NASA prepares to head back to the moon.
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.2 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 13 September 2024
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
Its goal will be to test out the Orion capsule and all the other equipment, so that by 2026, Artemis III can put astronauts back ON the moon.
The Artemis program is aimed to kickstart a new, more enduring era of space travel that leads to Mars.It's also intentionally more representative than Apollo was. The Artemis program will eventually put the first woman on the moon, as well as the first person of color.
It's all as historic and high stakes as it gets, and also pretty daunting.
NPR's Scott Detrow goes behind the scenes at the Johnson Space Center in Houston to see how the team is preparing.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I recently found myself awkwardly crouched down trying not to bang my head and trying to figure out how to wedge myself into a tight low space. |
| 0:10.0 | Actually kneel down, kind of facing the ground. |
| 0:13.2 | We have to teach you how to do this like an astronaut. |
| 0:15.5 | Okay, and now you just kind of start rolling your way. |
| 0:18.3 | Don't scratch your watch. |
| 0:20.6 | Yep, and now your feet come up and over. |
| 0:22.6 | Yes, perfect. |
| 0:24.6 | That is astronaut Reed Wiseman. |
| 0:26.6 | And it should be said he was much more smooth about making his way |
| 0:30.3 | into the same small nook at the front of the training mock-up of an Orion space capsule at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. |
| 0:37.0 | We were now both on our backs, laying on blue seats that when we craned our necks up allowed us to look out four port windows. |
| 0:45.1 | And when we look straight forward, put us flush against a complicated panel of screens, knobs, |
| 0:50.1 | and switches, some of which they hope they never need to touch. |
| 0:54.0 | In general, the switches are not intended to be used if everything is going well. |
| 0:59.0 | These switches are last-ditch efforts. |
| 1:02.0 | Like for here, this is main parachute deploy so if we if we are in a |
| 1:06.3 | really bad day and our main parachute does not deploy moving this switch will send an |
| 1:10.0 | electrical signal from the battery directly to the employment. |
| 1:13.0 | This time next year, if everything stays on schedule, which with an effort like this is a really |
| 1:17.7 | big if, Wiseman plans to be in this seat commanding Artemis 2, the first flight around the moon in more than 50 years. |
| 1:26.0 | The screens display dense lines of flight data. |
| 1:29.0 | To me, they're all random numbers. |
... |
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