Humans could be living on Moon by 2030, Nasa says

With a week to go before the launch of Artemis I, the mission consisting of the Space Launch System (SLS) mega-rocket and an uncrewed Orion spacecraft, bound for the Moon, NASA program director Howard Hu considered It is feasible that by 2030 there will be humans living and working on Earth's natural satellite.

Fifty years after the launch of Apollo 17 —in December 1972, the American Artemis I program intends to be the first step, even without a crew, for successive missions with the ultimate goal of returning astronauts to the surface of the Moon and making it possible a long-term human presence for decades to come.

"We are going to send people to the surface of the moon, and they are going to live on the surface and do science," Howard Hu told the BCC. "It's the first step we're taking for long-term deep space exploration, not just for the United States but for the world," he noted.

The existence of water at the south pole of the Moon is an enigma that motivates several scientists to plan trips to the natural satellite. For the specialist, this was a good reason to return because, if found, it could be used to help power rockets on the way to Mars.

When do humans land on the moon?

According to Howard Hu, once the Orion spacecraft program completes all safety tests of its components and systems approved, the plan is to have humans living on the moon "within this decade."

"It's really going to be very important for us to learn a little bit beyond our Earth's orbit and then take a big step when we go to Mars," the scientist explained, adding: " The Artemis missions allow us to have a sustainable platform and a transportation system that allows us to learn to operate in that deep space environment ."

NASA wants to establish a sustainable human presence on the Moon, with missions lasting several weeks, not a few days like the Apollo program. Their goal is to better understand how to live and work in deep space.

Space radiation represents a real threat to health, and is more intense on the Moon than on the International Space Station (ISS), located a thousand times closer to Earth and therefore still partially shielded by its magnetic field. Since the first Artemis mission, experiments have been planned to study the impact of this radiation on living organisms and to evaluate the effectiveness of an anti-radiation jacket.

The importance of Artemis I for NASA

The Artemis I mission will last six weeks. The unmanned spacecraft will orbit the Moon without landing and return to Earth. The NASA initiative seeks to pave the way for a crewed test flight and future human lunar exploration.

During the journey, the Orion spacecraft will travel farther than any other spacecraft built for humans has ever done.

It will travel more than 280,000 miles from Florida—40,000 miles beyond the natural satellite—and stay in space longer than any astronaut ship without docking to a space station. Afterwards, it will return to Earth faster and endure more heat than ever.

Among other objectives, NASA's proposal seeks to test on the Moon the technologies that will allow it to evolve on Mars. Indeed, it must test the new suits for spacewalks, whose design was entrusted to the company Axiom Space for the first mission that will touch the lunar soil in 2025, at the earliest. Other needs include vehicles for the movement of the astronauts, as well as housing.

Finally, for sustainable access to an energy source, NASA is working on developing portable nuclear fission systems. Solving any eventual problems will be much easier on the Moon, just a few days away from Earth, than on Mars, which takes several months to reach.

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