NASA boss presents Artemis 3 astronauts – mission becomes a test flight

NASA boss Jared Isaacman presents the four astronauts for the Artemis 3 mission. They are: three Americans - Randy Bresnik, as mission commander, Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio as mission specialist. And the first European astronaut in the Artemis program was the Italian Luca Parmitano. He will be the pilot of the space capsule. Parmitano brings a touch of Italian lightness on board, jokes Josef Aschenbacher, Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA).

In the Artemis 2 mission, people flew around the moon in the spring for the first time in more than 50 years. Artemis 3 was originally intended to land people on the moon again. But now the mission becomes an interim step. A so-called rendezvous and the docking of two lunar modules with the Orion space capsule will be tested - not near the moon, but in Earth orbit.

“Really difficult undertaking”

A wise decision, says Michael Summers. He's an astrophysicist at George Mason University and says, "It sounds so simple: rendezvous and docking. But it's hard! Software, hardware - you have to test everything." He was therefore happy when NASA decided to do this in Earth orbit instead of sending astronauts directly to the south pole of the moon. This is a “really difficult undertaking”.

The Artemis 3 mission is scheduled to start next year. But there is a problem: the development of the lunar modules is delayed. One is being developed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' company Blue Origin, and the other is being developed by Tesla boss Elon Musk's SpaceX company. And the two carrier rockets that are supposed to take the lunar modules into space for the rendezvous are not yet flying reliably. Blue Origin's exploded just recently, and SpaceX's explodes again and again.

Commercial companies are not automatically better

There are problems, says astrophysicist Summers. It's not the case that commercial companies are automatically better, faster and cheaper than NASA itself. "When commercial companies do that, there's a good side and a bad side. The good side is that they can be much more efficient. They don't have as much bureaucracy. But the disadvantage is that they have less experience than NASA."

You are now in control, says Artemis 2 commander Ride Wisemann as he symbolically passes the baton to the Artemis 3 crew. This should now pave the way for people to actually land on the moon again with Artemis 4. This should not be the case until 2028 at the earliest. But that doesn't seem really realistic.