Washington, MINA – NASA is preparing to launch the first crew of astronauts toward the moon in over 53 years with its second Artemis mission, a key test flight in humanity’s broader lunar goals as the US races to reassert leadership in space faced with growing competition from China.
Three U.S. and one Canadian astronaut are due for liftoff aboard NASA’s Orion capsule and Space Launch System rocket on Wednesday for a 10-day test mission swinging around the moon and back, a winding journey taking them deeper into space than humans have ever gone before, Reuters reported.
The mission is the first crewed test flight in NASA’s Artemis program, the flagship US effort to begin regular flights to the moon, at an estimated cost of at least $93 billion since 2012. Not since Apollo 17 in 1972 have humans touched down on the moon’s surface, a tricky feat NASA aims to repeat in 2028 at the rugged lunar south pole.
The US is the only country to have put humans on another celestial body with its six lunar landings of the Apollo program, driven by competition with the former Soviet Union.
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China, a formidable technological rival to the US has made steady progress in its own moon program in recent years, with a string of robotic lunar landings and a 2030 goal to put its own crew on the surface. U.S. officials have focused on beating China to the surface. []
Mi’raj News Agency (MINA)
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