Why Artemis III & IV Astronauts Face Dangers Apollo Never Encountered (8K)

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:01]The Apollo missions were a walk in the park compared to what awaits the next American on the lunar south pole. When Armstrong and Uldren landed in 1969, they touched down on bright equatorial planes lit by direct sunlight on terrain that was relatively flat and surveyed in advance. Every Apollo landing site that followed used the same basic approach.

[00:00:24]Land where the sun is high. Land where the ground is visible. land where the temperature swings while extreme are at least predictable. The Artemis 3 and four astronauts who train for the lunar south pole will not have any of those luxuries. They are descending into the Shackleton crater region into eternal darkness into cryogenic temperatures into terrain made of jagged abrasive regalith that could shred modern hardware faster than Apollo era engineers had ever had to plan for.

[00:00:57]Think about a place so cold that electronics freeze on contact. So dark that human eyes have never registered the floor of it. This is Shackleton, an ancient lunar abyss where volatile ice hides beneath unstable, seismically active ground. The astronauts who go there are not just exploring. They're fighting to survive an environment that seems engineered to destroy whatever lands inside it. And NASA's going back anyway. But the rules of survival on the moon have completely changed. Apollo crews navigated weathered regalith and predictable landing zones. The next generation of astronauts must navigate razor sharp lunar dust, unpredictable moonquakes, and shadows that block direct line of sight communication with Earth itself.

[00:01:42]Engineering survival against this brutal untouched terrain is the greatest hurdle humanity has ever faced in deep space. A quick word on the mission numbers before we go further. As of early 2026, NASA's planning has shifted. Artemis 3, originally meant to be the first crude lunar landing of the program, is now expected to fly as a crude test in Earth orbit, putting the first lunar south pole landing on Artemis 4 in 2028. Both crews will train for the same destination, face the same conditions.

[00:02:14]The dangers we are about to walk through don't change with the mission number.

[00:02:18]They are inherent to the destination itself.

[00:02:22]The Apollo program landed humans in six different places on the moon. Every single one of those landing sites was on the equatorial near side. Everyone had direct, harsh, unfiltered sunlight overhead for the entire surface stay.

[00:02:37]Astronauts could see the terrain. They could see their own shadows. They could see the lander. The lunar south pole is something else entirely. The moon has an axial tilt of just 1.5°.

[00:02:49]Earth's, for comparison, is 23.5 degrees. That tiny tilt has enormous consequences. At the lunar south pole, the sun never rises high in the sky. It skims the horizon all year long, never fully rising and never fully setting.

[00:03:05]The result is a permanent twilight on the rim of certain craters and absolute darkness inside them. These dark zones have a name, permanently shadowed regions or PSRs. Some of these regions have been in continuous shadow for 2 billion years. Sunlight has never touched their floor in all that time.

[00:03:26]Shackleton Crater is one of those regions. It sits almost exactly on the lunar south pole with the moon's rotational axis passing near its rim.

[00:03:35]Its interior has been in permanent shadow for billions of years. The walls of the crater drop away at a 30° slope into a floor about 2.6 6 mi deep, which is deeper than the Grand Canyon. The astronauts will not be landing inside Shackleton itself. The current candidate landing sites are on illuminated ridges along its rim where solar power and direct line of sight to Earth can be maintained.

[00:04:02]But the science targets, the volatile ice, the cold trapped record of the early solar system, all of that is inside the crater, which means the astronauts have to go down.

[00:04:13]Operating inside a permanently shadowed region is unlike anything Apollo crews ever faced. Without an atmosphere to scatter light, shadows on the moon are not soft. They are absolute. There is no glow inside a shadow. There is no diffused light. A boulder cast a shadow that is, in optical terms, indistinguishable from a hole in the ground.

[00:04:36]An astronaut walking with a helmet light into a PSR has the same situation as a diver descending into an underwater cave with a single flashlight. The narrow beam reveals what it directly hits.

[00:04:48]Everything outside the beam is black.

[00:04:51]Step in the wrong place and the only warning is the gravitational pull as the leg drops. There is no peripheral cue.

[00:04:58]There is no horizon. Even depth perception breaks down because the brain calibrates depth using ambient light cues that simply do not exist in a PSR.

