For the first time a woman is going to enter the lunar surface. As part of NASA’s Artemis program, a man and woman astronauts will travel to the Moon’s South Pole for the first lunar landing since 1972.
NASA has unveiled a $28 billion plan to return to the moon by 2024. This is the expense of the next four years of landing on the moon in the Artemis program.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has said that the first female astronaut on the moon will be someone ‘who has been proven, somebody who has flown, and somebody who has been on the International Space Station already’.
Bridenstein has admitted that the five-year time frame set by the US government depends on Congress allocating another $3.2 billion to build a landing system.
He talked about how the two astronauts would travel through a capsule called Orion. The Orion capsule will be launched by the SLS rocket.
‘The budget request that we have before the House and the Senate right now includes $3.2billion for 2021 for the human landing system. It is critically important that we get that $3.2billion,’ Bridenstein said.
The US House of Representatives had earlier passed a bill allocating $600 million for the landing system.