The Stars My Destination: Artemis I Orbit

Better Late than Never | Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea máxima culpa!

Destination Moon
21 November-5 December 2022: Artemis I passed within eighty-one miles of the Moon's surface, before entering a distant retrograde orbit (D.R.O.) that carried the Orion capsule to a distance of two hundred sixty-eight thousand five hundred sixty-three miles (268,563 mi) from the Earth, surpassing the farthest-distance record for a crew-rated spacecraft set by Apollo 13 in 1970. (The Apollo 13 trio aboard the Odyssey & the Aquarius still hold the farthest-distance record for a crewed spacecraft.)

The Artemis I Orion's D.R.O. is one of the signals that the Artemis Program is not just a latter-day repetition of the Apollo Program. That is not a slight; I revere Apollo. One does not need to be a long-time reader of The Secret Base to realize that I revere Apollo. I invite the curious & open-minded to peruse our copious Apollo posting from last month/last year, December 2022, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 17 & to look back at the triumph of Apollo. But Apollo was a crash program & as such was unsustainable. We absolutely could have pushed on with the Apollo hardware beyond Apollo 17. The surface of the Moon is roughly the size of the African continent & we landed twelve men at six sites, venturing no farther than five miles from any of those sites; additionally, all the Apollo landing sites were on the Near Side of the Moon; no human has ever set foot on the Far Side of the Moon; so, there is absolutely much more to discover about the Moon. No one would accept that twelve men at six sites, for a total of twelve days, would be sufficient to explore all of Africa. But with the goal "of landing a man on the moon & returning him safely to Earth" achieved, we lacked the will to keep going, let alone to go further.

A D.R.O. is a inherently stable orbit & was considered for the forthcoming Lunar Gateway space station, which will serve as a base camp & staging ground for Artemis Moon landing missions: Orion capsules will dock with the Gateway & the Moonwalkers will then transfer to a Starship Human Landing System spacecraft for descent to & ascent from the lunar surface. As it happens, the Gateway is now planned to be placed in a near-rectilinear halo orbit (N.R.H.O.) instead of a distant retrograde orbit, but an N.R.H.O. like a D.R.O. is another stable orbit, meant as a permanent home for the Gateway. We are going back to the Moon, back to stay. The four years between Apollo 8 (December 1968), the first lunar orbital flight, & Apollo 17 (December 17), the final lunar landing, were a Golden Age, but after Apollo 17 we didn't go back for forty-nine years eleven months, until Artemis I. Artemis is going to establish a long-term—dare one hope semi-permanent?—presence on the Moon.

Artemis missions, in the years to come, will explore new & challenging regions of the Moon such as the south pole, where orbital robotic probes have revealed the surprising presence of ice in permanently-shadowed craters. Astronauts, both American & international, will learn to discover & exploit in situ resources, learning the techniques & refining the tools necessary for exploring deep space, beyond low Earth orbit (L.E.O.). We have not left L.E.O. in fifty years; the Moon, through the Artemis Program, will be where we will learn how to explore other worlds, Mars & eventually the rest of the Solar System. We will bring both knowledge & material resources back to Earth, but most importantly we will learn more about ourselves, about what we can accomplish through discipline, determination, & cooperation. We will learn to dream again. Looking around at the nihilism in which our culture is drowning, it is obvious to everyone that we need to learn again how to look to the future with hope instead of dread. Artemis I is where we begin.

And the truth is that I had one eye on an ancient & timeless clock, hung uselessly in heaven; whose very name has passed into a figure for such bemused folly. In the true sense of an ancient phrase, I was moonstruck. A lunar landscape a scene of winter moonlight had inexplicably got between me & all other scenes. If any one had asked me I could not have said what it was; I cannot say now… It was not an adventure; it was a vision.
—G. K. Chesterton, A Miscellany of Men (1912)

Bonus! Moonshot Song o' the Day: Artemis I
Ian Whitcomb, "Moonstruck" from Titanic: Music as Heard on the Fateful Voyage (Space Cadet Mike Papa Whiskey)

The Wayback Machine Tour of Artemis I
Liftoff & the Road to Artemis I
Artemis I Launch

Ex Luna, scientia.