50 Fun Facts About Artemis Program

From which NASA center do the Artemis program's Moon rockets lift off?

Kennedy Space Center in Florida: each rocket rides to the pad at about one mile an hour on a tracked carrier built in the 1960s to haul Saturn V Moon rockets.

Artemis, the Moon program's namesake, is best known in Greek myth as the goddess of what?

The hunt and wild animals were her domain. NASA picked her because she is the twin sister of Apollo, and the new program set out to land the first woman on the Moon.

Which president signed Space Policy Directive 1, the order that sent NASA back toward the Moon?

Donald Trump signed it in December 2017, scrapping NASA's plan to send astronauts to an asteroid and ordering a return to the Moon first, with Mars to follow.

Which NASA administrator announced the Artemis name in May 2019?

Jim Bridenstine revealed the name on a call about an extra $1.6 billion for a 2024 landing, saying it suited a program that would carry the first woman to the Moon.

Which cancelled NASA program was Artemis's Orion spacecraft originally designed for?

Constellation was cancelled in 2010 after a review found it could not reach the Moon without far more money. Congress kept its Orion capsule and ordered a new rocket to carry it.

Which hurricane sent the Artemis I rocket back to shelter days before a planned launch?

Hurricane Ian forced the rollback in late September 2022. Six weeks later NASA left the rocket on the pad through Hurricane Nicole, and it launched within a week of that storm.

SLS's RS-25 engines first flew on which vehicle?

The Space Shuttle: the first SLS rockets use engines that really flew on shuttle missions. They were built to be reused, but each now makes one last flight and is thrown away with the stage.

Which company builds the SLS core stage?

Boeing builds the 212-foot stage, the largest NASA has ever produced, and each one makes a 900-mile trip to the launch site by barge.

At which NASA site in New Orleans is the SLS core stage built?

Michoud Assembly Facility came through Hurricane Katrina with the help of 38 workers who stayed behind to run its pumps, clearing more than a billion gallons of water from the rocket factory.

Which company builds Orion's crew module?

Lockheed Martin won the contract in 2006, when NASA gave up on winged spaceplanes and went back to the capsule shape that first carried Americans into orbit.

Who is the prime contractor for Orion's European Service Module?

Airbus Defence and Space assembles it in Bremen, Germany. Europe supplies the module in place of cash for its share of the International Space Station's running costs.

Orion's first uncrewed test flight in 2014 launched atop which rocket?

Delta IV Heavy flung the empty capsule 3,600 miles up so that it would fall back at about 20,000 mph, fast enough to give its new heat shield a first real test.

A leak of which propellant scrubbed Artemis I's second launch attempt?

Liquid hydrogen slips through the tightest seals. On the night Artemis I finally launched, three technicians walked up to the fuelled rocket and tightened loose nuts to stop another leak.

Which orbit did Orion fly for six days on Artemis I?

Distant retrograde orbit: distant because it sits far above the Moon, retrograde because Orion circled against the Moon's own motion. It is so stable that the ship needed little fuel to stay.

What did NASA name the mannequin that flew in the commander's seat on Artemis I?

Moonikin Campos won a public vote of more than 300,000 ballots. The name honours Arturo Campos, the engineer whose emergency power plan helped bring a crippled 1970 Moon flight home.

Which cartoon character flew on Artemis I as the zero-g indicator?

Snoopy has been NASA's safety mascot since the Apollo era, and astronauts still hand silver Snoopy pins to workers who help keep crews safe.

The phantom torsos Helga and Zohar on Artemis I measured what?

Radiation exposure was mapped inside both torsos. Zohar wore a protective vest and Helga flew without one, so scientists could see how much the vest helped.

Which voice assistant was tested aboard Artemis I in the Callisto demonstration?

Amazon Alexa flew with no crew to talk to, so staff in mission control spoke to it over a video link. It answered from a database on board, because the cloud was too far away.

Artemis I splashed down 50 years to the day after which 1972 Moon landing?

Apollo 17 landed on December 11, 1972. Fifty years later to the day, Orion skipped off the top of the atmosphere like a stone across a lake before its final plunge into the Pacific.

What problem did engineers find in Orion's heat shield after Artemis I?

Greater-than-expected erosion: trapped gas broke chunks of charred material off the shield. NASA flew the same shield design on Artemis II but steepened the reentry to cut the time spent in the conditions that caused it.

The Artemis II crew sent greetings from space for which holiday?

Easter fell four days into the flight. The launch had slipped from February to April 1 after a fuel leak in rehearsal and then a helium fault that sent the rocket back to its hangar.

Who commanded Artemis II?

Reid Wiseman led the crew. As they rounded the Moon, the four proposed naming a crater Carroll, after his late wife, who died of cancer in 2020.

Which Artemis II crew member was the first woman to travel around the Moon?

Christina Koch was due to make the first all-female spacewalk in March 2019, but the station had only one medium suit ready. She made it that October with Jessica Meir.

Which country did Artemis II mission specialist Jeremy Hansen represent?

Canada won the seat by agreeing to build Canadarm3, a robotic arm for NASA's planned station near the Moon. It made Hansen the first non-American to fly around the Moon.

What name did the Artemis II crew give their Orion spacecraft?

Integrity was the crew's own choice. They said it stood for the trust, respect, candour and humility shared by the astronauts and the thousands of people who got them to the Moon.

Whose distance record from Earth did the Artemis II crew break?

Apollo 13 set the old mark by accident: after its oxygen tank blew, the emergency loop home carried the crew higher over the far side than any landing flight. Orion went about 4,100 miles farther.

