{"id":394329,"date":"2026-04-12T06:16:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-12T06:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/394329\/"},"modified":"2026-04-12T06:16:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T06:16:09","slug":"with-artemis-ii-nasa-went-back-to-the-moon-what-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/394329\/","title":{"rendered":"With Artemis II, Nasa went back to the moon. What now?"},"content":{"rendered":"

They have flown at 17,000 miles per hour, travelled 685,000 miles and spent 10 days in space, a trip that took Nasa<\/a>\u2019s Artemis II<\/a> crew the furthest humanity has ever been from the Earth. But now that the space agency is back on Earth, the journey is only really beginning.<\/p>\n

Artemis II<\/a> took humans back around the moon<\/a> for the first time in 50 years. But they have yet to match Nasa\u2019s accomplishments in 1969, when astronauts touched down on the lunar surface for the first time.<\/p>\n

For Nasa, the US government, and perhaps for all of humanity \u2013\u00a0in whose name the astronauts<\/a> said they were travelling \u2013\u00a0the real question is when it will finally be able to equal that achievement. And, from there, to beat it: to establish permanent settlements on the moon<\/a>, which could eventually be used to help launch the first ever crewed missions to Mars.<\/p>\n

Those journeys are partly about high-minded goals of space exploration and better understanding the universe we find ourselves in. But they are also powered by less hopeful geopolitical concerns, the new power of space as a domain for war, and another space race that would see the US face off against China to be the first country to return to the lunar surface.<\/p>\n

Nasa hopes to do that by the end of the decade. Its current plans suggest that it will be on the moon in early 2028 \u2013 but it has been repeatedly delayed in the past.<\/p>\n

First, it will launch the Artemis III mission. That was originally due to land on the moon, but by 2023, Nasa had decided that it would instead test the systems that will be used to drop astronauts<\/a> onto the moon, without actually doing so.<\/p>\n

If that succeeds, then comes Artemis IV, which aims to finally put astronauts onto the moon. That is scheduled for mid-2027, though all of these dates are subject to slip, and experts suggest that this is likely.<\/p>\n

Space can be slow, and unexpectedly so. The first mission in the Artemis programme \u2013\u00a0during which an uncrewed test flight would be sent around the moon \u2013\u00a0was originally planned for 2016, but was repeatedly delayed by problems with the hardware, the pandemic and even unforeseen problems while the rocket was on its launchpad.<\/p>\n

\"ToTo boldly go: The first country to get to the moon will be able to more readily exploit the opportunities such a feat offers, both economic and military-based (NASA)<\/p>\n

China is working to a similar schedule, with the hope of getting to the moon by 2030. And it is working fast: it has already put landers on the moon, and is due to test the spacecraft later this year, and experts suggest that its timelines could be a little more realistic than the ones offered by Nasa.<\/p>\n

The winner will not only get glory. Experts believe that space will offer everything from new military capabilities to economic possibilities, and the country that gets back on the moon first will get to start exploiting those sooner and set the terms for how they are exploited.<\/p>\n

The final re-entry of Artemis was a reflection of the fact that even after all these times and all these tests, the programme isn\u2019t going perfectly. The heat shield that protected the astronauts from the searing temperatures generated as they fell into the atmosphere had run into problems during the uncrewed Artemis I flight \u2013\u00a0but Nasa decided it did not have the time for a full redesign, and instead tweaked the trajectory so that astronauts would, counter-intuitively, fall more steeply and thereby spend less time relying on the heat shield.<\/p>\n

That had to happen because while Nasa is painstakingly careful, it is also in a rush. Various political demands \u2013\u00a0from inside the US, as well as imposed by the race with China \u2013\u00a0require that Nasa get to the moon as quickly as it can do safely, and so time is not on the space agency\u2019s side.<\/p>\n

It is a race, one that will decide the future of the whole of Earth as well as the space outside of it, and like all races, it is decided by precisely balancing risk-taking with care. Artemis II was an astonishing and sometimes risky success \u2013but now begins the really important sprint.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They have flown at 17,000 miles per hour, travelled 685,000 miles and spent 10 days in space, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":394330,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247],"class_list":{"0":"post-394329","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394329\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/394330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}