When the Eagle separated from the Columbia and descended to the Lunar surface, their only real goal was to land on the Moon and then take off and return to Earth safely. Anywhere on the Moon would do for a landing site, so long as it was on the Moon. In theory, even one successful flight would satisfy the goals of the Apollo Project, so they sought out what they hoped would be the smoothest, easiest landing zone.
The Artemis Project has much bigger goals than just a there-and-back-again, “flags and footprints” mission. To begin with, they intend to land at the Moon’s South Pole to prospect for ice, to spare the need to import precious water from Earth. The terrain there is known to be much more difficult. After learning how to stick that landing, Artemis astronauts will stay on the Moon for long periods, testing equipment which will be used in an expedition to Mars. It will be safer to test equipment on the Moon, just a two days’ flight away from Earth in case of evacuation or rescue — closer than 18 months away on Mars.
Before testing equipment on the Moon, though, they’ve been testing it on Earth, only minutes away from an emergency room, and where there is (almost) always air to breathe.
“You don’t test it for the first time in space,” Pascal Lee, director of the tests, explained to Jes Burns of OPB. “You test it on Earth in places that are forgiving. Where you know, if it doesn’t work, that’s OK. Nobody dies.”
Those tests have taken place in various locations in Oregon — sometimes as close to Corvallis as a two hours’ drive. This is another case of Artemis going where Apollo has gone before, and then beyond: engineers from Collins Aerospace, where the equipment was designed and built, climbed over the same tumbled lava rocks that their predecessors did almost a lifetime ago, but also went places no astronaut has gone before, including entering Skylight Cave and climbing the steep Pumice Slope at Crater Lake.
The primary purpose of the tests wasn’t even to study how well the new spacesuits performed on varied terrain, though. It was to try out other equipment that Artemis astronauts will be using.
Apollo astronauts wore spiral binders strapped to the sleeves of their suits with instructions for the various tasks they were to perform. It was crude, but NASA could be sure that it wouldn’t fail, and wouldn’t cause accidents.
“But when you think about going back to the surface of the moon where you’re going to be doing field geology, mining, driving robots, vehicles. You’re going to be carrying a spiral binder the thickness of a phone book if you did that,” Lee said. “Now the time has come, basically, for some well-matured IT to get integrated into the suit.”
New Worlds on Earth
“We were looking for new places… to train astronauts so that they have not just the right type of rock to look at, but the right type of topography to roam around on and to hike and eventually to drive around as well,” Lee said.
As the Director of the NASA Haughton-Mars Project, Lee would normally have spent the Summer of 2021 on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic. The Haughton Impact Crater in Devon Island is considered by NASA to be the closest analogue on Earth to Mars. As with so many things, Lee’s plans were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic: poor control over the spread of the virus in the U.S. forced Canada to close the border to U.S. citizens.
Instead, Lee oversaw equipment study in Oregon — where work was sometimes stymied by local wildfires. Ironically, the engineers conducting tests on Earth, where they expected air to be no problem, found themselves “running from spot to spot to find a breathable place” because of the 2021 wildfires.
The Apollo Project was mostly a Cold War propaganda stunt. It didn’t yield a great deal of scientific knowledge, considering how much money was spent on it, and it was a dead end when it came to laying groundwork for further space exploration.
By comparison, Artemis takes both of these things much more seriously. Even so, there is a certain amount of showmanship involved in the planning of the flights. Care is being taken to ensure that it will land the first woman on the Moon, and the first person of color. A Collins Aerospace engineer with the eerily appropriate name Ashley Himmelmann (“Sky-Person”) took part in the equipment tests, making sure that the spacesuits will serve women as well as they do men.
By John M. Burt
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