Astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt collects lunar rake samples from the moon on the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972. Credit: NASA
NASA officials released a nearly five-year, $28 billion plan Monday to return astronauts to the surface of the moon before the end of 2024, but the agency’s administrator said the “aggressive” timeline set by the Trump administration last year hinges on Congress approving $3.2 billion in the next few months to kick-start development of new human-rated lunar landers.
The plan unveiled Monday contained few new details not previously disclosed by NASA. It assumes crews will launch on NASA’s Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket, fly to the moon’s vicinity on an Orion capsule, then transfer into a commercially-developed lunar lander to ferry the astronauts to and from the lunar surface.
NASA released a new overview document Monday describing the agency’s approach to landing astronauts on the moon for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972. The program, named Artemis, encompasses the SLS, Orion, Human Landing Systems, and the Gateway, a human-tended platform in lunar orbit that will eventually serve as a staging point for missions to the moon.
“NASA has all the key systems and contracts in place to ensure that we are meeting the president’s ambitious goal to return American astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.
The Trump administration last year directed NASA to land the first woman and the next man on the moon by the end of 2024, moving up the space agency’s previous moon landing schedule by four years.
Bridenstine acknowledged the challenge of landing astronauts on the moon in four years. Three companies — Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX — are developing human-rated lunar landers for NASA, which plans next year to select one or two of the lander teams to continue work on their spacecraft.
“There’s a number of different risks when you deal with human spaceflight,” Bridenstine said. “NASA is really really good at dealing with the technical risks.”
“The challenge that we have is the political risk — the programs that go too long, that cost too much, and that end up getting cast out later in the development program,” Bridenstine said, adding that programs that develop over longer schedules often end up with higher overall costs. “So to save money, and to reduce political risk, we want to go fast … 2024 is an aggressive timeline. Is it possible? Yes. Does everything have to go right? Yes.”
Artist’s concept of an Orion spacecraft at the moon. Credit: NASA
The Gateway is not required for the 2024 mission, which is designated Artemis 3. NASA decided earlier this year it would allow the companies developing human-rated lunar lander concepts to propose ways to transport astronauts from lunar orbit to the moon’s surface and back to the Orion spacecraft without using the Gateway, at least for the first landing on Artemis 3.
Bridenstine said Monday the Gateway is “critically important” for creating a “sustainable” lunar exploration program. It will allow lunar landers to be refueled and reused, and help NASA lead the establishment of a base camp on the moon, where engineers will develop the know-how to tap lunar resources like water ice to generate air, drinking water, and rocket fuel.
The Gateway will also have international contributions from Canada, Europe, and Japan.
The lessons learned will ultimately feed into planning a human expedition to Mars, according to NASA.
In the planning document released Monday, NASA outlined a two-step program to initially move fast to get astronauts to the moon by the end of 2024. Then NASA aims to develop an “Artemis Base Camp” by the end of the 2020s near the moon’s south pole, where crews will be able to live and work for months at a time.
The budget estimates in the planning document do not include developments focused on sustaining the lunar program, such as the Gateway station, surface habitats, and rovers.
That does not mean those programs will not be funded in the next year years, NASA said. The first two elements of the Gateway station remain scheduled to be launched together in 2023.
NASA projects the parts of the Artemis program required for the 2024 moon landing — known as Phase 1 — will cost $28 billion through fiscal year 2025, which begins Oct. 1, 2024.
That figure “represents the costs that are associated with the next four years in the Artemis program to land on the moon by 2024. so SLS funding, Orion funding, the Human Landing System, and of course the spacesuits, all of those things that are part of the Artemis program are included in that $28 billion.”
The Orion spacecraft has been in development since 2006 as part of NASA’s Constellation program initiated by the George W. Bush administration. After rising costs and delays, the Obama administration canceled the Constellation program in 2010, but the Orion spacecraft survived in NASA’s revamped deep space exploration program aimed at Mars.
