NASA’s Artemis I is a big step toward sending humans back to the moon.

PUBLISH DATE: 10/23/22 (pbs.org)

By Ana Aceves

The upcoming launch of NASA’s Artemis I is a big step toward sending humans back to the moon for the first time in 50 years. Discover what scientists hope this launch could mean for the future of space travel.

TRANSCRIPT

Why NASA is Going Back to the Moon
Published October 24, 2022

Narrator: The launch of Artemis I is a big step towards sending humans back to the Moon for the first time in 50 years, paving the way for deep space travel and potentially establishing a human colony on mars.

Michelle Hanlon: Who doesn’t want to go back to the Moon? I mean, come on. It’s a stepping stone to the rest of our future.

Hakeem Oluseyi: We have aspirations—aspirations for the Moon, aspirations for Mars and beyond.

Narrator: The first of NASA’s new Artemis program, Artemis I will voyage to the Moon and back, testing two deep space exploration systems: the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch Systems rocket, the world’s most powerful rocket. The Orion spacecraft will fly about 1.3 million miles—making this the farthest and longest mission by any spacecraft built for humans. But why does nasa want to return to the Moon? NASA scientists hope to eventually establish a more permanent presence on the Moon to help launch exploration deeper into space, like on Mars.

Bradley Jolliff: We need to go there, learn how to live and work sustainably off Earth. A lot of people would like to go on to Mars, but we have a lot of experience to get under the belt before we can do that journey to Mars. And the Moon is the best place to do it.

Narrator: But before we can set foot on the red planet, we first need to know what it would take to survive in space. Luckily for future Moon dwellers, we already know about one resource necessary for human survival…

Hakeem Oluseyi: One of the big surprises in exploring the Moon is the discovery of water.

Narrator: Water and ice were confirmed on the poles of the Moon in 2018. And a few years later, water molecules were also found in the sunlit areas of the Moon.

Michelle Hanlon: If we’re going to create permanent living conditions on the Moon, we don’t want to be hauling water up there, right? And so if we can extract that water, then we can make sure our humans on the Moon survive.

Narrator: Water on the Moon could actually be pretty widespread—and it could have another use too… rocket fuel.

Michelle Hanlon: But not only that, if you split those water atoms differently, you can make propulsion.

Narrator: Some rockets today rely on liquid hydrogen and oxygen. And water is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen.

Michelle Hanlon: And so instead of starting from Earth to get out to the asteroid belt or to3 Mars, we can use propulsion that we get from the moon. It’s a lot easier to rocket off the moon.

Narrator: There are other valuable resources on the Moon and in outer space too like rare-earth metals: nickel, aluminum and platinum.

Michelle Hanlon: We call them rare-earth metals because we don’t have a lot of them on Earth. We know that there are a lot of asteroids out there that are made up entirely of rare-earth metals. And so if we can access the Moon then we can go to those other asteroids and bring all of those resources back.
Narrator: But the way those resources are mined, and by whom, raises a lot of questions.

Hakeem Oluseyi: The question I have is: is it going to be like colonization, filled with conflict, or will it be more like the way we treat Antarctica? You know, scientists work there, nobody claims to own any of it, and we all share in the discoveries that could be made there.

Narrator: There are a number of international agreements that govern space exploration, including the Outer Space Treaty, which says no country can claim territory in space.

Michelle Hanlon: So a lot of people talk about space as being the wild, wild west, but it’s not. There are laws that apply in space. And so that’s really become the question of if you can’t claim territory, how can you use the resources? President Obama in 2015 signed the Asteroid Act, which says the United States interprets Article II to mean that you can’t go up and claim a piece of a plot of land. But if you extract the resources from that plot of land, you own those resources.

Hakeem Oluseyi: So in my opinion, the more we have access to space, the more the entire planet of humanity can profit from that. We live on a finite planet with finite resources, and we’re going to have to get resources from somewhere eventually. And these bodies are our neighbors and they have what we need. I think that in the future there will be more and more participation if we have a strong global economy as well as stability.

Narrator: As far as explorations go, humans have been living in outer space, in the International Space Station for decades—and before that, we had the Space Shuttle program. And the Apollo program, which brought humans to the Moon for the first time.

Hakeem Oluseyi: Perhaps future generations will look at Artemis the way we look at other missions, like the first flight of the Wright brothers that led to aviation. But now we’re talking about humans exploring our solar system in person. There is a whole universe out there to explore.