Stages of the Artemis 2 Mission

This mission has the purpose of taking four people to the moon, Commander Gregory Wiseman, pilot Víctor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and second mission specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency. If this mission is carried out and fulfills its objective, Cristina Koch would become the first woman to reach the orbit of the Moon, as well as Víctor Glover would be the first person of color and Jeremy Hansen, the first Canadian to achieve it.

In this mission there will not be a moon landing, that is, no one is going to go down to the surface of the moon, Artemis 2 will limit itself to traveling there and back, that is the mission, when this mission is ready and there are no more delays, the SLS with the Orion capsule mounted on the tip will take off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 2 minutes later, the two spent solid fuel boosters will be released over the Atlantic, while the four RS25 engines of the first stage will continue on their way to reach the speed necessary to enter orbit.

Once in orbit, the covers that protect the delicate solar panels that will provide electricity to the Orion capsule during takeoff will be removed and it will separate from the first stage. The second stage will take the astronauts to a high orbit, the solar panels will be deployed and it will be checked that all systems are working well, then the Orion capsule will separate from the second stage and the crew will test the manual controls to have information about the docking maneuvers planned for future missions.

One day later, the service module will turn on the engine that will take the Orion capsule with the astronauts to the orbit of the Moon, they will travel for 4 days until they pass behind it just 7,400 km from the surface of its hidden side, which is the one we never see from Earth. And when they come out the other side, their return journey will begin.

Surely the crew will be in charge of taking some good photos for memories and their respective selfies. To return to Earth it does not need any impulse, as they did not decelerate enough to enter in orbit around the Moon, they will simply fall back to Earth, this will allow them to have plenty of fuel for maneuvers prior to re-entry into the atmosphere.

Shortly before reaching Earth, the Orion capsule will separate from the service module and its 12 thrusters will keep it in the appropriate position for reentry. It will enter the atmosphere at 40,000 km/h and begin to burn, decelerating rapidly. Due to this deceleration, the crew will experience 4G forces, that is, they will feel that their bodies are four times heavier; The air compressed by the enormous speed of the capsule will heat the heat shield up to 3,000ºC.

The atmosphere will continue to slow the capsule and a sequence of parachutes will finish the job, the Orion capsule and its four crew members will collide with the water at just 30 km/h over the Pacific, about 100 km from the California coast.

The SLS or space launch system, the most powerful rocket ever built, at least when plans to build it began in 2011, uses two enormous solid fuel boosters that it inherited from the space shuttle due to the need to reduce development and construction costs. They are “reused” boosters, but they serve well, they are perfect, the problem, or rather, one of the problems that has forced NASA to postpone the launch of the Artemis 2 Mission several times is the hydrogen used by the rocket engines, including the four powerful RS25 engines of the first stage.

Hydrogen, having the smallest atom in the entire periodic table, has the bad habit of leaking anywhere, any seal, any joint. It passes between the atoms of the material of any tank that wants to confine it, caring very little about NASA's plans and scheduled dates.

And the engines of all the stages of the rocket work with a mixture of liquid hydrogen and oxygen, so every time there is a leak everything has to be checked, becoming a nightmare for engineers that has delayed the Artemis program on several occasions.

Even so, the last delay, at least until I made this publication, was no longer due to a hydrogen leak, this time they had problems with the nitrogen that is used to purge the pipelines, through which the hydrogen and oxygen tanks are loaded and unloaded. Nitrogen, unlike hydrogen and oxygen, which burn quickly and strongly, is inert. It means that it is stable and does not react. In fact, nitrogen is what prevents the oxygen in the atmosphere from catching fire with any spark.

Nitrogen has that same function in the ducts that feed the SLS's huge fuel tanks, preventing it from suddenly exploding at the slightest spark, so it's an important thing. For this reason, the huge rocket that was already placed on the launch pad, awaiting its scheduled liftoff on March 6, was returned to the vehicle assembly building to find the fault and repair it, moving the launch date back to April, if they find the problem and repair it soon.

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