By Ray Jacobs, Part-Time Tutor
September 13, 2022

James Webb Telescope

I love space. Like, I really love space. I wasn’t one of those kids whose parents sent them to space camp, but doing a weekly comb-through of new articles about space and/or dinosaurs has been a habit of mine for a few years now. But it’s not just me. Space has been fascinating people since we somehow emerged from it. We’ve been staring at it wondering what it’s like for our whole lives.

A whole new litany of cosmic wonders have been eliciting the Happy Brain Chemicals lately. People of yesteryear sat entranced in front of their television sets as the Apollo 13 crew set down on the dusty gray surface of the moon. But I don’t sense nearly the same amount of excitement about space from the general public today – it’s almost as if people think it’s a once-and-done thing, like we’re just going to end up on Mars eventually and it’s not worth thinking about. But the novelty of space is nowhere close to everything that makes it special.

Apollo 13 Spacecraft

If you really think about it, we haven’t set foot on the moon since December 1972. That’s almost 50 years ago. Imagine all the crazy new stuff we can learn with all the technological advancements we’ve made!

That’s where we come to today’s first subject: Artemis I, the first in a multi-mission flight plan with the eventual goal of creating an established presence on the moon. The first mission will be an uncrewed orbital trial run of the Orion spacecraft and its rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS). Artemis II next year will be a crewed orbital mission, before Artemis III launches in 2024 and actually lands on the lunar surface.

Unfortunately, Artemis I has had a few issues so far. The first launch attempt, scheduled for August 29th, was called off 40 minutes prior to launch time for a hydrogen fuel leak. The second attempt on September 3rd was scrubbed for the same reason. There was also an engine issue flagged during pre-flight checks. This means that Artemis can’t go back to the launch pad for a while, but with any luck the SLS will be better than ever before once technicians have had a go at it.

The day before posting this, it was announced that the super rocket’s next launch attempt would be pushed back another 3 days to September 27th. In the meantime, NASA plans on testing the system that fuels the rocket to see if they can identify the cause of the leaks before the whole kit and caboodle gets wheeled out to the platform – especially because the launch window on the 27th will only be 70 minutes long, as opposed to the 2-hour window they would have had on the 23rd.

Artemis 1, comprised of the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft

I was shocked when I found out about the Artemis program: not because it was happening, but because I didn’t know about it sooner! We’re working on establishing a consistent presence on the moon – how has the media not been clamoring over this?! Can you imagine how crazy it’ll be to have people living and working on the moon, possibly even within some of our lifetimes? Sure, there’ll be a lot of challenges to overcome scientifically before we can get there, but at the current rate our capabilities are expanding, there’s no telling how easily we might be able to conquer them.

Now we pivot to the James Webb Space Telescope.

The JWST has been giving us incredibly high-quality images of space since it was launched on Christmas Day of 2021. We’re able to do things like see a dying binary star system inside a planetary nebula, get the first ever direct image of a planet outside our solar system, and witness the glowing hot mass of a star being ejected in concentric rings. How frickin’ cool?!?!

The Carina Nebula, as seen by JWST

Sitting here in the Writing Center working on this, I’m absolutely losing my mind at all of these pictures. The thought that we’re able to take in all the different waves of radiation out in space and convert them into something we can actually see is wild to me, and that’s not even mentioning the fact that we can learn a BUNCH of stuff with this information, including learning the chemical composition of different nebulae & planets and witnessing the life cycles of different kinds of stars. (You can view all of the JWST images here.)

“So what?” I hear you ask yourself. “It’s just another rocket and just another telescope.” But you’d be incorrect to say that, in addition to hurting my feelings! Even though I’m a nerd who got an A+ in their college astronomy class, you don’t have to know anything about space to be excited about it! There are plenty of articles that do a really good job breaking down what people need to know about all these different projects. Plus, the mystery of space on its own is fascinating. It ignites the imagination and gives us the scope to realize how trivial our problems can seem in the grand scheme of things.

The Apollo missions gave the world hope when it was hard to find. The Vietnam War raged on and the US instituted its draft lottery. The Stonewall Riots took place in New York City. Charles Manson and his followers were running amok. Hurricane Camille killed almost 250 people. A coup deposed the king of Libya. A bank was blown up in Milan. Student protests all over the US were getting cracked down on by police. The trial of the Chicago Seven began. British troops were deployed in Northern Ireland. Today, we’re collectively bogged down as a society with the weight of a global pandemic, another war, and a political zeitgeist more rocky and treacherous than the mountain range. Doesn’t it seem fated that right when the world needs something good more than ever, we’re finally turning our attentions back to the stars?

To make a long, very nerdy ramble short, now is the perfect time to go nuts over how cool space is. So why haven’t you done that yet?!