Houston (AFP) Aug 15, 2022 Rick LaBrode has worked at NASA for 37 years, but he says the American...
Rick LaBrode has worked at NASA for 37 years, but he says the American quest to return to the Moon is by far the crowning moment of his career.
LaBrode is the lead flight director for Artemis 1, set to take off later this month - the first time a capsule that can carry humans will be sent to the Moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972.
From 2024, astronauts will travel aboard Orion for the same trip, and the following year, at the earliest, Americans will once again step foot on the Moon.
Beyond upgrades to Mission Control for the mission, the entire Johnson Space Center is a bit over the Moon about Artemis.
To train for eventual voyages to the Moon, simulations must replicate the Moon's one-sixth gravity.
The latter group will wear the new spacesuits made by NASA for Artemis missions.
He said his job is to help "Verify procedures and hardware" so that when NASA finally names the Artemis astronauts who will take part in crewed missions to the Moon, they can be "Ready to go."
"They do a lot of emergency egress training here," Debbie Korth, deputy manager of the Orion program, told AFP. Korth, who has worked on Orion for more than a decade, said everyone in Houston is excited for the return to the Moon and for NASA's future.
South Korea's first lunar orbiter successfully launched on a year-long mission to observe the Moon, Seoul said Friday, with the payload including a new disruption-tolerant network for sending data from space.
Danuri - a portmanteau of the Korean words for "Moon" and "Enjoy" - was on a Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida by Elon Musk's aerospace company SpaceX. It aims to reach the Moon by mid-December.