Artemis IV: The Complete Mission in Real-Time 3D
September 20, 2028
Experience the Artemis IV mission of September 20, 2028: follow the spacecraft's real Earth-to-Moon trajectory and back, in a real-time 3D reconstruction.
It's September 5, 2028.
Starbase, in south Texas. On the pad stands the largest rocket ever built.
A hundred and twenty-one metres: Starship and Super Heavy stand taller than the Saturn V.
On top, a Starship of a different kind: a lunar lander, and it will not come home.
It lifts off empty. The crew takes another route, aboard an Orion capsule.
The four astronauts lifted off from Florida, on an SLS rocket.
Two of them will go down to the Moon; the other two will wait for them in orbit.
This mission takes the first woman and the first person of colour to the Moon.
Artemis is the programme bringing humans back to the Moon, fifty years after Apollo.
November 2022: Artemis I sends an empty Orion capsule around the Moon.
It reaches 432,000 km from Earth, farther than any crew-rated ship had gone before.
Artemis II took four astronauts around the Moon, without landing.
The landing itself slipped from mission to mission. It falls to Artemis IV.
Apollo landed near the equator. This time, the target is the south pole.
In its craters the Sun has never shone, and water ice is trapped there.
Liftoff. Super Heavy's thirty-three Raptors tear the rocket off the pad.
The flame is blue: the Raptors burn methane, which leaves almost no soot.
Seven thousand tonnes of thrust, twice that of Apollo's Saturn V.
It is already leaning east: what it needs is speed, not height.
This is where the air pushes back on it hardest.
Methane is a fuel we could one day make on the spot, on Mars.
Hot staging: the ship lights its engines before the booster lets go.
Nobody had flown this before: the upper stage lights inside the lower one's flame.
The ship takes over, sixty kilometres up.
Engine cutoff. The ship settles into a parking orbit at 150 km.
It does not have the fuel to reach the Moon. It has to be filled up first.
Translunar injection: the engines relight and the ship leaves Earth behind.
Nobody aboard. This ship leaves empty, and that is the plan.
It is this big because it carries the fuel to land on the Moon and leave again.
Before leaving, other Starships came to refuel it in Earth orbit.
Starship is built to be reused. Not this one: it will never see Earth again.
Three hundred and eighty thousand kilometres separate Earth from the Moon.
The Moon is a rehearsal for Mars: landing there, living there, leaving again.
And at its south pole there is water: to drink, to breathe, to make fuel from.
Insertion into a halo orbit, a stretched loop over the poles.
It climbs to 70,000 km above the south pole.
Orion has been waiting here for days. The two ships dock.
No crew had ever moved from one ship to another this far from Earth.
Two astronauts cross the hatch and move into the lander.
The other two stay in Orion, the only ship that will bring them home.
Apollo did the same: two men went down, a third circled overhead.
The wait here lasts six days, and Orion nearly completes one lap of its orbit.
This orbit costs almost nothing to hold: the ship sits there in balance.
It keeps Earth in sight at all times, so the radio never drops out.
Aboard the lander: water, air and supplies for a week on the ground.
Undocking. The lander pulls away and leaves Orion on its orbit.
It heads down toward the south pole, where no crew has ever landed.
From here on, only one vehicle can carry them back to Orion.
Below, a field of craters the Sun only ever lights at a grazing angle.
The descent takes hours, braking little by little against the Moon.
Powered descent. The engines relight to kill the orbital speed.
There is no air here. No parachute, no wing: it is all done on engines.
The site was chosen for its near-constant sunlight, and the shadow right beside it.
At the pole the shadows are long and the ground reads badly. Landing is harder.
The four legs unfold beneath the hull.
Each carries a wide pad, so it does not sink into the dust.
The ship's shadow stretches ahead of it: here the Sun stays down at the horizon.
Apollo landed by hand. Here, the computer flies the ship down.
A few hundred metres up, the big engines shut down.
Their blast would dig into the ground and throw stones at the hull.
Fifteen small thrusters take over, set high on the flank.
They set the ship down without stirring anything around it.
The last metres are flown blind, in dust that nothing holds down.
Contact. The first crewed Moon landing since Apollo 17, in December 1972.
Fifty-six years later. And for the first time at the south pole.
A lift runs down the side of the hull: some thirty metres to the ground.
They set foot on the Moon, and plant the flag.
Here the Sun does not set: it circles them, skimming the ridges.
A few kilometres away, in permanent shadow, it is minus two hundred degrees.
They bring samples back up: rocks, and dust from the floor of the craters.
What that ice holds tells us where the solar system's water came from.
Their suits are new, more flexible than Apollo's and built for the cold.
The lift carries them back up, the same run as before, in reverse.
The flag stays behind, like the six Apollo left before it.
Armstrong and Aldrin stayed only a day. Here, the stay lasts six.
Liftoff. The thrusters lift the ship off the lunar surface.
The legs fold back against the hull as it climbs.
The big engines take over two hull lengths higher up.
Little holds it back here: lunar gravity is a sixth of ours.
It climbs back to the halo, where Orion has been circling for six days.
No tower, no ground crew: the ship leaves from the dust it landed in.
And one chance only. If it does not lift off, nobody can come and get them.
Docking. The crew is back together aboard Orion.
The samples come across with them, case by case.
Two of them walked on the Moon. All four go home together.
Orion pulls away from the lander, its work done.
It does not come home. It is sent to circle the Sun, clear of every trajectory.
Trans-Earth injection: Orion's engine lights, bound for Earth.
The service module is European. It provides the push, and the electricity.
One burn is all that counts here. If it fails, nobody comes home.
At this distance, an order sent from Earth takes over a second to arrive.
The journey home begins. The Moon recedes behind them.
They stow the samples, check the heat shield, rehearse the reentry.
Earth is still only a bright dot ahead of the capsule.
Nothing left to fly for eight days: the trajectory does the work.
The heat shield is five metres across. It is what brings them home.
It protects by burning, and wears away as the capsule comes down.
The service module is jettisoned. The capsule turns, heat shield forward.
It hits the atmosphere at nearly 40,000 km/h, coming in from the Moon.
The air compressed ahead of it ignites and wraps it in a sheath of plasma.
The radio goes silent through it. There is nothing to do but wait.
The parachutes open in sequence, eleven canopies in all.
Splashdown in the Pacific.
Humans have walked on the Moon again, fifty-six years after the last ones.
They bring back ice, taken where the Sun has never reached.
A month of travel, six days at the south pole, four people home.
Apollo proved we could get there. Artemis is trying to stay.