A “game-changing” year is in store says administrator
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The successful completion of the Artemis I mission to the moon and back capped off 2022 as an impressive year for NASA. The agency hopes to carry that momentum forward as it looks ahead to the new year.
Bill Nelson, NASA administrator, said in a recently released agency video that 2022 “will go down in history books as one of the most accomplished years (in) all of NASA’s history and missions.” As for 2023, “there’s a lot more coming,” he said.
Some milestones on tap for the new year include more missions to the International Space Station and new developments for the Artemis program, as well as science missions, payload deliveries to the surface of the moon, and advancements in the field of supersonic aircraft.
More Space Station missions
NASA’s next roughly six-month-long crewed mission to the International Space Station, SpaceX’s Crew-6, is slated to launch from Kennedy Space Center sometime in mid-February aboard a Crew Dragon spacecraft. The crew members include two NASA astronauts, Stephen Bowen, and Woody Hoburg, along with Al Neyadi from the United Arab Emirates and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
Another long-duration crewed mission, SpaceX’s Crew-7, will follow sometime in the fall.
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SpaceX is also expected to carry out three cargo resupply missions to the station this year. One is expected before March, while another is most likely to happen in June, and a final sometime in the fall.
Before that, though, the final test flight of Boeing’s trouble-plagued Starliner spacecraft is expected in April. Scheduled to last about two weeks, the Crew Flight Test will stress Boeing’s and the Starliner’s capability to ferry two NASA astronauts, Barry Wilmore and Suni Williams, to the station and back.
Artemis advancements
While the next Artemis mission isn’t planned to blast off until sometime in 2024, the agency has plenty to keep busy with this year to enable future crewed missions to the moon.
Early in the year, according to Nelson, the agency is expected to announce, “the selection of the first astronauts to go to the moon in more than 50 years.”
Vanessa Wyche, NASA director of the Johnson Space Center, told reporters in December that the announcement would only come after the Artemis I mission had been deemed a complete success by NASA. With the Artemis I Orion spacecraft now back at Kennedy Space Center, that announcement could come anytime.
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Reid Wiseman, NASA chief of the Astronaut Office, told reporters in August that any one of the 42 currently active NASA astronauts and ten astronaut candidates in training could be eligible for future Artemis missions. “For age, we have anywhere from late-20s all the way up to mid-60s,” Wiseman said about Artemis astronaut mission eligibility. “As…
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