NASA is practicing moonwalks. When are we going back?

After the success of Artemis II, we at Short Wave definitely have moon fever. So, we brought NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce https://www.npr.org/people/4494969/nell-greenfieldboyce onto the show to talk about where we’re headed. What will future Artemis missions look like and what needs to happen next for people to be able to walk on the moon again? We find out in this latest installment of Spacing Out – with space enthusiasts Regina G Barber https://www.npr.org/people/1082526815/regina-g-barber and one of the hosts of All Things Considered, Scott Detrow https://www.npr.org/people/444796749/scott-detrow! Interested in more space episodes? Check out our whole summer series, Space Camp https://www.npr.org/series/g-s1-3299/short-wave-space-camp. Or, email us your ideas for future space-focused episodes at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. P. S. If you see this and you like the idea of formally calling this segment “Spacing Out with Gina”, email us to let us know that too! We’re still deciding. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:16Speaker 01

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:21Regina Barber?

  Hey, Short Wavers. Regina Barber here, and we are back with our space news segment. And I think we still should call the podcast version Space In Out with Gina.

• 0:30Speaker 03

  I mean, it sounds good to me. Fair is fair.

• 0:33Regina Barber?

  Today, we have science correspondent Nell Greenfield. Boys, hey, Nell.

• 0:36Speaker 03

  Hey, Gina.

• 0:37Regina Barber?

  And we also have our regular contributor, space geek and All Things Considered host, Scott Detrow. Welcome back to this part of space, Scott.

• 0:45Speaker 04

  I am so thrilled to be back here. Favorite topic to discuss at all points. Ready to space out again.

• 0:51Regina Barber?

  Yes. And Nell, our first timer, are you ready for this?

• 0:54Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So I know I came here to talk about Artemis because we just had a successful mission from NASA. So I'm going to tell you what's in store for the next Artemis missions. And do you have any guesses from the two of you, like before we get into it, about where we're going to go?

• 1:11Regina Barber?

  Uh, they are going to go to Jupiter.

• 1:13Speaker 04

  They'll talk about their toilets.

• 1:14Regina Barber?

  I mean, they should talk about their toilets.

• 1:16Speaker 03

  Those are all fine, fine guesses. And if we go to those places, I will definitely want to cover them, but not this time.

• 1:22Speaker 04

  Then we're also going to get into some sort of connection between seismic activity and total solar eclipses, right?

• 1:28Regina Barber?

  Yes, a real scientific connection. And to round it out, we're going to talk about an interstellar comet. And for a taste of what's to come, I have a joke for you both. So why does a shooting star taste better than a comet?

• 1:43Speaker 04

  Hmm, I have no idea.

• 1:44Speaker 03

  Not so icy?

• 1:46Regina Barber?

  It's a little meteor.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  Oh, all right.

• 1:50Regina Barber?

  You're welcome. You're welcome. I looked that up. I didn't write it down. That was stolen. Today on the show, it's a real space jam. We travel all the way from Earth to the origins of an interstellar comet. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 3:34Regina Barber?

  Okay, Nell Scott, I'm very excited to talk to you guys about Artemis. You know I'm obsessed with the moon.

• 3:39Speaker 04

  We are obsessed as well. And Nell, you and I spent a lot of time recently talking about Artemis 2. We saw it launch. We saw it splash down. We covered the whole base. It was the first time people ventured out to the moon in five decades. The mission, by and large, went really well.

• 3:54Regina Barber?

  And we were both on live together for the launch and the splashdown.

• 3:58Speaker 04

  I know. We're just going to superimpose a rocket blasting off behind you for this because that was such a cool moment last time. You know, not always, but you know, when it happens, it's great. Um, but I think one key thing that made this such a phenomenon of a story is that the astronauts really seemed to be having a fun time doing it.

• 4:15Regina Barber?

  Yeah, and they took like gorgeous photos. They broke a Record for going the furthest people have ever gone from Earth.

• 4:21Speaker 04

  But the important caveat that we always had to work in when we talked about this was the fact that they never actually landed on the moon.

• 4:27Regina Barber?

  No, no, no. The crew capsule can't land. In fact, I read that the astronauts need another vehicle to do that. Right now?

• 4:34Speaker 03

  Right. So Jared Isaacman, he's the head of NASA who took charge a few months ago. He's this businessman and a private astronaut. Anyway, he has been trying to speed up the two companies that have contracts with NASA to develop a lunar lander. So the hardware they need to land on the moon. Those are SpaceX and Blue Origin are the companies.

• 4:55Speaker 04

  Any sense when they think they might have a lander ready?

• 4:59Speaker 03

  It's hard to know since these commercial companies tend to keep things as private as they can, although sometimes stuff just happens. So for example, Blue Origin just had a problem with the upper stage of its new Glenn rocket. I mean, they failed to put a satellite into the right orbit. And then the Federal Aviation Administration grounded the rocket. Well, there's an investigation. So there's been a lot of chatter about how all that could slow down Blue Origin's work to support the moon landing effort. But anyway, NASA has said that they plan to test one or maybe even both landers next year. And so the basic idea is that launch the crew capsule with astronauts on board, then launch one or both landers so that they can kind of rendezvous with the lander and try to,

• 5:43Speaker 03

  you know, try things out in space, but do it all close to Earth. So they would be checking out propulsion, life support, all that kind of stuff.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  And it's the thinking that if that works well, then they can go ahead with the mission after that and try to land on the moon, walk on the moon?

• 5:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, NASA says the landing could happen as soon as 2028. But, you know, there are almost always delays in the space business. Still, NASA is actively preparing for surface operations on the moon. They've even been doing practice simulations with the Artemis 2 astronauts who just came back, like Christina Cook.

