Science Friday
The Artemis II mission has launched, and its four astronauts are en route to the moon for a lunar flyby.
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Hi, I'm Sci-Fry producer Kathleen Davis and you're listening to Science Friday.
10, 9, 8, 7, RST 25 inches, lift. 4, 3, 2, 1, booster ignition and lift off. The crew of Artemis 2 now bound for the moon. Humanity's next great voyage begins.
Good roll pitch.
Roger, roll pitch.
That was Wednesday's launch of the Artemis 2 mission. Four astronauts are now well on their way towards the moon. They're planning to swing around in a lunar flyby before heading back to Earth about a week from now. This flight has been a long time coming. The Artemis program has faced several delays and the overall Artemis program to return to the moon is in flux as well. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman recently announced a shift in focus to building a moon base. Here for an update on the Artemis 2 mission and longer term plans for the moon is Brendan Byrne of Central Florida Public Media. He's also host of the Are We There Yet podcast. Welcome back Brendan.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Okay, so you were at the launch that we just heard. I'm so jealous. Set the scene for us. What was that like?
It was a scene that I have never seen before. There were so many people out there watching this launch countdown. I got there probably about nine hours before T minus zero and it was already buzzing with energy. The launch itself was also like nothing I had ever seen before. You know, SLS is a massive rocket and as we heard that countdown there, we saw the engines light, we saw the solid rocket boosters light, and then we saw the vehicle start to move off the pad, but quite silently, right? You know, we see things faster than we can hear things. But once the sound-
That those SRBs hit us, it just it shook your body. You don't you don't see a launch, you don't hear a launch, you feel a launch. And that was certainly the case with SLS. Those SRBs cracked the the air. It sounded like a flapping flag. And just to watch this this bright orange beam, followed by this this puffy cloudy tail behind it, had eastward and downrange was just an incredible sight. And to think, all of that power, 8.8 million pounds of thrust, all of that noise and forces we were feeling four miles away. It was wild to imagine that that there were four people atop that rocket, making this incredible journey.
Right. I mean, as a space nerd, were you extremely jazzed?
Absolutely. Absolutely. Kathleen, any launch is really, really cool, right? They never get old. I've probably covered at least 100 of them at this point. But whenever there's people on board, there's a little extra special jazz, as you would say, in in these missions, but especially knowing that there were four people on top of this one, leaving this planet and whipping around the moon for the first time in over 50 years was just really, really incredible.
Well, give us a thumbnail of the mission plan for this trip. Who are the astronauts? What are they going to be doing?
Yeah, you got three NASA astronauts and one from Canada, Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Cook, and then Canadian Space Agency Astronaut and Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen. This is a test flight. They are really going to be checking the Orion Space Capsule out for future missions. This is the first time it is flying with a human crew. The first hour or two, they were in space, they began doing these tests, right? One of the stages of the rocket that they used to actually boost it into that higher orbit, when it was all out of fuel, they decoupled from it. So the capsule and service module came apart from it. And Victor Glover grabbed the controls
of Orion and started flying around the spent rocket stage. This was to test the manual controls of Orion, really see how it handles. In space, and this is important because future Orion space capsules are going to need to dock with the lunar landing vehicle that will take astronauts down to to the surface of the moon. They're also testing the life support systems, so the oxygen, the water, the toilets, which they ran into a bit of an issue with. The toilet is very important, but they were able to get it fixed. And then they'll be flying around the moon, as you mentioned, slingshoting around the moon at around 5,000 miles above the surface of the far side of the moon.
So this is a viewpoint that human eyes have never seen before. And they've got training from geologists to actually look for certain geological features on the moon, take photos, and then send them back. All of that is happening. And while they're going to and from, they'll be doing medical tests on themselves. Really, we're learning a lot about the effects of deep space travel on human beings because we haven't done it in a half a century.
Wow. I mean, if all goes according to plan on this flight, what are the next steps for the Artemis program?
So the next steps, if all goes well, will be Artemis III. And this is a bit of a shift from earlier plans. Artemis III will not head to the moon. It's going to head to low Earth orbit, NASA says, by mid 2027, to test commercial landers. Now, there are two companies that are building landers that will eventually take humans to the surface of the moon, SpaceX and Blue Origin. If these vehicles are ready, they're going to launch them into low Earth orbit, and Orion will dock with them. So Apollo did this early in the program as well. They proved that they could dock with the lunar lander. So that will be Artemis III. That's another
very critical test. Artemis IV is going to send humans to the moon using one of these landers. They will fly into lunar orbit, head down to the surface of the moon, and then come back. And then from there on, Artemis V and beyond will be missions to the surface of the moon.
