Returning to the Moon [and Then Going to Mars]
By: Roger Slavens | Categories: Alumni Achievements
NASA’s Artemis program plans to take people back to the moon by 2024—including the first woman—and three Georgia Tech graduates are among those who will help get them there. Alumni astronauts Eric Boe, MS EE 97, Shane Kimbrough, MS OR 98, and Doug Wheelock, MS AE 92, are all working on Artemis. “Only 12 people have ever walked on the moon,” Kimbrough says. “All were American men. Putting the first female boots on the moon will inspire a new generation of students, especially girls, to pursue STEM fields.” Collaborating with commercial and international space partners, NASA hopes to use new technologies to make long space flights more sustainable and surface explorations more thorough. NASA’s powerful new rocket, the Space Launch System, will send astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft a quarter million miles from Earth to lunar orbit. Astronauts will dock Orion at the orbiting spaceship Gateway where they will live and work around the Moon.
The crew will take to the surface of the Moon in a new human landing system before returning to the orbital outpost. The crew—hopefully manned by Tech astronauts—will ultimately return to Earth aboard Orion.
