RAeS BWC December 2023 Lecture
14 December 2023
NASA’s Artemis Moon Programme – an overview from the sidelines.
Doors Open 6:15pm.
Lecture starts: 7.00pm
Location: National Cold War Exhibition, Lecture Theatre.
Admission is free to Members of the Royal Aeronautical Society and Museum Members
Other visitors welcome with a donation – no booking required, just turn up.
This month’s Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton’s branch of the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Lecture will be: NASA’s Artemis Moon Programme – an overview from the sidelines.
This month’s speaker will be John Thatcher.
The Artemis programme is a robotic and human Moon exploration program led by the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) along with six major partner agencies and is intended to re-establish a human presence on the Moon for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. There are several elements to the programme which also has the long-term goal of establishing a permanent base on the Moon to facilitate the feasibility of human missions to Mars. This talk will provide a summary of the whole programme but with a healthy degree of scepticism aiming to balance aspirations and reality.
(copyright NASA 2023)
No need to pre-book, please drop in. All welcome.
About John Thatcher:
John Thatcher retired in May 2013 after over 30 years working in the space industry, mainly involved in spacecraft engineering and project management. He began his career as an aerothermodynamicist at Rolls-Royce Aero Engines in Derby. He also worked briefly in the nuclear power industry before joining what was then British Aerospace at Stevenage working on communication satellites. John is a Chartered Engineer and Member of the Royal Aeronautical Society.
During his career ‘in space’ he has been fortunate to have worked on most aspects of spacecraft engineering covering design, development, manufacture, integration, test, launch and operations of communication and scientific missions, including the industrial management of the Beagle 2 Mars lander project in its early years. For his last decade at work John was the European Consortium Project Manager for the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) on the James Webb Space Telescope and the Flight Model MIRI was delivered to NASA in 2012 – more details are included in his talk.
In 2013 John was awarded the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Geoffrey Pardoe Space Award along with the Society’s Specialist Bronze Award “In recognition of his effective leadership and dedication as one of the major contributing factors in the successful management and delivery of the James Webb Space Telescope Mid-Infrared Instrument, a flagship science project of the UK Space Agency.”
