(Radio Iowa) – A Sioux City woman who was a long-time employee of NASA is watching with interest as the Artemis Two Mission makes its way to the moon and back. Audrey Smith Rivers is excited to see the first mission to the moon and the eventual landing there for the first time since the Apollo missions in the 1970’s. “It’s about time. 50 years is way too long. And we’ve gained so much from what we did from the early Mercury to through space station, especially during the Apollo missions when they needed to get things extremely small and extremely fast,” Rivers says.
Rivers followed the space missions since the beginnings and then worked at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston during the Space Shuttle era. She says there are some similarities between the current mission and the Apollo 8 mission that went around the moon in preparation for the landing. “They had a similar capsule, not as big as the Orion capsule, and they had a big super rocket, similar but not with the same configurations of engines as the current SLS. But a lot of the trajectories and a lot of what they’re going to be doing based on their new technology is very similar to what they did in Apollo 8,” she says.
Rivers says much of the technology now used was developed for the shuttle program and the space station. “Mechanical things, computerized things. It gave us so much, the cell phones we talk on, our watches that we wear, it has provided so much to this country and to the world,” River says. She hopes the resumption of the moon missions will spur renewed interest in the space program, but says it costs money and there will likely need to be private or commercial investment.
“If we can get commercial firms involved, not even like a SpaceX, but just chemical firms and stuff like that, maybe that will allow the demand, the will that was necessary that we did not have when we stopped Apollo after Apollo 17,” she says. “We actually had three more missions after that, but those were acts just because they didn’t think people cared anymore.” NASA’s current plans are for at least one moon landing, and possibly a second.
