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Wendy Rush

NASA In Nevada, Mission To Put First Woman, Person Of Color, On The Moon

Author Wendy Rush

It’s been five decades since NASA was at the Nevada National Security Site. But they’re back. For an exciting mission.

NASA is calling it the Artemis Moon Mission. And it’s the most aggressive NASA mission to date. One of many goals of the mission is to bring both the first woman and the first person of color to land on the moon. As part of a community of long-term lunar explorers called the Artemis Generation. NASA wants to establish an ongoing presence on the moon. Both to explore more of the moon’s surface than ever before, and to collect as much information as possible (nasa.gov).

Mars or bust.

According to a video on the NASA website, the ultimate goal of the Artemis Moon Mission is to prepare to travel to Mars. The video indicates Mars is the next natural step in space exploration. And that explorers need to learn more before they can establish a community on another planet.

And a community is exactly what they intend to build on the moon for the Artemis Generation. Instead of individual lunar missions, like those of the past, this mission is an ongoing one. For this, NASA will build the Artemis Base Camp on the moon, which will host the new group of explorers for a long-term stay.

Mission goals.

Some goals of the mission include learning how to build a spaceship in deep space, as well as perfecting the art of travel to and from surfaces in space. Beyond that, the Artemis Moon Mission aims to do something bigger. To figure out how to make humans thrive in an environment of partial gravity. They’ll do this in part by building fission power plants on the moon, finding water for drinking, and refining water to use as a fuel and oxygen source. So the Artemis Moon Mission is picking up where the Apollo Mission left off in the 1970’s.

Training in Nevada.

The Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) is the location for the Artemis training program. NASA will use the site in Nye County to train the new astronaut candidates. According to the NNSS website, the site has the largest and deepest craters in the world. It also is home to the Icecap Tower in Yucca Flat. These terrain features are so close to what is found on the moon’s surface, it’s the best place to train astronauts for the upcoming moon mission.

The NNSS posted a video on YouTube showing what the training will look like at the training site. NASA’s goal is to build the Artemis Base Camp and inhabit it with explorers by 2025.

– Wendy Rush, 96.3 KKLZ

Moon Landing: 53 Years Later

Today (July 20, 2022) marks the 53rd anniversary of the moon landing by the United States Space Shuttle mission Apollo 11. While there were many missions prior to that one on July 20, 1969, it was the first time a human had ever stepped foot on the surface of the moon. If you were a kid when this happened, it’s hard to forget. On July 16, 1969, just seven months after NASA sent the first mission all the way to the moon (though nobody actually stepped on it) in Apollo 8, another Saturn V rocket was headed into space.

The excitement at the Kennedy Space Center and around the globe on that morning was palpable. The rocket launched just after 9:00am EST and minutes later was in orbit. When it was clear everything was running smoothly, NASA gave the order to three young astronauts to head to the moon. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins entered the moon’s orbit three days later and Armstrong and Aldrin climbed aboard the lunar module Eagle to make the first ever moon landing by a human. If Michael Collins isn’t as well-known in history as the first two men, it’s because he didn’t get to walk on the moon that day. He was chosen to stay behind in the command module Columbia in the lunar orbit.

Of course NASA is celebrating today’s anniversary with photos and videos of that massive achievement.

Buzz Aldrin is also getting in on the nostalgia. In his tweet today, Aldrin talked about the pride he and Neil Armstrong felt about representing our country on the Apollo 11 mission.

In honor of the occasion, we put together a collection of photos. You can see in one of the photos with the footprint that the surface of the moon is of a very fine grain. In that famous video released by NASA on that fateful day, Neil Armstrong said the surface was “almost like a powder”. How very cool to have been there.

–Wendy Rush, 96.3 KKLZ, Las Vegas

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