Around 50 years ago, the last man to date was on the moon – now the US space agency Nasa is pushing ahead with its next missions to the moon. The first step has been taken: an unmanned test flight of the Artemis mission has started. An Orion capsule lifted off from the Cape Canaveral cosmodrome with the help of the heavy-lift rocket Space Launch System to orbit the moon and land back in the Pacific around 40 days later.
With the Artemis mission, US astronauts should actually land on the moon again by 2024, including a woman for the first time. This is now planned for 2025 at the earliest. Four astronauts are to be taken to lunar orbit in the Orion spacecraft, where two of them will then transfer to a lander. A kind of space station is also to be created on the moon, also as a basis for a manned flight to Mars – the latter, however, only in the distant future.
The last time a human walked on the moon was in 1972
The last human to have been on the moon in December 1972 was the US astronaut Eugene Cernan, who died in 2017, with the Apollo 17 mission. The US astronaut Neil Armstrong was the first person to set foot on the moon on July 21, 1969. Armstrong, who died in August 2012, is also the first person to set foot on a celestial body other than Earth.
Of the star shows important stations of the new moon program Artemis by means of a series of photos.