean, the Chinese idea of doing it is much more akin to the Apollo programme. They have a very simple, long-marched rocket with an orbiter and lander on board, and that's it.

5:31There's one rocket goes there. With the NASA program, you're talking about multiple rockets. And if it is the starship, the Elon Musk SpaceX starship, that to fuel it before it leaves Earth is going to mean 11 other rockets being launched into Earth's orbit to be used as petrol tankers. It's mad.

5:51Tom Clarke:If America just wanted to beat China, it could send a simple mission, put a couple of astronauts on the moon, and they're over here. But they've done that before. So in order to show preeminence and dominance in space, they kind of need to go one better than the Apollo astronauts did. Otherwise, they're just repeating what they did 53 years ago, 54 years ago. So there's that. But also, by putting a base, it's geopolitics. It's effectively a territorial claim. I mean, legally speaking, you're not supposed to do that in space, and there's work to try and figure out that. But there is a boots on the ground element and that's why they're looking at that too.

6:24Thomas Moore:All three of us are sitting here with smiles on our faces. How long do I have to sit on tenterhooks before we may get the launch? Because it's been cancelled before, hasn't it?

6:35Tom Clarke:Yeah, that's why there's been all this doing it for me. It was meant to launch in January, it got bumped, then it got bumped again in February and we're now on for an April launch. They had all sorts of technical issues and they're pretty confident they've sorted them out. so much so they're not even going to do another dress rehearsal. They're just going to fuel the thing up. And if it looks good, they're going to launch on April the 1st. But they have several other options that week to do it again. If it doesn't work that time, it bumps another month because it's the moon and it's a monthly lunar orbit.

7:04Tom Clarke:They can only go at a crucial time each month. So it's not guaranteed, but fingers crossed it's going to go. And also for the reasons Tom has mentioned, the jeopardy, there is the risk here. This is a new rocket that's never carried humans before. They tested it, it worked fine when they flew it the first time, but they never tested it with humans on it. If there's any slight risk, they are going to cancel. They're not going to risk this thing. NASA is much more risk averse these days. After the two shuttle disasters, you've now got a NASA chief who's an astronaut himself. He's not going to put people in harm's way.

7:39Thomas Moore:Let's talk about the mission specifically, because, you know, I think for some of us, you tend to think it's just point a big rocket at the moon and cross fingers. It's a lot more complicated than that. Well, just on that first point, you could just point a rocket at the moon and go for it, but it would use a heck of a lot of fuel. The idea here is that you'll stop burning fuel pretty much the moment you leave Earth's gravity. After that, it's what's called a free return. So they'll be going out and a slingshot around the moon, but they won't be using any more fuel to push themselves home. It is just that swing around the back of the moon using its gravity to fire it back.

8:18And that has important implications for if something went wrong. If you think the kind of Apollo 13 type disaster where the spacecraft is...

8:26Thomas Moore:You have to remind some of our listeners about Apollo 13. Yeah, that was one of the key Apollo missions where it was an oxygen tank that exploded and it crippled the power. And they had to go round the moon and then come back again. And they only had a certain amount of power and oxygen for two people that actually went into the lunar lander and used it as a lifeboat to come back. And they managed to get everybody back by some trickery. But this free return idea is the kind of the fail safe, if you like. If something really goes wrong, this spacecraft will swing around the moon on its own and come back towards Earth.

9:03Thomas Moore:So, Tom, but the first thing they've got to do is get out of Earth's gravity. And, you know, I know only too well every time I get out of a chair how difficult that can be.

9:10Tom Clarke:We see Elon Musk rockets taking off practically every week, taking satellites into low Earth orbit. And that's a fairly simple thing to do now. You don't need a huge amount of speed and stuff you're lifting to do a mission like that. To get to the moon, you're taking four people, their life support system, some of the sort of in-space propulsion system that they need to fly them up there. It's a huge mass that you've got to lift. And you've also got to get into a very high orbit. so to give it enough speed going once around the earth you know thomas was talking about that sort of slingshot thing they're available on speed to go around there to fling them out to the moon to then use more moon to get back they need a lot of kinetic energy really really big rocket and that's the thing that limits everything else like how much you can take how long you can stay um and it is no mean feat and it's in fact been a huge challenge even for a modern nasa that's got all of the learnings of the Apollo missions, it has been a huge challenge to build something to do this job.

10:06Thomas Moore:Who is building it, by the way? Because you talked about the kind of the private aspect of spaceflight these days with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos both involved. I mean, is this public or is this private? Do we know? It's a bit of both.

