NASA is looking for volunteers for the first trip to the Moon in over 50 years.
It's been more than five decades since humans last set foot on the Moon.
Scheduled for April 2026, NASA's Artemis II mission will be the first crewed trip beyond Earth's orbit since the Apollo program ended. Four astronauts will spend 10 days on a lunar flyby mission.
Meanwhile, NASA is reportedly crowdsourcing some of the mission support, meaning anyone with the right equipment can actually help track the spacecraft as it journeys to the Moon and back.
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The space agency announced last week that they're seeking volunteers with well-equipped ground stations who can monitor the Orion spacecraft's radio signals throughout its journey.
Volunteers need expertise in capturing and monitoring S-band radio signals (deep space radio broadcast) and the ability to track the spacecraft's movement using something called Doppler data.
Doppler tracking data is essentially tiny changes in radio pitch that tell you how fast something is moving and where it's going.
For four days, volunteers will experience the journey of a lifetime, record and report on Orion’s S-band signals, as they venture to the Moon and back.
The lunar crew includes American astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Hammock Koch, plus Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
Kevin Coggins, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for Space Communication and Navigation, explained the reason for hosting this opportunity.
“By offering this opportunity to the broader aerospace community, we can identify available tracking capabilities outside the government,” Coggins said in an August statement.
Since NASA is working with private companies like SpaceX more and more, it will need to take privately owned tools for a test drive. Every radio signal that volunteers track is helping make sure everything works properly for future missions.
But, this isn't a brand new idea either.
When they sent the unmanned Artemis I mission out in late 2022, 18 volunteers successfully tracked the spacecraft for 25 days as it went to the Moon and back. It worked so well that NASA decided to do it again for the crewed mission.
While technically anyone can apply through NASA's website, you'll need to meet the criteria for managing some pretty technical equipment. Experience in one-way tracking is also required.
I's also worth noting that private organisations, space agencies and universities are probably going to dominate the volunteer list as they've got the ground stations and expertise needed.