• 6:15Speaker 06

  When we got back to Earth, we all within one or two days were in surface spacewalk suits, doing surface geology tasks and doing them well.

• 6:26Regina Barber?

  Wow, that must have been so cool. To like suit up and then pretend to be like studying moon rocks on the lunar surface, having just been so close to the actual moon.

• 6:35Speaker 04

  One other thing I want to mention about Artemis was that really cool moment where they got to witness a solar eclipse from space, the moon passing in front of the sun.

• 6:43Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  It was so cool to see those pictures and that, of course, also reminded me about the solar eclipse, near and dear to our hearts, April 2024, just a few years ago. Such a joyous moment. I really enjoyed it. And Gina, I am happy to hear that we're going to be talking eclipses for the next topic.

• 6:58Regina Barber?

  Yeah, we totally are. And we're going to talk about seismic activity.

• 7:02Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 7:03Regina Barber?

  So Nell, you saw the solar eclipse too, right?

• 7:06Speaker 03

  Of course, I saw the total solar eclipse. I'm not going to miss that.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  I went with my kid's school, standing out on the on the field in front of the school with a bunch of kids staring at it. And it was great. It was a fun day.

• 7:17Regina Barber?

  I don't know if this happened to you all, but like I saw the total solar eclipse in Buffalo. Everyone was like super excited. They were like really loud. And then when totality happened, that's when the moon fully covers the sun. And when you can see that ghostly corona flickering around it, everyone got really still, really quiet. And this stillness was recorded by seismometers across North America.

• 7:39Speaker 07

  People were changing their behavior in order to go out and view the eclipse. And that's really the first time that anyone has looked at human behavior through seismics and acoustics that I'm aware of during an event like a solar eclipse.

• 7:53Regina Barber?

  That's Benjamin Fernando. He's a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Lab. And what Benjamin found is that in cities that were in the path of totality, that's where you get to see the total solar eclipse, it was seismically quiet. So seismometers pick up noise from all sorts of things, like trucks driving around town, you know, constructions, even music concerts.

• 8:13Speaker 04

  Right. And I always enjoy stories like this because you'll pick up, you know, like you'll see that a big concert, like a Taylor Swift concert actually has seismic activity. So this is kind of like that, but but the total opposite?

• 8:25Regina Barber?

  Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So I remember that Taylor Swift concert too. It was really cool. It was actually around like 2.3 magnitude earthquake, I think, is what they recorded.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  Because they were jumping up and down, right?

• 8:36Regina Barber?

  Well, it's because they were singing too, like they were just movement and swaying. And Benjamin said that seismometers are able to detect how quiet everything becomes. It's a good reminder that these tools can serve another purpose, like to help us understand noise pollution and how it affects our health and our environment.

• 8:53Speaker 04

  Last topic, we haven't gone interstellar yet in spacing out.

• 8:56Regina Barber?

  No, not yet.

• 8:56Speaker 04

  We're doing it now.

• 8:57Regina Barber?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:58Speaker 04

  3I Atlas, one of a couple of interstellar objects that came our way recently. There's some news. What's going on?

• 9:03Regina Barber?

  Yeah, so this is a comet that formed outside of our solar system. And it was just found zooming through ours last July. And currently, it's in between Jupiter and Saturn because it's still in our solar system. And after studying it for a while, astronomers think they know a little bit more about where it came from.

• 9:19Speaker 04

  Where?

• 9:20Regina Barber?

  It was somewhere colder than here, than our solar system.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  Wait, how do they know that?

• 9:26Regina Barber?

  Yeah, so they can look at the water evaporating from the surface of the comet using an array of radio telescopes in Chile. So scientists found that compared with comets made in our solar system, 3I Atlas has water that's different. Specifically, it's got more of this so-called semi-heavy water. And that's water with a slightly altered makeup. And that means it probably formed in a colder environment. So it's likely that it comes from a solar system that formed differently than our own.

• 9:53Speaker 04

  How close does that get scientists to knowing, though, which specific star system it came from?

• 9:59Regina Barber?

  It really doesn't. So they don't know that. But this information really helps scientists study future interstellar comets and to see if they have the same water composition. Because in recent years, scientists have gotten better at detecting these interstellar objects, and it seems likely that they're going to find more. So along the way, they can ask, like, is the water composition common, this one that we've seen in 3I Atlas? Or is it unique? Are we unique?

• 10:24Speaker 04

  Regina, you're unique.

• 10:25Regina Barber?

  Oh.

• 10:26Speaker 04

  Don't worry about it.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 10:28Regina Barber?

  Nell, did you have a good time in our space segment?

• 10:32Speaker 03

  Of course. I mean, you know, I get to talk about space for work. I mean, what's not a good time there?

• 10:38Regina Barber?

  Nell, you had a great time. That's all I wanted. You can come back when you have another space story.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  Excellent, excellent. Perhaps soon.

• 10:46Regina Barber?

  Perhaps. And Scott, you are stuck with us, though. And it's your fault for co-creating this space segment with me.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  You know what? I can't wait. Let's do it again soon.

• 10:54Regina Barber?

  Excellent, excellent.

• 10:57Regina Barber?

  If you liked this episode, share it with a friend. It really helps our show. And hey, give us a follow on the NPR app or wherever you're listening from, and you'll never miss a new episode. This episode was produced by Burley McCoy and Kai McNamee. It was edited by Christopher Intagliata, Amina Khan, and our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Nell, myself, and Tyler Jones checked the facts. Robert Rodriguez and Tiffany Vera Castro were the audio engineers. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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