10:17Tom Clarke:So it's publicly funded, but what people sometimes forget is that throughout NASA's history, it's been private contractors that have built bits of the spacecraft for them under contract. What's changed since is sort of, you've got Elon Musk, who's a go-it-alone, standalone space agency in his own right, almost. And we've got Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, who's sort of trying to do something very similar and doing very well at it. But, you know, you've got Boeing, you've got Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Rocketdyne, all of these established American contractors that build NASA's rockets for them.

10:46Tom Clarke:And actually, that's part of the story. And a lot of these components were used in the shuttle program. These engines have flown before, and they've been souped up. So some of the engines that are flying on this Artemis II rocket, the Space Launch System rocket, powered the space shuttle when it was in orbit. And they've scavenged the parts. And they've done that. And upcycled them. And the same with the solid rocket boosters as well. They're leftover hardware, slightly tweaked for this rocket.

11:14Thomas Moore:Okay, so the astronauts have been taken up into kind of an orbit around the Earth. What happens next? So they're doing two orbits of the Earth first. The first in low Earth orbit, the kind of orbit that the International Space Station is in. Okay. I hope they're on the other side of the planet. Fire up the thrusters again to lift them up into a much higher orbit. And it's in that orbit where they'll take the capsule for a test drive. They'll disconnect themselves from the rest of the upper stage of the rocket. They'll flip it round. They'll dock again just to prove that in manual control, everything works as they will need it to work once they get to the moon.

11:55It's a bit of space ballet. before they hit the button to finally leave Earth's gravity and head off to the Moon. Because once they've done that, they are committed.

12:04Tom Clarke:And the idea is, yeah, it's an untested capsule, untested system. If it starts leaking or something's fallen off, they have got an option to just come back down to Earth again.

12:13Thomas Moore:Right.

12:13Tom Clarke:Not a preferred option, but it's still there. Obviously, once they've fired the rockets to head them off to the Moon, that's a one-way trip.

12:20Thomas Moore:What's the capsule itself like? Because I'm imagining this isn't a couple of hours of a journey to get to the Moon, is it? No, it's three days plus to get to the moon. In a tin can with three other people. It's about the size of a camper van. Really? Yeah, it is really cozy for four people. And Jeremy Hansen, the Canadian, he is six foot two. He's already said he's taking up more than his fair share of the space within the capsule. And in there, they're going to have to sleep, eat, exercise, go to the loo. There's no privacy whatsoever. so they've got to know each other very well and there's going to be nothing much that they'll be able to hide i'm sorry to be the scatological infantile one here but the one fact that i know about artemis 2 compared to the apollo missions they've actually got a toilet on board this time it's not a cubicle i mean it is literally a hatch in the floor which they lift up to access the

13:10Tom Clarke:toilet that's that's it right really yeah imagine the worst camper van caravan toilet you've ever been to it's like that only darker and smaller and no door and there's no door but also and it's in the floor but only when it's on earth because obviously once you're in space there's

13:24Thomas Moore:no up and down anyway so true but in space everyone can hear you use the loo but there is the toilet

13:30Tom Clarke:that's important because they are going for they are going for quite a long while but you also

13:33Thomas Moore:mentioned that the exercise they're going to have to do some cardio they're going to have to do some physical fitness because there is the the muscle wastage that kind of comes from from prolonged exposure to weightlessness but more than that isn't radiation a problem if you're heading to the moon very much so so they have got a radiation shelter and they will be testing it out so once Once you're beyond the Earth's magnetic shield, you are out into an area where you can be bombarded by cosmic radiation, solar radiation. And that is really dangerous for deep space missions. But they have got a shelter where it's not particularly technical.

14:08I mean, it's basically where they're surrounded by big bags of water and food and equipment and that kind of stuff, which will absorb some of that radiation. But they will be wearing radiation monitors themselves. They want to know how good this is at protecting the astronauts.

14:22Thomas Moore:So having gone round the Earth a couple of times, pointed themselves in the direction of the Moon, or slightly to one side of the Moon, in fact, what are they going to do when they get there? Because they're going round to what I'm always told by you, Thomas, whenever we discuss this. It's not the dark side of the Moon, but it's the far side of the Moon where they will be out of comms. It's not the dark side, because when the Moon is not shining so bright on our side, it's shining on the other side. But the far side is the side of the moon that we never see from Earth. So just 24 people, the Apollo astronauts, have seen firsthand the far side of the moon.

14:58So this is going to be really special to go back because, of course, the technology is better now. They'll be flying slightly further away than the Apollo astronauts, about 4 ,000 miles. Their view will be a bit like holding the moon up as if it's a basketball in their hand. That's the kind of view that they'll have of the moon. But the idea is to give it a really good look with high definition cameras and not just learning something about the geography, the geology of the moon as much as they can from that far apart, but also looking at potential landing sites for a future mission.