[00:05:08]Apollo astronauts describe moving on the moon as disorienting at first. The lack of atmospheric haze made distant objects look closer than they were. In a PSR, the issue is the opposite. Close objects appear to vanish. The astronauts will be navigating by suit light and lidar alone in a place where the human eye is for the first time in spacelight history almost completely useless.

[00:05:33]The temperature problem at the lunar south pole is on a scale Apollo simply never had to address. Apollo astronauts dealt with extreme thermal swings. In direct sunlight, surface temperatures reached around 240° F. On the lunar night side, temperatures fell to roughly -280 degrees Fahrenheit. Cold, but manageable. The Apollo missions were timed to land during local lunar morning, giving the crew about 75 hours of sunlight before any nightside cold became an operational issue.

[00:06:05]Shackleton's permanently shadowed regions are colder, far colder. Thermal mapping by the Diver instrument on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has measured PSR floor temperatures that hold steady at about minus280° F in the warmer zones. But the deepest, most isolated cold traps drop to around 25 Kelvin or roughly -415° F. That makes them some of the coldest known surfaces in the entire solar system. Colder than the surface of Pluto, colder than the rings of Saturn.

[00:06:41]At those temperatures, ordinary spacecraft materials stop behaving like materials. They behave like ceramics.

[00:06:47]Steel becomes brittle and can shatter on impact. Polymers stiffen and crack.

[00:06:52]Lubricants freeze solid. Wires that flex thousands of times in normal operation will snap after a few cycles. The phenomena is called cold soak failure and it has destroyed more lunar landers than any other single environmental factor. The Apollo A7L space suit was rated for short excursions into shadow, but it was never designed to operate in genuine cryogenic conditions. The new Axiom extra vehicular mobility unit, the Axe EMU, has to do exactly that. The suit needs to hold a habitable internal environment for an astronaut while the boots are in contact with regalith approaching -400° F. And the engineering challenge runs in both directions. While the boots and lower legs lose heat aggressively into the freezing regalith, the helmet and upper body still need active cooling because the astronaut's body itself produces around 300 watts of metabolic heat that has to go somewhere.

[00:07:50]In direct sunlight on the rim of the crater, the suit has to dump heat. A few steps later in the PSR, the same suit has to retain heat. The thermal management system has to switch between those two modes, sometimes within minutes, without compromising suit pressure or mobility. Apollo never had to do this. Apollo suits operated in a single thermal regime with sunlight hitting them constantly. The new generation of suits has to handle sunlight, shadow, and cryogenic vacuum all in the same EVA. That technical leap is the difference between a suit designed for daytime camping and a suit designed for an Antarctic deep cave dive in winter.

[00:08:30]And cold is the only second worst environmental hazard at the South Pole.

[00:08:35]The dust is what aerospace engineers genuinely fear because lunar dust at the equator is one thing. The dust at the South Pole is something different. Enjoy deep fact check space stories. Hit subscribe and activate the notification bell. Otherwise, YouTube will not show you the next videos and you will miss what we uncover next. Every Apollo mission came back with the same complaint. The dust gets everywhere.

[00:09:02]Eugene Cernin, the last man to walk on the moon, called it the number one challenge for any future lunar mission.

[00:09:07]and he was talking about equatorial dust. The dust of the south pole is a fundamentally different material. Here's why. The lunar surface is constantly bombarded by the solar wind. Charged particles streaming from the sun strike the regalith and over hundreds of millions of years slowly weather and round the individual dust grains. The result is a surface dust that while still abrasive has had its sharpest edges blunted by billions of years of microscopic sand blasting. Apollo astronauts encountered this kind of weathered regalith. It was unpleasant.

[00:09:41]It clogged seals. It araided pressure suits, but it was comparatively the friendlier version. The shadows of the South Pole have blocked solar wind exposure for 2 billion years. The dust inside permanently shadowed regions has not been weathered at all. It is fresh.

[00:09:59]It is jagged. The grains are essentially uneroded glass shards formed during ancient impacts and then locked in cold storage ever since.

[00:10:09]Microscope studies of similar shadowed regulith from Antarctic lunar meteorites show fractured surfaces, sharp angular edges, and surface chemistry that is reactive in a way Apollo dust never was.

