The "giant moon rocket" in the United States has been postponed twice, when will it officially take off?

As we all know, the United States is still the only country that has successfully sent astronauts to the moon, and the time is more than fifty years ago, and the place where each moon landing is different.

The 12 astronauts brought a total of about 382 kilograms of samples from the moon, and Apollo 17 was the largest one, reaching 115 kilograms.

The lunar sample that the United States gave us more than forty years ago was only 1 gram, which looked about the size of a soybean, and needed to be seen with a magnifying glass, but it allowed us to advance towards the sea of stars.

With the successful landing of China's Chang'e-5 on the moon and carrying back 1731 grams of lunar soil, scientists have more material to study the evolutionary history of the moon and lay the foundation for taking samples from other planets such as Mars.

The "giant moon rocket" in the United States has been postponed twice, when will it officially take off?

As early as 2020, NASA officially released the main content of the Artemis plan, which is actually a three-step approach:

The first step, the Artemis 1 mission, to carry out the "unmanned flight test", will take about 3 weeks to return to Earth, in order to ensure that the spacecraft's important systems such as communications and life support are operating properly.

The second step, in 2023, is to rehearse the manned mission through the Artemis 2 mission, and during the lunar overflight, the astronauts on the Orion spacecraft will also conduct manual docking experiments to rehearse the requirements of the next official lunar mission in advance.

The third step, it is expected that in 2024, Artemis 3 will let American astronauts land on the moon again, and many people may not know that this Artemis program has more than a dozen participating countries, including Japan, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United Arab Emirates.

Artemis 1's rocket and spacecraft were actually successfully combined on October 20, 2021, but the Artemis project did not proceed as well as the earlier announced time. On October 24, 2021, NASA announced for the first time that the operation of the Artemis 1 mission will be postponed from the end of 2021 to February 2022. By February 1, 2022, NASA had again announced that it would postpone it until April 30.

On March 14, NASA once again announced the news about Artemis I, which is expected to be tested on March 17, tentatively scheduled for 5 p.m. that day, and will take about 11 hours to reach its destination. However, even if this series of tests are successfully completed, the official launch time is not expected to be earlier than May 2022.

Having already landed on the moon 6 times, why not send astronauts directly to the moon when the first "giant lunar rocket" is launched?

Indeed, many people are confused:

This is not the first time that the United States has implemented a manned lunar landing program, and the Artemis-planned Orion spacecraft can obviously accommodate as many as 4 people, and is even called a "giant moon rocket" by NASA. However, the Artemis I mission did not intend to send astronauts directly to the moon, and even when it took off, it would not carry people at all!

Yes, in the Apollo program of that year, Apollo 11, Apollo 12, Apollo 14, Apollo 15, Apollo 16, Apollo 17 all successfully returned to the moon, only Apollo 13 had to terminate the lunar exploration because of the sudden explosion of the service module oxygen tank.

However, the early missions of the Apollo program were also in preparation for the subsequent manned moon landings, such as Apollo 4 and Apollo 6, which were unmanned test flights. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Artemis project did not send astronauts directly to the moon as soon as they came up, but first carried out unmanned flight.

Moreover, the rocket that sent the Apollo spacecraft to the moon was the Saturn V carrier rocket that had long been unproduced, while the super-heavy carrier rocket chosen by Artemis was the Space Launch System (SLS) that evolved from the space shuttle.

According to data released by NASA, SLS looks stronger than the Saturn V carrier rocket of that year, after all, its thrust is 15% higher, and it can also carry objects weighing 24,000 kilograms to the moon. However, after all, SLS has not yet performed an overloaded lunar mission, it is also right to be cautious, many things can not only look at theoretical data, but also need to be practically operated, moreover, the last moon landing has indeed been many years.

All in all:

Although one of the ultimate goals of the Apollo and Artemis plans was to send humans to the moon, the difficulty of implementing these two plans was not the same thing.

The Apollo program took 11 years and cost more than $25.5 billion, and although astronauts brought back samples from the moon and even installed instruments to monitor lunar earthquakes, they were unable to stay on the moon for long periods of time.

The Artemis program is different, although one of its goals is also to send astronauts to the moon and successfully return to the ground, but it will also try to establish a normalized stay mechanism to pave the way for future manned landings on Mars.

To put it this way, the moon has never been the ultimate goal of human exploration of extraterrestrial planets, because this natural satellite of the earth has basically no possibility of life. As we all know, the earth cannot always be suitable for human habitation, even if we are not implicated in the mass extinction, the earth's environment will become a forbidden area for life due to the change of the solar evolution cycle.

Therefore, before this day comes, finding a "second earth" is the common goal of scientists around the world, after all, we ordinary people can't help this. However, the moon, which may not have life and is not suitable for human habitation, can become a "springboard" for us to travel to other planets, such as Mars, which everyone is currently very concerned about, which is a process from near and far.