Return to the moon
Saturday, July 20, is Moon Day and the 55th anniversary of the first Apollo 11 moonwalk. Here’s a look at the Apollo program and the new Artemis program to return to the lunar surface.
NASA will now target September 2025 for Artemis II, the first crewed Artemis mission around the Moon, and September 2026 for Artemis III, which is planned to land the first astronauts near the lunar South Pole. Artemis IV, the first mission to the Gateway lunar space station, remains on track for 2028.
“We are returning to the Moon in a way we never have before, and the safety of our astronauts is NASA’s top priority as we prepare for future Artemis missions,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “We’ve learned a lot since Artemis I, and the success of these early missions relies on our commercial and international partnerships to further our reach and understanding of humanity’s place in our solar system. Artemis represents what we can accomplish as a nation – and as a global coalition. When we set our sights on what is hard, together, we can achieve what is great.”
Above, the Artemis III spacesuit prototype, the AxEMU. Though this prototype uses a dark gray cover material, the final version will likely be all-white when worn by NASA astronauts on the Moon’s surface.
Moon-landing deniersAccording to PC Magazine, the number of moon-landing deniers rose from 6% in 1999 to more than 10% in 2019. The younger the person polled, the more likely they were to think the moon landing was a hoax.
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was the first U.S. mission to the Moon in over 10 years. LRO created a 3D map of the Moon, as part of a program to identify future landing sites and resources – including deposits of water ice shadowed in polar craters. LRO continues to orbit the Moon. Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been mapping and photographing the Moon in high-definition since 2009.
You can see the LRO’s latest images here.
Apollo program
NASA’s plan to send men to the Moon began during the Eisenhower administration. President John F. Kennedy made it a national goal in May 1961, and it was realized during the Nixon administration in 1969. The U.S. spent $25.8 billion on Project Apollo between 1960 and 1973, or approximately $257 billion when adjusted for inflation to 2024 dollars. The lunar mapping program NASA is doing has images of all the Apollo mission landing sites and found a cave on the Moon this week.
You can see NASA’s images of the caves here.
Sources: NASA, Aerospace Legacy Foundation, Library of Congress, the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, The Planetary Society