[00:10:22]Inhale a few grams of equatorial Apollo dust as several astronauts effectively did when they re-entered the lunar module after EVAs and you get an unpleasant rash and some respiratory irritation.

[00:10:34]Inhale the same quantity of unweathered South Pole dust and the chemical reactivity could potentially cause damage similar to silicosis the lung disease coal miners get. The grains don't just araid tissue, they react with it. And then there's the static charging problem.

[00:10:52]On the moon, the constant exposure to ultraviolet light and solar wind ionizes the surface, giving lunar dust a strong electrostatic charge. The dust grains become in effect microscopic magnets.

[00:11:04]They cling to anything they touch and refuse to let go. Brushing them off does almost nothing because the static charge reattaches them within seconds. Apollo crews documented this thoroughly. After EVA, every surface inside the lunar module was dusted with regalith that had hitched a ride on suits and tools.

[00:11:25]At the south pole, this electrostatic effect is intensified. The shadows create steep voltage gradients across the regalith surface. Dust and shadowed regions can carry charges of thousands of volts, much higher than the equatorial values. NASA engineers have nicknamed this kind of material razor dust because it is both abrasive and electrostatically aggressive. Razor dust will cling to solar panels and degrade their output. It will coat camera lenses in blind optical instruments. It will work its way into seals and bearings and will not come out. The Apollo program had to design dust mitigation for missions of 3 days on the surface for the planned South Pole missions with the goal of building toward a permanent base. The dust problem has to be solved over months and years, not days. And it has to be solved before any astronaut steps inside a habitat carrying that dust on their suit. Otherwise, the dust ends up in the air system, in the food, in the eyes of every person aboard. That outcome is not theoretical. It happened on Apollo. The difference is that an Apollo mission ended in a few days. A South Pole base does not. The ground itself at the south pole is not the dry stable rock that Apollo astronauts walked on. Apollo landed on planes where the regalith was dry, dusty, and chemically inert. Beneath the dust was solidified basaltt, predictable, wellstudied, and seismically quiet during every surface day. The Apollo passive seismic experiment recorded moonquakes during the Apollo era, but they were faint distant events. None of them disturbed the missions. The South Pole regalith is different. Buried within it are volatile compounds. Frozen water, frozen carbon dioxide, frozen ammonia, frozen methane, and other volatiles deposited by comet impacts and trapped by the cold. These have been accumulating for over 2 billion years in some places. The regalith down there is a chemical mixture, not a uniform rock layer. And that chemistry has consequences for any vehicle landing on it. When a spacecraft fires its descent engines into volatile richch regulith, the heat from the exhaust plume sublimates the buried ice. Frozen water turns instantly to vapor. Frozen carbon dioxide turns instantly to gas. The ground does not absorb that energy quietly. It outgasses, sometimes violently, ejecting dust and vapor in unpredictable directions. The lander's plume can excavate craters several feet wide in seconds, and the released vapor can redeposit dust on the lander itself, contaminating optical sensors and clocking mechanisms. This phenomena was a marginal concern at Apollo equatorial sites where the regulith was dry. At the south pole, with kilometers of volatile rich soil potentially under the touchdown zone, plume cratering becomes a primary engineering hazard. The new human landing system designs, both SpaceX's Starship HLS and Blue Origins Blue Moon, are specifically built to manage this issue with descent profiles that minimize plume interaction with the surface during the final hover. And then there are the moon quakes. The moon has four kinds of quakes. Deep moon quakes originating around 700 km below the surface driven by tidal stresses from Earth. Shallow moon quakes occurring within the upper crust, often unexpectedly strong. Thermal moon quakes caused by daily temperature swings stressing surface rock and impactdriven seismic events when meteorites hit the surface. The Apollo network detected all four types, but Apollo seismometers were mostly at equatorial sites. The South Pole is different. Recent gravity and topography data from the Grail and LRO missions suggest that the South Pole region has experienced significant tectonic activity within the past 100 million years, including thrust falting and custal compression. Several recent papers have argued that South Pole moonquakes are likely deeper, stronger, and more frequent than the equatorial events Apollo measured. For a permanent surface installation, this matters enormously. A habitat designed to withstand only weak Apollo style moonquakes could fail catastrophically during the kind of strong shallow event that the South Pole appears to experience. The new lunar environment monitoring station called LEMs is being deployed specifically to characterize this seismic environment. It will be the first dedicated long-term seismometer on the lunar south pole and its early data will define how every future habitat there is built. The crews who land at the south pole are essentially walking onto ground that we have never directly measured. They will be the seismic instruments themselves in the sense that whatever happens during their stay teaches us what the next generation of astronauts has to be ready for.

