This very hot summer of 2022 has brought us not only sleepless nights but also a beautiful and now unexpected piece of news: at the end of August, we are off to the Moon!
When hopes seemed slim by then, the “Artemis I” mission finally got the final green light from NASA.The Artemis program is essentially the first, real project that aims to return humans to lunar soil and, more importantly, to create a sustainable and lasting human presence there.
This all sounds almost like science fiction, but in reality, it is more than doable; and the program, despite the delays and issues that were chilling enthusiasm, seems to have made up a lot of ground.Artemis is also the first project to involve every possible aerospace entity, including private and commercial ones.
All of this with the aim of not only "conquering" the Moon for good, but paving the way toward Mars missions.Getting to Mars, you know, is however a much more complicated task than returning to our natural satellite; the reconquest of the Moon will therefore also be a wonderful way to train for the long journey to the red planet; a journey that by the way will be accomplished through the same rocket vectors that at this time are heating the engines for the Moon.
Small steps, which perhaps, as happened in the past for Apollo, will become "gigantic leaps for humanity", and for the moment we must make ourselves sufficient.