NASA believes that people will be able to live on the moon this decade

On November 16, the Artemis program launched a Space Launch System rocket with the Orion lunar spacecraft, making it a historic day for human spaceflight. After that, NASA started talking about the possibility of humans living on the moon in the near future.

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This opinion was expressed by Howard Hu, who heads the lunar spacecraft program Orion at the agency. He believes that people will be able to stay on the moon for a long time by the end of this decade. For now, it's just a matter of accommodating scientists to support scientific missions.

The main task now is to find out if there is water at the satellite's south pole, because it could be used to provide fuel for ships going to deeper places - to Mars, for example.

"We’re going to be sending people down to the surface and they’re going to be living on that surface and doing science. It’s really going to be very important for us to learn a little bit beyond our Earth’s orbit and then do a big step when we go to Mars. And the Artemis missions enable us to have a sustainable platform and transportation system that allows us to learn how to operate in that deep space environment", Howard Hu emphasizes.

This time, the Orion spacecraft set out without humans, but it has a special dummy on board to record the impact of the flight on the human body. If the current flight is successful, the next will be with a crew, and then a third when the astronauts land on the moon again for the first time since Apollo 17 50 years ago in December 1972.

Source: BBC