You are watching the flight readiness briefing for NASA's Artemis 1 mission.

The agency's Artemis mission is being heralded as the start of a new era of space exploration.

It will be one small step towards one giant leap.

It's been a year since NASA launched Artemis I, the first in a series of missions that

will eventually take humans back to the moon for the first time in over 50 years, with

one big difference.

This time we're going back to stay.

NASA's hoping to land humans on the moon by 2025, but after that, they've got bigger plans.

They're hoping to build an orbiting lunar space station and a permanent base on the moon itself.

And our goal is to apply what we've learned, living and operating on the moon, and continue then out into the solar system.

Our plan is for humans to walk on Mars by 2040.

A permanent moon base and a mission to Mars could be the first steps

toward becoming a multi-planetary species,

where Earth isn't our only home, where we're not

confined to one vulnerable pale blue dot in case of catastrophe. Eventually, we can imagine a solar

system full of human life. Human settlements in space, in which tens of thousands of people will

live and work.

But there's a pretty basic thing standing in the way.

Okay, here we've had a problem here.

Space is terrible. It wants to kill us.

Science writer Rebecca Boyle.

You know, we've evolved to live on this planet and this planet only. I tell you, Deke, it's cold up in there.

...