I mean, this program has had a fair number of setbacks and delays. Is that all behind us now? Or is that thinking a little too optimistically?
I will say we've got some recency bias here. You know, the, the launch of Artemis 2 did go really, really well. Artemis 1, that was an uncrewed mission of the Orion space capsule using the same rocket, SLS. A lot of issues with, with that launch, right? You might remember that there was, you know, hydrogen leaks. There was an issue with Artemis 2 when they did a fueling test. This was a practice run of launch day. There was that hydrogen leak as well. They were able to fix it during that test, but then they found another issue with, with the helium system that pressurizes all of those tanks. But on, on launch day, April 1st, it was the first attempt and the countdown went extremely smooth. So if, if, if Artemis 2 does set the pace for kind of smooth operations, then we are looking very good.
The issues that we are going to be looking at and things that could slow this down is the development of those lunar landers. So, you know, the rocket looks good. We're seeing the Orion space capsule. All indications are it's looking pretty good. Now we just need those landers to be developed, which, which could be a bit of a challenge or a hang up in, in this whole Artemis plan.
So let's zoom out a little bit. I mentioned at the top that there's been this change in the overall structure of this program. NASA's scrapping plans for a space station that was supposed to be a staging point for a mission to land on the moon. Why the change?
So new NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, in just his first few weeks here, he mentioned that he wanted to see these Artemis flights happen far more frequently than they actually are. Artemis 1, the last launch of this was in 2022. So you can see there's a lot of time in between, in between these, these launches. He said, we need to increase the cadence. He, he changed the design of the rocket to make them a little less complicated to allow that to happen. And then there was plans for a tiny lunar Orbiting lab in space and those plans have have been scrapped in order to build
a science base on the surface of the moon. Now, in order to do this, NASA is going to partner with with commercial companies to just send this armada of of payload and robotic missions to the moon to get that going. So essentially, he wants to go to the moon to stay. The gateway, which is what the orbiting space station is called, was was very tiny. It was really only meant to transfer astronauts from the Orion Space Capsule to their lunar landers. Now with a permanent science base, they'll be able to keep astronauts there for four weeks at a time, essentially reproducing what they do in in low Earth orbit on the International Space Station for science.
I mean, is changing the plan kind of mid course, like, bad? How do you read that?
I mean, this plan has been changed mid course so many times. I mean, pretty much every president since the Apollo program has has had a a plan for for the moon. Really, going to the moon takes a lot of money. It takes a lot of of congressional buy in. And we really haven't seen that quite just yet. And really, Kathleen, you know, this is a change in course. This is disruptive, but it needed to happen. I mean, we were seeing Artemis was was becoming kind of stale and and not going where it needed to go. And now this has really given it a big push. It seems to have congressional buy in. I spoke with the the the subcommittee chairman of the Space and Aeronautics Committee in in Congress,
Mike Herodopoulos. He was at the launch as well. And he loves this this new direction and said that, you know, the success of Artemis 2 is going to develop whether or not Congress is going to move forward with this. So so that is that's a good sign.
Mm hmm. I mean, building a base on the moon is very flashy, right? Like, that is sounds very exciting. Do you think it's realistic?
That's a very good question. I think so. You know, NASA and other international partners have accomplished, you know, really incredible things. You know, if you would have asked me in 1995, is the International Space Station realistic? You know, I may have been a bit skeptical there because that was a huge undertaking. And it did happen to get done. The moon base is going to be an absolutely incredibly difficult undertaking. I spoke with one of the engineers who helped build the International Space Station, and he said just that. But he's also optimistic that this will happen. You know, we have the technology, we have the ability to do this. The moon has so many things that we
really want to get. But the moon is also a witness plate to what has happened in our cosmic history. And if we want to understand, you know, where we came from, where life came from, and whether or not we may be alone in the universe, we always seem to be looking outward at that question. But the moon holds critical clues to that. We just need to get there and find the science. So yes, it is a very, very difficult task. Will it happen? I certainly hope so. And there's a very good reason for it, too.
Well, Brendan, thanks so much for filling us in.
Anytime. Thank you.
