NASA’s plodding, iterative approach to its Artemis program gives the distinct impression that it has somehow forgotten how to land humans on the Moon. A closer inspection uncovers the many reasons—whether justified or not—for why it’s taking NASA so long to return boots to those vaunted lunar grounds.
When Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Harrison Schmitt said goodbye to the Moon in December 1972, no one would have guessed that at least 50 years would go by before the next set of humans would return. The closing Apollo mission ended a frenetic period of scientific and technological advancement, an era sparked by the famous “space race” speech given by President John F. Kennedy in 1962.
That’s not to say NASA stood idle during the post-Apollo era. Space exploration continued in different forms, with probes launched to the outer solar system, space stations built in low Earth orbit, Space Shuttles ferrying astronauts to space, and rovers sent to Mars, among many other incredible achievements. As for putting astronauts back on the Moon, not so much.
NASA is seeking to change this through its ambitious Artemis program, which kicked off in spectacular fashion last year with the debut of its Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket. Blasting off with 8.8 million pounds of thrust, SLS sent an uncrewed Orion capsule on a 1.4-million-mile journey around the Moon and back.
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The inaugural mission sets the stage for Artemis 2, a crewed journey around the Moon and back, and Artemis 3, a mission to land a man and a woman on the Moon in 2025. It’s an achingly slow pace, but the situation is even worse than that. Artemis 4 won’t happen until 2028 at the earliest, which is quite the gap between missions. Artemis 5 through 7 are expected to transpire yearly starting in 2029.
For NASA, it’s one important step at a time, but to casual observers it seems as though NASA has opted to reinvent the wheel. Why can’t NASA more quickly manage a feat it nailed six times a half-century ago? It should be a piece of cake to do so now, no?
It’s a fair point, but the U.S. is now far removed from Cold War mentalities, and it’s got vastly different priorities, both internationally, domestically, and even environmentally. The space agency is unquestioningly limited by what Congress will allow, but when it comes to the slow pace of Artemis, there’s something else to consider, and that’s NASA’s desire to maintain a human presence around the Moon for the long term. And, crucially, much of Artemis is predicated on an even greater ambition: landing humans on Mars.
The pace of Artemis’s development is greatly constrained by budget, and NASA now longer has access to the kind of money it had during the Cold War.
“All you need to do is look at the NASA budget as a percent of GDP under Kennedy and today, and it is easy to understand why we are not making the giant leaps of the Apollo era,” explained Michelle Hanlon, co-director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi. It wasn’t difficult to rally the nation given the Cold War climate and “what certainly looked like Soviet superiority in space,” but “once the challenge was met the national mood changed,” Hanlon wrote in an email, adding that more people watched a rerun of I Love Lucy than the Apollo 17 broadcasts in 1972.
President Richard Nixon was ultimately responsible for downscaling NASA’s lunar ambitions. The intense cost of Apollo made it unsustainable and, as a politically driven “flags and footsteps” endeavor, the program lost its luster once the U.S. beat the Soviet Union to the prize, according to Jack Burns, a professor in the physics department at the University of Colorado-Boulder. It didn’t help that Nixon “hated the Kennedys,” Burns explained during our video call, noting Kennedy’s connection to Apollo.
“Apollo used an enormous amount of resources—5% of the federal budget went into NASA in the mid 1960s, whereas today it’s less than four-tenths of 1%—and we’re still going to the Moon and we’re still planning on going to Mars,” said Burns. “That’s an order of magnitude less cost to do this,” he said. NASA may seem a monumental agency, with its proposed budget of $27 billion for next year, but that’s roughly half of what President Biden wants to give the National Institutes of Health in 2024.
The ongoing war in Vietnam compounded the budgetary situation even further, and “don’t forget that there were protests of the Apollo program—Whitey on the Moon anyone?—with activists wondering how we could rationalize literally taking food out of the mouths of poverty-stricken children to support putting a human on the Moon,” said Hanlon.
With a shrunken budget and the Moon landing checked off the to-do list, NASA moved on to more modest celestial pastures. Five decades later, the space agency is once again setting its sights on the Moon, but with yearly budgets that pale in comparison to the Apollo era. Christopher Impey, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, says NASA is having to spread out the funding it does receive from Congress.
“They have Earth-observing scientific programs, they have propulsion development,” and they’re “doing a lot of ambitious planetary science missions,” Impey explained during a video call. NASA has “a lot of things that they have to squeeze into that budget,” so “shoehorning something like going back to the Moon” is “always a challenge and it’s always going to take longer than you want,” he said.
At the same time, the energy and urgency of Apollo is “probably not going to be repeated because we have bigger fish to fry,” said Impey. “We have a planet that’s going down the toilet, and we have a lot of issues that America is concerned about and distracted by, and is going to cost money to fix.” The U.S. approach to space has moved away from the “we could do anything” mentality of the 1950s and 1960s, Impey said, and “we’re never going to be in that space anymore—the bloom is off the rose.”
Relatedly, the slowness in returning to the Moon is also the result of the average person either not caring for space or not understanding the need or desire to go back to the Moon, according to Impey. “We have all these problems on Earth, and so I think a large chunk of the public is just deeply skeptical that this is the thing we should do even before putting a price tag on it.”
The Apollo missions were relatively simple in nature: Land pairs of humans on the surface, have them hang out for a bit, and get them the hell back home in one piece. Rinse and repeat six times. A key difference with Artemis is that NASA, in addition to returning astronauts to the Moon, is seeking to do so in a sustainable way and to create systems, technology, and infrastructure that will enable our long-term presence in the lunar environment. That presents an important challenge and another reason why Artemis is taking so long to unfold.
“Returning to the Moon seems so hard because it is hard,” Jessica West, a senior researcher at Project Ploughshares, explained in an email. “Especially to do it in a way that is safe and can be sustained into the future.”
“The whole program is fundamentally different from Apollo—this is not Apollo,” said Burns.
NASA and its commercial and international partners have big plans. The rationale for reaching the Moon has fundamentally changed; instead of it being a race to the Moon, it’s an effort to expand our reach into space, whereby we would use the Moon to extract important resources and perform important science. “In many ways, we are back in a race,” said Hanlon. “But this is not just about prestige—it’s about resources.” As she points out: “Whoever gets there first will get both bragging rights and the pick of where to go. You can imagine the implications.”
Competition aside, Hanlon says the time has come for humans to work more seriously in exploring and using the vast resources space has to offer. “This starts with the Moon, our stalwart and nearest neighbor,” she said. “The Moon will be the testing ground for future deeper forays into space. This will be a very long process that will proceed in baby steps.”
“We couldn’t have thought of that in the 60s—the mining of water and other materials, and preparing to go to Mars,” said Burns. “The idea that we could have gone to Mars right after Apollo was pure fantasy.”
For sure—there’s no way NASA could have attempted an Artemis-like plan in the immediate post-Apollo era. For Artemis, NASA and its international partners are planning to build the first lunar space station, known as Gateway. There’s also a desire for sustainable infrastructure, whether it be nuclear reactors on the Moon or swarms of lunar satellites to ensure constant contact with Earth.
With its focus on the southern polar region, Artemis requires an entirely new Moon suit, a prototype of which is currently in development. Other requirements include at least two human landing systems, a lunar terrain vehicle, a pressurized rover, various support satellites, fission surface power, prototypes to test water and oxygen production, and surface habitats. NASA also wants to build a full-fledged base camp on the Moon for continual occupation.
Much of these technologies will be rolled out as the Artemis missions mature, but many of the elements need to be designed from scratch. That’s going to take time. Lots of time.
“This isn’t about reinventing the wheel: the whole mis Source: Gizmodo