CORRECTION: A caption to the photo was added.
While the space rocket Artemis II launched a coast away in Florida on Wednesday afternoon, the project’s ambitions could be felt close to home at LBCC, inspiring students and a Lakewood resident whose father worked for NASA to create the first ever space shuttle that went into orbit.
Jay King, the Lakewood resident, explained his father’s role in the creation of the shuttle in detail.
“He was a metallurgist and he worked on the structure inside the shuttle orbiter itself to displace energy. So you didn’t have these three massive rocket boosters going through the orbiter… If you have something with that much thrust and you have a heavy object on top of it, the thing that has a thrust will tend to try to go through it, unless you can disperse the energy,” King said.
King added, “He said there was like 100,000 separate pieces of alloy metal that dispersed the energy of the rockets to keep it from going through.”
For King, Artemis II’s launch was a meaningful moment that reminded him of his father’s efforts in making this revolutionary space aircraft, which was “the world’s first reusable spacecraft” according to NASA. The shuttle normalized traveling to space, conducting 135 missions and sending 355 people into space in a 30 year period, before retiring in 2011.
What was so special about the design was its ability to launch like a rocket, maneuver in Earth orbit like a spacecraft, but land like an airplane, as NASA said in the same article.
A core memory for King was getting to watch the moment when the first space shuttle, Columbia, landed on a salt lake bed at an air force base in California in the early 1980s.
“It was good, just being there as a kid watching something land, of course, it looked just like an airplane, so it wasn’t all that crazy. But, just knowing that it had just been circling the Earth and came to ground in one piece, not in an ocean. So that was pretty special,” King said.
King is excited that the Artemis II launch will take humans further into space, as it is the first time in 54 years that humans will be traveling to the moon. For the recent Artemis II mission, the rocket will go around the moon, and there are future plans with the next Artemis missions to have humans land on the moon and eventually build a base.
One of the main goals of this series of Artemis missions is to get humans to develop the technologies to be able to live and travel further into space, so that we will be able to send humans to Mars one day.
The moment of the launch inspired Kathryn Handen-Llopi, a mechanical engineering student at LBCC, fortifying her passion for space.
“I mean, it’s awesome. I feel like any sort of rocket launch…it’s like a great moment for humanity, right? And just seeing what we’re able to do on an engineering and physics level, but also just on an inspirational level,” Kathryn Handen-Llopi said.
She voiced some criticism that was also felt by King and many others on social media.
“I wish the camera, you know, didn’t keep cutting to the crowd. I was a little bummed, I think for the first stage separation, it panned to the crowd and I’m like ‘no I wanna see the rocket’,” Handen-Llopi said.
While physics professor Ryan Carroll was also amazed by the launch, he was a bit apprehensive about the project because he believes that missions with humans tend to focus more on being a public relations move to inspire humanity and unite them, rather than focusing on scientific advancement.
“You ask a physicist, and they’ll always be like, man stuff is a lot of like PR projects… The original, a lot of that stuff was to get people excited and inspired, to be excited about space and excited about exploring space. But since it’s so much cheaper to send the uncrewed experiments, you often times just want to send those ones,” Carroll said.
He explained that uncrewed missions are cheaper since you don’t need to pay to sustain human life in space, and that another benefit is that you don’t put anyone’s life at risk.
“You never have the bad PR of someone dying out there, like that, you just have a robot that you never expect to come, not come back,” he said. “It’s a little bit bad, but not too bad, but then if it does land, then you get to use it for as many years as you need to,” Carroll said.
He believes that the money used for the rocket could have been allocated to build a new telescope in space, so that “entire universities across the world” could use it and benefit from it to conduct research.
However, Carroll is open to seeing the discoveries that will arise from the Artemis mission, and also pointed out a major benefit of human missions, which is that research can be conducted faster.
“If you have a crewed mission, they can do science much, much more efficient… In the time that it takes a robot to do a year worth of tasks, a human properly supported can do it in like two weeks or something like that. Because like, when you’re talking about a Mars robot, you gotta like send it a signal, such that it can’t get itself into trouble and then it does the signal and then it sends back. .. So you can’t be driving in like real time,” Carroll said.
Handen-Llopi hopes that the Artemis II mission will draw in more people to gain a passion for space like her. One of her dream jobs is to be a test engineer for NASA.
“You really don’t need to know how to do all the crazy math calculations to be a fan of space. I just… encourage anyone to look up some photos and be amazed,” Handen-Llopi said.