The Space Launch System was announced in 2011 to loft the Orion spacecraft with crews on expeditions in deep space.
Both programs have suffered years of delays, but NASA says the first SLS/Orion test flight — named Artemis 1 — is scheduled for launch by November 2021. The first flight-ready SLS core stage will be test-fired in late October or early November at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, then delivered to the Kennedy Space Center for final assembly with its solid rocket boosters, cryogenic upper stage, and Orion spacecraft.
The segments of the SLS solid boosters, the rocket’s upper stage, and the Orion spacecraft have been completed and are awaiting arrival of the core stage before ground teams begin stacking the launcher inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy.
The Artemis 1 mission will test out the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft on a mission to orbit the moon and return to Earth. No astronauts will fly on Artemis 1.
“That mission will be over a month long, and it’ll be checking out all of the critical systems,” said Kathy Lueders, head of NASA’s human spaceflight directorate.
A mock-up of the Blue Origin-led human-rated lunar lander was recently delivered to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for simulations and testing. Credit: Blue Origin
Assuming Artemis 1 goes according to plan, the next SLS/Orion launch in 2023 will carry a crew on a 10-day mission around the moon, sending people farther from Earth than ever before.
NASA recently decided to add a rendezvous and proximity operations demonstration to the Artemis 2 flight plan. The astronauts on Artemis 2 will take manual control of their Orion spaceship and pilot the capsule back toward the SLS upper stage after separating from the rocket in a high-altitude orbit around Earth, before setting off on a trajectory toward the moon.
The astronauts will “assess Orion’s handling characteristics” during the manual piloting demo, which will stop short of an actual docking with the upper stage,” NASA officials wrote in the Artemis planning document released Monday The demonstration will “provide provide performance data and operational experience that cannot be readily gained on the ground in preparation for critical rendezvous, proximity operations, docking, as well as undocking operations” beginning on the Artemis 3 mission.
After looping around the moon on a “free return trajectory,” the Artemis 2 astronauts will return to Earth and ride their Orion capsule to a parachute-assisted splashdown at sea.
That will set the stage for Artemis 3, which will use a similar SLS/Orion vehicle to launch the astronauts to rendezvous with a human-rated lander pre-positioned near the moon after launch aboard a commercial rocket. After flying the Orion spacecraft to link up with the lander in a high-altitude lunar orbit, the astronauts will move into the descent vehicle for the final leg of the journey to the moon.
NASA officials anticipate the Artemis 3 crew will spend nearly a week on the lunar surface to conduct at least two, and perhaps four, moonwalk excursions. Then the astronauts will take off and head back to the Orion spacecraft to ferry them back to Earth.
In parallel with the SLS, Orion, and lander test flights, NASA engineers will demonstrate an upgraded spacesuit design on the International Space Station before it is used by astronauts on the lunar surface.
Bridenstine said Monday that NASA could select a “cadre” of astronauts to begin training for Artemis missions, but the agency has no immediate plans to do so. He added that the agency typically assigns space crews about two years before launch.
The NASA chief also said Monday that the Artemis 3 mission’s landing site remains near the moon’s south pole. In a meeting of lunar scientists last week, Bridenstine discussed a hypothetical scenario in which the Artemis 3 astronauts could return to one of the Apollo landing sites in the moon’s equatorial regions if NASA defers plans for a polar landing
“Right now, we have no plans for Artemis 3 for anything other than the south pole,” Bridenstine said Monday.
Scientists have discovered evidence for water ice harbored in permanently shadowed craters near the moon’s south pole, but no mission has landed there yet. NASA plans to send robotic precursors to the south pole region in the next few years, including a rover named VIPER that will attempt to study the ice deposits up close.
The core stage for NASA’s first Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket was hoisted into a vertical test stand in January at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi for testing that will culminate in a hotfire of the rocket’s four main engines. Credit: NASA
The chances of achieving a lunar landing with astronauts in 2024 depend on winning support in Congress, and that support is not assured.
