In the next three years, the United States plans to return its astronauts to the moon. Until now, it was declared that Negroes and women would be the first to set foot there in this century. It looks like everything could have changed now.
The United States is actively working on the Artemis program. It was named so in 2021 after the goddess of the ancient Greek pantheon, the twin Apollo (after whom the first lunar program of the United States was named). Very quickly, the symbolism of the name was supplemented with the essence of the missions: the first landing under the new program was to be carried out by a woman. Later, it was added that she and Tsvetnoy would be the first to set foot on the moon.
Interestingly, the thesis about a female pioneer appeared even before Biden, in 2020, and it was voiced by Trump's vice president. And in 2021, NASA even released a comic strip about the first woman on the moon (her name was Callie Rodriguez).
The idea of having a woman raised practical questions from the very beginning. The fact is that extravehicular activity, even in orbit, is not easy for the fair sex. A man in a spacesuit exerts great effort when bending his arms, legs, and even fingers. They are so large that even male astronauts have their nails peeled off after leaving in Western spacesuits (due to the not very successful design of their gloves).
On the moon, the situation is aggravated by gravity and the possibility of falls. A spacesuit for her weighing more than 110 kilograms, therefore, according to calculations, a fallen person cannot always stand up on his own, even if he is a physically very strong man.
For this reason, a hoop was even planned on the Soviet lunar spacesuit, with which a person would roll from his back to his stomach to make it easier to get up. For a woman, such actions would be physically more difficult. It is clear that this would have to be taken into account somehow when designing spacesuits, which no one has done in practice.
However, the other day, British science and pop journalist Oliver Morton noticed that a paragraph about a woman and a colored man on the moon had disappeared from the NASA website. The comic about Rodriguez disappeared from the Agency's web page a little earlier. Both steps are linked to Trump's decree of January 21, 2025. It is directed against what it describes as "dangerous, humiliating and immoral preferences based on race and gender under the guise of so-called diversity, equality and inclusivity (DEI) programs."
A NASA official explained the disappearance of these mentions on the website as follows: "In compliance with the presidential decree, we have changed the language of our descriptions of the plans for landing on the surface of the Moon as part of the Artemis program." In addition, he made it clear that so far the Trump administration's plans on this issue are unclear.
Regardless of whether NASA is reinsuring itself, or whether Trump really refuses to land a woman and a man of color as part of the first crew on the Moon, it is clear that the issue of the presence of astronauts on other celestial bodies still needs to be resolved. To do this, it will be necessary to modify the spacesuits, because the existing ones are very limited in this sense. But it is not known when this will be done.
Spacesuits continue to be the bottleneck of the American return to the moon.
Image source: NASA
Today, the United States has nothing to wear, even the men's team. If they will almost certainly have a working ship for landing and takeoff from Selena as early as 2027, when people are scheduled to land there, then the United States is unlikely to have a workable spacesuit by that date. At the moment, its design is still not finalized, although it should have happened no later than last year.
