GoKawiilNASA is apparently pretty serious about building a base on the Moon, and the astronauts who just flew there say it is “absolutely doable.”
Within two days of landing on Earth, the Artemis II astronauts were already back in spacesuits, working as if they had just landed in a gravity well and had ventured outside onto the lunar surface for a spacewalk.
“We were in surface spacewalk suits, doing surface geology tasks, and doing them well,” said Christina Koch, a mission specialist on the Artemis II mission. “(We were) able to complete an entire battery of very challenging surface tasks.”
“Lifted up” by lunar base
Koch made her comments on Thursday during the crew’s first news conference since returning to Earth on April 10. Their mission, a smashing success, tested a NASA rocket and spacecraft on the first human flight into deep space in more than five decades. It represents the opening salvo of NASA’s Artemis campaign and comes amid significant changes to the program.
Only a week before the Artemis II mission lifted off, when the crew was already in quarantine, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced that the space agency was pivoting away from a lunar space station to a surface base. Moreover, he said NASA would aggressively work to develop this lunar base in three phases over the next decade.
Koch said this announcement energized the crew and the mission.
“We were very much lifted up by the notion that we would get to contribute to astronauts doing this all over again, much sooner than we thought, and that we were going to be focused on the Moon base, on surface operations,” Koch said. “We are feeling even more excited and just ready to take that on as an agency.”