NASA delays Artemis II launch
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With NASA's new chief taking over the agency recently, here's what NASA sees for the future of space exploration, along with its upcoming projects.
What everyone agrees on is that NASA needs a new spacecraft capable of relaying communications from Mars to Earth. This issue has become especially acute with the recent loss of NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft. NASA’s best communications relay remains the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has now been there for 20 years.
Nuclear propulsion and power technologies could unlock new frontiers in missions to the moon, Mars, and beyond. NASA has reached an important milestone advancing nuclear propulsion that could benefit future deep space missions by completing a cold-flow test campaign of the first flight reactor engineering development unit since the 1960s.
Cold-flow tests at NASA Marshall demonstrated the stability of a nuclear propulsion design aimed at reducing travel times to the moon and Mars.
I hope someday my kids are gonna be watching, maybe decades into the future, the Artemis 100 mission,” NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said.
Artemis II, the next mission in NASA’s Artemis program to explore the Moon, is scheduled to launch from Florida within the coming weeks. The mission will be the first crewed mission to the vicinity of the Moon since 1972, with the four-person crew expected to travel farther than any other human mission in spaceflight history.
NASA engineers have completed first cold-flow tests of a full-scale nuclear thermal propulsion reactor, validating designs for future deep-space missions.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-11 mission returned safely to Earth after 167 days in orbit, completing hundreds of hours of research aboard the International Space Station.