Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, October 21 (Xinhua)-- after a series of unexpected events, NASA decided to continue to push forward the Artemis manned lunar landing program step by step.

NASA has ordered three additional Orion capsules from Lockheed Martin, valued at $1.99 billion (about 14.388 billion yuan). The spacecraft will be used in NASA's Artemis Moon Program, the Artemis VI-8 mission.

Lisa Callahan, vice president and general manager of commercial and civil aerospace at Lockheed Martin, said that "it is an honor to work with NASA to deliver the Orion spacecraft for NASA's Artemis mission". This order includes spacecraft, mission planning and service support until the 1930s.

"this is an uncertain delivery, uncertain quantity (IDIQ) contract, which can provide up to 12 aircraft," he said. (Lockheed Martin is the main contractor for the Orion project)

Previously, NASA ordered three Orion capsules under the contract in 2019. Therefore, if the agency wishes, it can order six more in the future.

A representative of Lockheed Martin said that spacecraft built for Artemis 3-5 cost 50 per cent less than spacecraft built during the design and development phase of the Orion project. The three new orders will be 30 per cent cheaper. "through the reuse of a wide range of structures and systems, combined with advanced digital design and manufacturing processes, we have achieved a large number of cost optimizations from Artemis 3 to 8."

It is said that the Artemis 2 aircraft will reuse some of the avionics from the Artemis 1 crew cabin, and the design of this reuse will continue to increase significantly, while the Artemis 3 pressure vessel capsule will be completely refurbished and reused as a running accessory for the Artemis 6 mission.

CTOnews.com has reported that the NASA Artemis project is divided into three phases: unmanned Artemis 1, Artemis 2 (2024), the first manned flight, and Artemis 3 (2025), which eventually landed a man on the moon.

NASA aims to establish sustainable human stations on and around the moon by the end of the 1920s. NASA plans to use the lessons learned from the program to help astronauts land on Mars in the late 1930s or early 1940s.

The basics of the Artemis mainly include the Orion spacecraft and Boeing's space launch system (SLS), but have recently been delayed several times due to SLS rockets. Artemis 1 will be the first mission of the SLS rocket and the second mission of the Orion spacecraft (Orion conducted a brief orbital test flight in 2014).

NASA says it plans to launch the Artemis-1 lunar mission in mid-November and plans to push the rocket to launch site 39B on November 4. If launched successfully on November 14, the mission will last about 25 and a half days and fall into the Pacific Ocean on December 9.

Artemis 1 will use a 98-meter SLS rocket and its Orion capsule to fly around the moon and return to Earth.

Simply put, in order to "return to the moon", NASA developed the Artemis project and built this launcher platform, called the Space launch system, which is the most powerful rocket launch system NASA has built since the 1960s. (the payload alone seems to be lower than the Saturn V used in the Apollo mission 53 years ago).

NASA said the test flight was its first mission to return to the moon with a manned spacecraft in nearly 50 years, and it was the first new spacecraft of its own since it retired its space shuttle fleet a decade ago.

According to NASA's plan, Artemis 1 will lift off from launch pad 39B, the launch pad used by the Apollo 10 mission around the moon in 1969, and it will take about a week to reach lunar orbit, where it will stay for nearly a month.

The Artemis project is divided into three phases: unmanned Artemis 1 (Artemis I), Artemis 2, the first manned flight, and Artemis 3, which eventually landed a man on the moon.

Once the Artemis 1 mission goes as expected, it will fly around the moon with an unmanned Orion cockpit to study the possible impact of a "return to the moon" on humans. Artemis 2 will then send four astronauts into space and then manned to the moon no earlier than 2025.

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