The Moon to Mars Missions Part 1

Hello! For those who are following, welcome back to Matthew's Guide To Space! Today we'll be talking about what NASA, (and some others), are cooking up to get humans to the Moon and eventually Mars.

Let's first talk about the SLS Rocket and how NASA plans to get it to the moon and eventually Mars. Plans for the Space Launch System started circulating in about 2017-2018. In March of 2017, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in California proposed a over 300 footer rocket booster that can take cargo and astronauts to the moon in half the time. Charlie Blackwell-Thomson, a Assistant Flight Director of the STS-130 Space Shuttle Mission got ahold of this news and proposed it be called Space Launch System. On June 3, 2019, in a press conference at Kennedy Space Center, NASA released the Artemis Program. Construction of the SLS had to start right away, since NASA originally planned Artemis I to launch in March 2022.

To fully understand the massive undertaking it is to get humans back to The Moon, we need to open history books to September 12th, 1962. John F. Kennedy was standing in front of thousands of people in Rice University, and declared: "We chose to go to go to the Moon.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." and it happened. On July 12, 1969, humans landed on the moon. From 1969-1972, 17 people walked, and drove on the moon.

More than 50 years later, in March of 2010, President Barack Obama announced we were going back to the Moon, within the decade with the $6.89 Billion program, Constellation. He was certain we could land us on the Moon with colonies by 2021 with the ultra-powerful Ares I rocket, but with Obama's Healthcare program failing, the Constellation Program turned into a $1 Billion slush fund.

After the Constellation Program fail, NASA needed more than $7.9 Billion for the SLS Program. In a CNN news interview, Charlie said the new rocket needed to be twice as powerful as the usual NASA rockets such as the Atlas and SpaceX rockets. That was in May of 2020, when the designers at JPL were pulling together the blueprints for SLS. Charlie, knowing how long it took to build a rocket, pulled together another $768,000 to get the materials shipped from Ecuador to Huntsville, Alabama by ZSR-999 AirMass Airplane. In Huntsville, the core boosters were attached at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center.

In July, Engineer Andrew Cameron suggested to Charlie to push back the date. The Core Boosters, which arrived by Union Pacific Railroad. She agreed to push it to November, no longer. In September of 2020, with the arrival of the Main Core Stages, the building can start. Follow along with my next post in my series, "Moon to Mars" the next episode will be "Launch of the SLS & How Terraforming can work: Easy Ways!"

Ad Astra!

-Matthew, signing off!

P.S. Please share with your friends and family-Enjoy!