The Artemis space programme is preparing
to return humanity to the lunar surface and
beyond. How will it make history?
“News Analysis 4”
link for article: https://www.bbc.com/news/scienceenvironment-65317469
“The Artemis space programme is preparing to return humanity
to the lunar surface and beyond. How will it make history?”
article by Sue Nelson published in May 19 tells us about the
Artemis space program and how NASA returns to the Moon
after 50 years. The main point of this article is to tell us about
future of this program and why it’s important for human and
history at all. It also tells us about advantages that this program
has compare to Apollo and some details about how this program
will take place. Author also says that Artemis program has
different aim than Apollo. Because now it is about making steps
in humans’ colonization of space and relationships between
countries and not about confrontation between United States and
Soviet Union like it was before.
The main bias in this article is that author tells only about pluses
of this program and forget about minuses. Also, author always
compare Apollo and Artemis program to show that Artemis
better. But last Apollo mission was more than half century ago
and for all this fifty years technologies have rapidly changed and
it’s clear that this program should has “technology on another
level” compare to Apollo. For example, author says “According
to Nasa, Orion's computer operates 20,000 times faster with
128,000 times more memory than those used on the Apollo
missions.”, but Apollos operating system was much slower and
had much less memory even then smartphones that we use
today, because then it was only a beginning of developing such
technologies. And this numbers aren’t much better than SpaceX
rocket has. Author also use quotes from the same people that are
interested in telling good things about Artemis program for
example in this article author four times use quotes from Jim
Free, Nasa's Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems
Development. In this article author also use some unuseful
information while trying to tell about positive sides of Artemis.
For example, at the beginning of the article author use Jim Free
quote which says "We're going to take the first human vehicle
further than any human vehicle has gone before," but at the next
paragraph author wrote that human crew of Artemis II will fly
closer to Earth then Apollo 13 crew. And why it is even a
important and author wrote about it two paragraphs? If bigger
distance from Earth only means more waste of fuel. And
because author use all this unuseful information, he didn’t
answer main question “How will Artemis space program make
history?”. And didn’t tell all Artemis perspectives for humanity
and didn’t tell how it would influence our future.
Even if count all minuses that this article has, you can get some
interesting information about Artemis program from it.