Brendan Byrne, host of the Are We There Yet? podcast and assistant news director for Central Florida Public Media in Orlando. After the break, turning to a simple but deep question, what if we didn't have a moon? Stay with us.
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Recently, we got a call on the listener line that really made us think.
This is Hollis from Tucson, Arizona. It is my opinion that if the Earth lost its moon for some reason or other, it would soon be as barren as Mars. Thank you for all your education.
Thank you, Hollis. What would happen if the moon disappeared? It's a great question. And here to help us with that is Rebecca Boyle. She's a science journalist and author of the book, Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are. Rebecca, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. I am dying to hear your thoughts on Hollis's question, but I think we need to tackle this maybe in two parts here. So maybe first, let's start in like an alternate dimension where, let's say, the Earth never had a moon. What would be different?
I mean, basically everything. So I don't even really know where to begin. Like, it would be, it would be, Hollis is right, man.
Why is that?
There are so many things the moon does to this planet that we take for granted. The primary one we all know is the tide. And that just is the way that the moon is pulling on Earth and we're pulling back on the moon as the moon is moving away from us and our rotation speed is slowing down. And if those things were not happening, Earth would spin a lot faster. And that means that the wind speeds that go around Earth jet stream would be super fast. So it'd be really horrible, windy all the time. And you wouldn't have this like crucial mixing of the oceans that happens all over the Earth, which makes nutrients sort of rise to the surface,
might have dragged the first life forms from the seafloor up to encounter the sun for the first time and invent photosynthesis. So if we'd ever had a moon, I don't know that we would be here.
Okay, interesting. So let's assume that we did have a moon and then it was suddenly eliminated. What do you think would happen if we already had, you know, life on Earth and then suddenly the moon was gone?
I think it would be very confusing to start for every form of life. We have in our cells, these circadian clocks. And we've known about these for a long time. And it means that our bodies synchronize to the day and night cycle, which is primarily driven by the sun, sunlight. But we also have a circulunar clock. And this has been shown to exist in marine animals. It's been shown to exist in plants. Like, life forms on Earth know the moon is there and they respond to it, whether it's through its light or through its gravity, or both. And so I think it would just be like really messy and confusing initially. And then after a while, depending on how long of time scales you want to, you know, think about,
it would be Pretty horrific, actually. Like, the tilt of Earth would change pretty dramatically. So we all know we have seasons because Earth's spin axis is tilted 23.5 degrees with respect to how we orbit the Sun. And if we didn't have the Moon, over like thousands of years or hundreds of thousands of years, Earth would wobble like a top that's about to fall over. And so it'd be really erratic. So we'd have huge changes in our climate. So it would be, it would be pretty ugly, I think, for a while. And it would be sad. There would be no other illumination at night other than ones that we provide. And I think that would be sad.
So over time, it would be pretty devastating, it sounds like.
Over time, it would be pretty devastating. And I actually do think we would notice it pretty soon. There are biological rhythms that would shift pretty quickly that may be less obvious to a person like, you know, looking at their phone on the subway at night or something. But pretty soon, you're going to start to feel it. And I think we don't really know how horrible it would be, how quickly.
What would the impact be of gravitational force suddenly stopping, right? Like, what would that be like? Do we know?
We don't really know. There would be some sort of rebound effect because, you know, I guess if you made the Moon go poof. And by the way, it didn't poof in such a way that like pieces of it started falling onto Earth in a hard rain, to borrow a phrase from the novel Seven Eves where this happens. The, if the Moon just like was whisked away someplace.
Sure, choose your own adventure.
Yeah, you know, then I think there would still be this, like some sort of reflex, you know, rebounding effect that would happen in Earth's crust. I would think that there would be earthquakes. I would think there would be, you know, I don't know if a tsunami is the right word for the force of water that would move around very suddenly, but there would be this sudden change in tidal patterns that would be really disruptive.
So Hollis is right. Earth would potentially be as barren as Mars if we lost our Moon?
I definitely think if we'd never had one, it would be a sad, barren, dry, lonely planet. And I think if it went away, that would eventually still happen, but it might take a little while.
Rebecca Boyle is a science journalist and author of the book, "Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are." Thank you, Rebecca.
Thanks for having me.
And if you're like Hollis and you have a big question that you need the answer to, give us a ring, 8774-SY-FRY. That's 8774-SY-FRY. This episode was produced by Charles Burquist. And if this podcast has you over the moon, please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kathleen Davis. Thanks for listening.
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