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Space travel has become commonplace. Over the past three decades, nearly 300 people have traveled to and from the International Space Station, some staying there for long periods. Months at a time. In the past several years, rocket startup Blue Origin has launched a series of day trips that go right beyond the threshold of space — upscale carnival rides for celebrities including Katy Perry, Gayle King And William Shatner.
Imminent Artemis II The lunar mission is different.
NASA’s space flight, scheduled to launch Wednesday evening, will carry four astronauts on a round trip all the way to the moon, which is 1,000 times farther than the space station, and they will have to break free from Earth’s gravity to do so. It’s a trip that only twenty people have ever done before, and the last time it happened was in 1972.
Artemis 2’s Orion spacecraft will take its four astronauts farther than any human has ever traveled into space, on a long arc of up to 4,700 miles beyond the far side of the moon. By contrast, more than 50 years ago the Apollo astronauts were in lunar orbit just 70 miles from the surface.
This would be a huge achievement for NASA in itself. It is also a harbinger of a new and devastating era in the space age that is still unfolding.
However, it seems difficult to make any impact on the national conversation.
There is certainly a lot going on here on Earth that is on the minds of many people. Military conflict. Government deadlock. Political protests. Concern about the cost of living and adequate health care. But this was true in the 1960s and early 1970s as well, and perhaps never more so than in the years following the first moon landing in July 1969. Apollo 11A giant leap for humanity.
I was a kid when Neil Armstrong Buzz Aldrin left their footprints on the dusty lunar terrain, and I clearly remember the constant television coverage. I watched with bated breath seeing the splashes as astronauts from all the Apollo space missions returned to Earth. It was a heroic and engaging novel.
Those Apollo lunar missions were the culmination of the first wave of space exploration, a decade and a half filled with one remarkable achievement after another.
The Artemis missions mark the beginning of a whole new era of space exploitation.
View of Earth rising above the lunar horizon, taken from the Apollo 11 spacecraft in July 1969.
Build a moon base
Artemis II We will not put astronauts on the moon. Like the historic Apollo 8 mission in December 1968 — the first flight that sent humans beyond Earth’s orbit, the one that gave us our first view of our planet as a blue orb against a deep black sea — it’s a flight in preparation for the eventual landing. This landing will happen for astronauts on the Artemis IV mission, currently scheduled for early 2028.
NASA’s long-term goals include: Create a moon base To achieve a “permanent human presence” on the moon. This outpost will become a hub of activity for an ambitious range of activities, from scientific investigations to power generation to building sustainable, habitable infrastructure.
The Apollo missions returned some lunar rock and dust samples. Souvenirs, basically. In the coming years, the United States and other countries will look to this Unlock the moon’s natural resourcesThey extract industrially valuable minerals and utilize water ice in order to survive, but also to produce fuel. NASA and others have been paying serious attention to this Opportunities to Commercial space miningincluding on moon.
NASA’s efforts have also attracted SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos, two of the richest people on the planet.
The US space agency is not alone in wanting to send troops to the moon. China It has plans to put its own crews there in 2030. Russia, India and other countries have been busy with (unmanned) lunar landing programs.
We are not far from a new and unprecedented round of great power competition, one that carries real risks, not just bragging rights.
In March, NASA shared this artist’s rendering of what the final lunar base might look like.
Factories on the moon
Then there is Musk, who is a nation-state in his own right. The man behind SpaceX rockets and Starlink satellites has long been obsessed with spreading human consciousness across the solar system, has long been focused on Mars as a starting point, and has redirected his considerable attention toward our nearest neighbor.
Earlier this year, Musk said he shifted his focus to…Build a self-growing city on the moon“, and perhaps “in less than 10 years.”
There is no doubt that it will be an industrial city rather than a global city – “a permanent presence of scientific and manufacturing endeavours”. Musk wrote In February when he announced SpaceX’s acquisition of his company xAI. “Factories on the Moon could leverage lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them in space.”
Let that sink in: factories on the moon.
In the near term, there will be no shortage of Musk-built satellites launched from Earth. Over the past few years, SpaceX has placed 10,000 Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit, an estimated 85% of all the world’s satellites. An increasingly crowded belt About our planet. As large as this number may seem, it is a Part of what Musk has in mind.
This is where artificial intelligence enters the picture.
In the February announcement, Musk also wrote about “the launch of one million satellites that will serve as orbital data centers.” AI data centers in space are an idea that is having a moment: Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, the chip maker powering the AI revolution, appears to… Keen on the idea also.
Meanwhile, NASA has its own plans to create a “competitive commercial ecosystem” in orbit.
Artemis 2 crew, from left to right: Commander Reed Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen.
“The common heritage of humanity”
All of these plans will be tested by difficult engineering and economic realities. Musk envisions launching rockets every 10 days to support the construction of that lunar city. NASA is targeting a lunar landing every six months to start, with a faster pace likely to follow. But shooting at the moon is more complicated than launching rockets into orbit.
The first lunar landing program ended with the Apollo 17 mission, although several more missions are planned. President Richard Nixon scaled back the effort because of the cost. The focus shifted to space stations and the space shuttle – and shorter travel to low Earth orbit.
Costs and trade will inevitably be at the heart of the conversations we will need to have as a nation about what we do on the moon. We also need to talk more about how we care about the increasingly crowded world of space with satellites outside our atmosphere.
It can all start now. Pay attention to this Artemis moon mission. The thrill of adventure: watching the rocket soar into the sky, tracking Orion’s long round-trip, and giving thanks for the safe return.
And listen to the hopeful words of the United Nations The 1979 Moon Agreement His framework for exploring and using our only natural satellite: “The Moon and its natural resources are the common heritage of humanity.”