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 burned almost all its fuel climbing here. To reach the Moon, it has to fill up again.
Higher up, another Starship is waiting: a tanker, its tanks full.
It catches up from below, on a lower, faster orbit, then brakes.
It stops right under the tanker, perfectly still, 350 km above the Earth.
It rises toward it, slowly, until the two ships touch.
A gentle push, and the fuel settles to the bottom of both ships' tanks.
That is why they face the same way: one push works for both.
The tanker backs away. The lander finally has what it needs to reach the Moon.
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.
Starship is built to be reused. Not this one: it will never see Earth again.
This map turns with the Moon around Earth: both of them stay still on it.
Engines off, the ship climbs on its momentum, and Earth keeps slowing it down.
Then the Moon takes over, and from here on it is the one pulling the ship in.
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 fall toward the Moon takes two and a half days, with no engine lit.
Here the Moon is seen from Earth: north pole at the top, south pole at the bottom.
The lander falls from the bottom of the halo toward the north pole, where it will brake.
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.
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.
Apollo landed by hand. Here, the computer flies the ship down.
The ship's shadow stretches ahead of it: here the Sun stays down at the horizon.
A few hundred metres up, the big engines shut down.
The four legs unfold beneath the hull.
The last metres are flown blind, in dust that nothing holds down.
Contact. The first crewed Moon landing since Apollo 17, in December 1972.
Each carries a wide pad, so it does not sink into the dust.
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.
The ship stays parked at the south pole. Above it, Orion carries on around its long loop.
Orion will swing back closest to the Moon just in time to pick them up.
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.
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.
It does not come home. It is sent to circle the Sun, clear of every trajectory.
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.
Orion falls back toward Earth, and gains speed with every passing hour.
Reentry hangs on one angle: too steep and the capsule burns up, too shallow and it skips off.
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.
At 7 km up, two drogue parachutes steady Orion and slow it down.
At 1.6 km, three small parachutes pull out the three mains, 35 meters each.
Under their canopies, Orion comes down no faster than a car in town.
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.