[00:16:29]Every Apollo mission stayed in direct radio contact with Earth from the moment of landing to the moment of liftoff. The equatorial nearside landing sites had a clear unobstructed view of Earth in the lunar sky. Mission control could see what the astronauts were doing in real time with a signal delay of about 1.3 seconds. Decisions were made jointly.

[00:16:50]Problems were diagnosed jointly. The astronauts never operated alone.

[00:16:56]Operating from the South Pole, especially from inside any of the candidate craters, breaks this assumption.

[00:17:03]From the floor of Shackleton, Earth is below the horizon. The crater walls rise high enough to block the line of sight.

[00:17:10]There is no direct radio path. Any communication has to be relayed either via a satellite in lunar orbit or via the planned gateway station. That introduces latency. It introduces signal loss. It introduces points of failure that did not exist on Apollo. The lunar gateway is a small space station NASA's building in a halo orbit around the moon. Its main job is to act as a permanent relay and waypoint between Earth and the lunar surface. Astronauts going to the south pole will rendevu with gateway transfer to a lander like Starship HLS or Blue Moon Mark1 and descend from there. Communications during surface operations will route through gateway when direct Earth contact is unavailable.

[00:17:57]The catch is that gateway is not always overhead. Its halo orbit takes about a week and during portions of that orbit the station is on the wrong side of the moon to relay signals to the south pole.

[00:18:08]During those windows, the astronauts on the surface are out of contact with Earth entirely. Anything that happens during those gaps, they have to handle alone. Apollo astronauts trained for the unlikely event of a comm's blackout. The South Pole crews trained for the certainty of one. Their suits, their lander, their habitat, all of it has to be more autonomous than anything Apollo flew.

[00:18:32]The decision-making authority that used to live in Houston now has to live partially on the lunar surface itself in the hands of four people in space suits navigating a cave dark crater. 2 seconds of speed of light delay from home, sometimes more. It's worth remembering why we are accepting these risks. Apollo answered the question of whether humans could reach the moon at all. The next missions are answering a different question entirely. Whether humans can stay, whether we can extract water ice from a permanently shadowed region, build a base that survives moonquakes, and create a sustainable presence that becomes the launching pad for the next leap. Mars is the goal beyond the moon.

[00:19:14]Everything we do at Shackleton is rehearsal for that. The Apollo missions were a sprint completed in a few days each. The South Pole missions are the foundation of an architecture meant to last decades, possibly centuries. That kind of permanence cannot be built on the easy ground. It has to be built on the worst ground we can find because that is where the resources are. That is where the science is and that is where humanity's next chapter begins. The Apollo mission stood on the bright side of the moon for a few days each, planted some flags, and came home. What the Aremis crews are walking into is an entirely different category of mission, one that humanity has never attempted on a planetary body. They are landing in eternal darkness, operating in cryogenic temperatures, walking on regalith that can damage their lungs and their hardware, and crossing seismically active terrain whose moonquake pattern we have not yet measured. And they are doing it without the constant Earth radio link Apollo took for granted.

[00:20:17]Engineering survival in this environment is not a checklist. It is a fundamental shift in how space flight has to be done. The suits are different. The landers are different. The communications architecture is different. The mission timeline is different. The very ground itself is different. And yet the goal is worth it.

[00:20:35]The water ice locked beneath Shackleton could one day fuel the rockets that take the next generation of explorers further. The science returned from cold trapped regalith could rewrite our understanding of how the inner solar system formed. The base we build on the rim of that crater could become the first permanent human installation on another world. What would you sacrifice for a chance to be on the first crew to walk into permanent shadow on another planet? Tell us in the comments. Because the people who will stand on that rim, looking down into a darkness no human has ever seen are training right now.

[00:21:12]Recently, four astronauts came back from a journey around the moon. They were the first crew to fly that far from Earth in over 50 years. If you want to see what that mission actually looked like in detail from launch to splashdown, watch Artemis 2, the full mission experience in 8K next.