Guest "We already knew this from the Apollo Program" by David Middleton

NASA's "crash test dummies" Helga and Zohar, along with an array of radiation instrumentation demonstrated that the Artemis spacecraft provides adequate shielding for short duration lunar missions. The results of these measurements were recently published in Nature.

The paper is open access, with the full text freely available. Here's the abstract:

Space radiation is a notable hazard for long-duration human spaceflight. Associated risks include cancer, cataracts, degenerative diseases and tissue reactions from large, acute exposures. Space radiation originates from diverse sources, including galactic cosmic rays, trapped-particle (Van Allen) belts and solar-particle events. Previous radiation data are from the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle in low-Earth orbit protected by heavy shielding and Earth's magnetic field and lightly shielded interplanetary robotic probes such as Mars Science Laboratory and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Limited data from the Apollo missions and ground measurements with substantial caveats are also available. Here we report radiation measurements from the heavily shielded Orion spacecraft on the uncrewed Artemis I lunar mission. At differing shielding locations inside the vehicle, a fourfold difference in dose rates was observed during proton-belt passes that are similar to large, reference solar-particle events. Interplanetary cosmic-ray dose equivalent rates in Orion were as much as 60% lower than previous observations. Furthermore, a change in orientation of the spacecraft during the proton-belt transit resulted in a reduction of radiation dose rates of around 50%. These measurements validate the Orion for future crewed exploration and inform future human spaceflight mission design.

George et al., 2024

Artemis II could launch as early as September 2025. The 10-day mission to orbit the Moon will be the first manned mission to the Moon since Apollo 17 in December 1972.