“The budget request that we have before the House and the Senate right now includes $3.2 billion for the Human Landing System,” Bridenstine said. “It is critically important that we get that $3.2 billion.”
A draft budget for NASA passed by the House in July would provide $628 million for lunar lander development in fiscal year 2021, which begins Oct. 1. The Senate has not drafted a NASA budget bill for the next fiscal year, and Congress is expected to pass a continuing resolution by the end of September to keep the government running through Election Day, after which lawmakers could pass a budget for the rest of fiscal year 2021.
The continuing resolution would fund government agencies at 2020 levels, and would not include money NASA says it needs for a Human Landing System.
“We need that $3.2 billion for the Human Landing System,” Bridenstine said. “I think that if we can have that done before Christmas, we’re still on track for a 2024 moon landing.”
If Congress passes a longer-term continuing resolution stretching into early next year, perhaps expiring in March, the longer wait for Human Landing System funds would make a 2024 moon landing more challenging, Bridenstine said. “I would argue that we’re still within the realm of possibility because we do have our work underway right now.”
“If we go beyond March and we still don’t have the Human Landing System funded, it becomes increasingly more difficult,” he said Monday in a conference call with reporters. “We want this to be a bipartisan effort, which we have had a lot of success in achieving. We would like to see the $3.2 billion for the Human Landing System funded at the earliest possible opportunity, and the best we can see that happening right now would be with an omnibus appropriations bill some time before the end of the year.”
More than $16 billion of the $28 billion NASA projects needing to make the Artemis 3 mission happen in 2024 will go toward developing a moon lander.
“If Congress doesn’t fund the moon landing program, then it won’t be achieved,” Bridenstine said later in his conference call with reporters Monday. “It’s really that simple. If they push the funding off, our goal would be to get to the moon at the earliest possible opportunity … If they keep delaying the funding, we will go to the moon at the earliest possible opportunity.”
Despite the funding uncertainty, Bridenstine said he is confident NASA will get the lunar lander money.
“I will tell you that there is broad consensus that it is time to go to the moon sustainably, and 2024 is achievable, and we’re working towards that,” he said. “When that omnibus appropriation is complete, I really believe there will be $3.2 billion for a Human Landing System. That could be at the end of the year, and it could be in March.”
Lueders said Monday that the lander teams led by Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX are “hitting every single milestone” under contracts awarded by NASA in April. After advancing their designs and refining their plans, the teams will submit proposals to NASA again ahead of a decision by agency managers early next year on which lander concepts provide the best chance of achieving a crewed landing on the moon by the end of 2024.
NASA’s budget will be a key factor in determining whether the space agency has to pick one lunar lander team to go forward, or if NASA can afford to keep funding two concepts.
“We would really like to maintain competition,” Lueders said.
NASA has set up the HLS program as a public-private partnership, in which the government and companies share the cost of developing the landing vehicles.
Two of the lead contractors vying to build NASA’s first human-rated lunar lander in 50 years are Blue Origin and SpaceX, led by billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Bridenstine said companies could supply more private funding to make up for a potential shortfall in the NASA budget.
“We are getting our final proposals from the each of the (HLS) provides right now, and it would also be nice to look at different opportunities for different financing, and what that would mean for us,” Lueders said.
She said NASA officials will evaluate their options in the “February/March timeframe” of next year before finalizing the HLS procurement strategy.
SpaceX’s lander is a derivative of the Starship transportation system the company is privately developing. Blue Origin’s concept involves a descent element the company will build itself, along with a crew cabin from Lockheed Martin, and a propulsive transfer stage from Northrop Grumman.
“With a public-private partnership, the companies themselves could actually step up to the plate in a bigger way,” Bridenstine said. “That is something that needs to be seriously considered. Our goal is to create the plan that best optimizes our ability to land on the moon by 2024, but certainly if the money doesn’t materialize, could they do it with their own resources? I’ll leave it to them to make their own determination.”
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
