NASA’s ‘Moonbound’ builds the hype for its epic Artemis II mission

With NASA’s first launch toward the moon in five decades potentially only a few months away, the space agency has just released the first episode of a new show that focuses on the highly anticipated mission.

Moonbound — Charting the Course runs for 22 minutes and offers a deep dive into the preparations being made for the 10-day Artemis II flight, which will see four astronauts fly around the moon and back again.

NASA is using the mission as the first crewed test of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft, paving the way for the crewed Artemis III lunar landing that could take place as early as 2027.

The space agency flew both the rocket and the spacecraft for the first time in the successful Artemis I mission in 2022.

“When you put crew on a rocket, it’s no longer a test flight,” John Honeycutt, the mission management team chair, says in the video. “This one needs to perform, and will perform, as good or better than the first one did … no doubt about it.”

At the 12:10 mark, the video lays out in detail the precise course that the Artemis II mission is expected to take, including the Kennedy Space Center launch, the lunar flyby, and the ocean splashdown.

After several days in an elliptical Earth orbit checking the performance of the Orion capsule under manual control, the crew will head toward the moon, coming within a mere 3,300 miles of the lunar surface as it flies around our nearest neighbor.

“We’re going to turn the spacecraft so you can have the best view of anybody of the moon in 50 years,” said Jeff Radigan, the Artemis II lead flight director. “We want to ensure that we’re getting the videos of the moon that all of us back here on Earth want to see, and ensuring that all of our systems work on the far side of the moon as well.”

The mission will end with the all-important splashdown following a high-speed entry into Earth’s atmosphere. This could be the most crucial part of the mission, as the Artemis I mission exposed some issues with the Orion’s heat shield, which NASA has worked on to resolve.

Looking further ahead, NASA wants to use the Artemis program to build a base on the moon for extended human missions, and to apply what it learns from the lunar missions to plan for the first crewed flight to Mars.

Moonbound — Charting the Course is free to view on NASA’s website.