NASA: people in the next 10 years will live on the moon

Howard Hu, who oversees the Orion spacecraft used in the Artemis program, said NASA

hopes that humans will live on the moon for "this decade", although it is unclear how long they will be able tostay on the lunar surface, or in what numbers.

The unmanned Artemis 1 mission launched this week after several months of delays. This will be a test flight for future missions that will take humans to the moon.

Artemis 2 is expected to take humans into orbitmoon in 2024 and then the first astronauts are set to set foot on the moon again with the Artemis 3 mission in 2025, though NASA has warned that the schedule could be pushed back.

NASA has announced missions to the Moon as the starting point for more ambitious goals, such as getting people to Mars.

Humans have not been to the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

"It's really going to be very important for us to explore our Earth's orbit a bit and then take the big step of going to Mars," Hu said.

$93 billion Artemis programhas been developed over many years with the aim of ensuring the presence of a person on the Moon before flights to Mars. Hu said the main goal would be to explore the south pole of the moon to determine if water is present there that could be used for missions to Mars.

Renewed interest in spaceflightsparked what has come to be widely known as the “billionaire space race,” as space travel increasingly becomes a private rather than a public enterprise. Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson became the first billionaire to visit space on July 11 last year, just a few days before Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos reached space on July 20, 2021.

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