What kind of path did Artemis II fly around the Moon?

A free-return trajectory lets gravity do the work: once Orion swung behind the Moon, Earth pulled it home, so the crew would have got back even if the main engine had failed.

What did the Artemis II crew observe shortly after their lunar flyby?

A solar eclipse: the Moon hid the Sun for the best part of an hour, far longer than totality ever lasts on Earth, and the crew watched the corona glow as a halo around a black disc.

Which service's divers helped the Artemis II crew out after splashdown?

The US Navy sent the transport ship USS John P. Murtha. Apollo capsules were hoisted aboard by crane, but the bigger, heavier Orion was floated into the ship's well deck.

Rise, the Artemis II mascot an eight-year-old designed, shows the Moon wearing what as a cap?

Earth: Lucas Ye of California beat more than 2,600 contest entries with a smiling Moon in an Earth cap, and NASA's thermal-blanket lab stitched it for the flight.

Under NASA's 2026 replan, where was Artemis III slated to test lunar landers?

In Earth orbit: the 2026 plan added the flight so a crew could practise docking with one or both commercial landers close to home before anyone tries a landing, much as Apollo 9 tried out the lunar module.

After NASA added an extra test flight in 2026, which mission became the first planned Moon landing since 1972?

Artemis IV inherited the landing, targeted for early 2028, when the flight before it became a docking rehearsal. NASA said it would pick whichever commercial lander was ready first.

Which company won NASA's April 2021 contract to build the first Artemis Moon lander?

SpaceX won with a version of its Starship. Two losing bidders protested, freezing the contract for months, and NASA later ordered a second lander from a rival to keep competition alive.

How will crews descend from the high cabin of the Moon lander NASA ordered in 2021?

Elevator: a lift will carry crews and their gear between the lunar surface and the living quarters near the top of the lander. Two astronauts tried out a mock-up of it in 2023.

Which lander did NASA select in May 2023 as the second Human Landing System?

Blue Moon is Blue Origin's lander. NASA said a second design would increase competition and cut costs, and it ordered an uncrewed test landing before any crew climbs aboard.

In March 2026 NASA paused which long-planned Artemis project to concentrate on a base on the Moon's surface?

The Gateway space station was meant to circle the Moon as a transfer point between capsule and lander. NASA shelved it in its current form and said it would reuse what hardware it could.

What resource draws Artemis planners to the Moon's south pole?

Water ice in craters the Sun never reaches could be purified for drinking, turned into breathable oxygen and made into rocket fuel, so crews would not have to haul it all from Earth.

Which children's favourite flew around the Moon on Artemis I for the European Space Agency?

Shaun the Sheep rode in the uncrewed capsule. The stop-motion star had already flown one of the weightless parabolic flights that real astronauts train on.

A 2011 US law stops NASA from partnering on Artemis with which space power?

China is shut out by the Wolf Amendment, which bars NASA from working directly with it. Asked in 2020 why Beijing was missing from the Accords, NASA's chief said the agency would always follow the law.

Which tiny European state was among the Artemis Accords' eight founding signatories?

Luxembourg, home of the satellite giant SES, set out to become a hub for space mining: in 2017 it passed a law letting companies own what they extract in space, three years before it signed the Accords on day one.

Which 1967 UN agreement do the Artemis Accords claim to uphold?

The Outer Space Treaty bars any nation from claiming the Moon. The Accords hold that mining its resources is not such a claim, a reading that critics, among them commentators in China, reject.

Near which two craters have planners proposed putting the Artemis Base Camp?

Shackleton and de Gerlache are both named after Antarctic explorers. The ridge between them is sunlit for most of the year, which matters to a base that would run on solar power.

Seeds of what flew around the Moon on Artemis I and were later planted at schools and museums across the US?

Trees: seeds of five species, among them sycamore and giant sequoia, made the trip. They revive a tradition begun in 1971 by an Apollo astronaut who had once been a forest firefighter.

Which country agreed in 2024 to build a pressurized lunar rover in exchange for astronaut seats?

Japan will build a cabin on wheels in which two astronauts can live for up to 30 days. In return it gets two trips to the surface, with a shared goal that one makes a Japanese astronaut the first non-American to land.

Who won NASA's 2022 order for the first Artemis moonwalk suits?

Axiom Space got the job after NASA's home-grown suit fell years behind schedule. The agency now buys moonwalking as a service, and the rival bidder later pulled out of its own suit contract.

What colour are the Orion Crew Survival System launch-and-entry suits?

Orange makes a crew easy to spot in the ocean if they ever have to leave the capsule before rescuers arrive. The suit can also keep its wearer alive for up to six days if the cabin loses pressure.

NASA's inspector general put the cost of each of the first four Artemis launches at about how much?

$4 billion: the audit's figure was $4.1 billion a launch, about eight times what NASA first estimated, and the inspector general told Congress the price struck him as unsustainable.

Which Apollo moonwalker called NASA's plan for a lunar-orbit station 'absurd' and backed the rival Moon Direct idea?

Buzz Aldrin asked in 2018 why a crew should stop at a waypoint in space to pick up a lander. Robert Zubrin's Moon Direct would instead fly landers straight between the surface and the neighbourhood of Earth.

Artemis Moon rockets begin their slow roll to the launch pad from which giant building?

The Vehicle Assembly Building was put up in the 1960s to stack the Saturn V standing upright, which is why it is one of the largest buildings in the world.

Artemis II's flight is most often compared with which Apollo mission?

Apollo 8 went a step further than its successor: it braked into orbit and circled the Moon, where Artemis II only swung once behind it and headed straight home.