The Artemis II Moonshot Deserves Your Awe – And Your Closest Attention, Too
Space travel has become commonplace. Over the past three decades, nearly 300 people have flown to and from the International Space Station, some of them staying there for months at a time. A few years ago, rocket startup Blue Origin launched a series of day trips that are just beyond the threshold of spaceflight — high-profile carnival rides for celebrities including Katy Perry, Gayle King and William Shatner.
Artemis II’s lunar mission is different.
NASA’s space shuttle, which took off Wednesday evening, is carrying four astronauts on a round trip to the moon — about 250,000 miles from Earth, a thousand times farther than the space station — and will have to break free from Earth’s gravity to do so. Only twenty people have ever made the trip, and the last one happened in 1972.
Orion’s Artemis II spacecraft will once again take its four astronauts farther than any human has ever been in space, on a long lap of up to 4,700 kilometers beyond the moon. By contrast, the Apollo astronauts 50-plus years ago were immersed in lunar orbit 70 miles or more from the surface.
This will be a major achievement for NASA itself. It is also a precursor to a new and disruptive era in the emerging Space Age.
However, it doesn’t seem to be creating a stir in the national conversation.
Of course, there is a lot going on here on Earth that is at the forefront of most people’s minds. Military conflict. Government gridlock. Political protests. Concerns about the cost of living and adequate health care. But that was true back in the ’60s and early ’70s as well, and perhaps never more so than in the years of the first moon landing in July 1969, Apollo 11’s leap into mankind.
I was a kid when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin put their stamp on the dirt, and I vividly remember the non-stop TV coverage. I watched anxiously to see the descent as the astronauts from all the Apollo space flights returned to Earth. It was a beautiful, heroic story.
Those Apollo moon missions were the culmination of the first wave of space exploration, a decade and a half full of surprises, respectively.
The Artemis mission marks the beginning of a new era of space exploration.
A view of Earth rising above the lunar horizon, taken from the Apollo 11 spacecraft in July 1969.
Watch this: Watch NASA’s Artemis II Launch to the Moon
Building a moon base
Artemis II will not put astronauts on the lunar surface. As the historic mission of Apollo 8 in December 1968 — the first to send humans beyond Earth’s orbit, the one that gave us our first glimpse of our planet as a blue orb facing a dark ocean — it is a fly-by-night preparing for the final landing. That astronaut touchdown will happen on the Artemis IV mission, currently scheduled for early 2028.
NASA’s long-term goals include establishing a lunar base to achieve a “permanent human presence” on the moon. The center will be a center of activity for a wide range of activities, from scientific research to power generation to the construction of sustainable and sustainable infrastructure.
The Apollo missions brought back several lunar rocks and dust samples. Souvenirs, basically. In the coming years, the US and other countries will be looking to open the moon’s natural resources, extract minerals of industrial value and add water ice for life, but also to create fuel. NASA and others have been considering the possibility of commercial mining, including on the moon.
NASA’s efforts have also included Elon Musk of SpaceX and Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin, two of the richest people in the world.
The US space agency is not alone in wanting to put boots on the moon. China has plans to station its workers there by 2030. Russia, India and other countries were busy with their (non-working) lunar plans.
We are not far from a new and unprecedented round of superpower competition, with real stakes, not just bragging rights.
In March, NASA shared this artist’s idea of what the surface of the moon might look like.
Factories on the moon
Then there is Musk, who is almost his own country. Long concerned with spreading human consciousness throughout the solar system, focusing on Mars as a starting point, the man behind the SpaceX rockets and Starlink satellites has once again directed his great attention to our nearest neighbor.
Earlier this year, Musk said he has shifted his focus to “building a self-growing city on the Moon,” which could happen “in less than 10 years.”
It will no doubt be an industrial city beyond space — “a permanent presence in science and manufacturing,” Musk wrote in February when he announced SpaceX’s acquisition of his xAI company. “Industries on the Moon can use lunar resources to make satellites and send them into space.”
Let that sink in: factories on the moon.
In the near future, there will be no shortage of Musk-made satellites to be launched to Earth. In the last few years, SpaceX has put 10,000 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit, which is about 85% of all the satellites in the crowded belt around the world. As big as that number sounds, it’s only a fraction of what Musk has in mind.
This is where AI comes into the picture.
In that February announcement, Musk wrote about “launching a million satellites that serve as orbital data centers.” AI data centers in space are an idea of short-termism: Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, maker of the chips powering the AI revolution, seems to be interested in the idea as well.
NASA, meanwhile, has its own plans for a “competitive commercial ecosystem” in orbit.
The Artemis II crew, left to right: commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mechanics Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen.
‘Common heritage of mankind’
All these plans will be tested with rigorous engineering and economic facts. Musk envisions launching rockets every 10 days to support the construction of the moon city. NASA aims to land on the moon every six months to begin with, with a cadence that could soon follow. But shooting the moon is more complicated than launching a rocket into orbit.
The first mission to land on the moon ended with the Apollo 17 mission, although several other flights were planned. President Richard Nixon scaled back the effort because of the cost. The focus shifted to space stations and the space shuttle — and short trips to Earth orbit.
Costs and trade will be at the center of the conversations we need to have as a nation about what we do — and — on the moon. We need to talk a lot, too, about how we take care of the ever-so-dense environment of satellite-filled space just outside our own universe.
All of that can start right now. Pay attention to this lunar activity of Artemis. Enjoy the entertainment: watching the rocket fly through the sky, tracking the long flight of Orion out and back, thankful for a safe return.
And listen to the words of the hopeful UN lunar treaty of 1979 and its framework for exploring and exploiting our only natural satellite: “The Moon and its natural resources are the common heritage of mankind.”
