Bhubaneswar: NASA will be sending the first woman to land on the moon.
There are currently three different projects in competition to build the lunar lander that will carry two astronauts, one of them a woman, to the moon from their vessel Orion.
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The first one is being developed by Blue Origin, founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, in partnership with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. The other two projects are being undertaken by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and by the company Dynetics.
While it is unknown yet who will be the first woman to walk on the moon, here’s how the gender split looks among the astronauts – of the 38 active astronauts in NASA’s astronaut corps, 17 are women.
Here are some key takeaways from the 2024 mission:
- At present, there are 12 active woman astronauts. They have since been joined by five other female NASA astronauts who graduated from training earlier this year. However, it remains unclear whether any of the newest astronauts can fulfill the criteria in time to fly on the first landing mission in 2024.
- The first flight, Artemis I, scheduled for November 2021, will be unmanned: the new giant rocket SLS, currently in its test phase, will take off for the first time with the Orion capsule.
- Artemis II, in 2023, will take astronauts around the Moon but will not land.
- Finally, Artemis III will be the equivalent of Apollo 11 in 1969, but the stay on the Moon will last longer, for about a week and will include two to five extravehicular activities.
- Artemis III – the one with the moon landing, will be humanity’s return to the surface of the Moon – landing the first astronauts on the lunar South Pole. After launching on SLS, astronauts will travel about 240,000 miles to lunar orbit aboard Orion, at which point they will directly board one of the new commercial human landing systems, or dock to the Gateway to inspect it and gather supplies before boarding the landing system for their expedition to the surface.
