What Will the Artemis II Moon Mission Teach Us?
This past Wednesday, at the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, the four-person crew of Artemis II strapped into a tiny metal capsule atop a skyscraper-size rocket. A column of fire, fuelled by millions of pounds of propellant, carried the astronauts into orbit, en route to the far side of the moon. Christina Koch, a mission specialist on the crew, had looked back at her planet before, during nearly a year aboard the International Space Station. Yet the I.S.S. orbited at a distance of only two hundred and fifty miles—too close to see the entire globe. The moon, in contrast, is a quarter-million miles away. On her way there, Koch saw the entire Earth for the first time. It eventually shrank to the size of a golf ball.
Astronauts have not explored the lunar surface since Apollo 17 landed there, in 1972. The Artemis program aims to go further, not only bringing humans to the moon but also building a permanent base there. Artemis II, the program’s first crewed flight, is essentially a practice run. In the course of ten days, the Orion capsule—dubbed Integrity—is swinging around the moon, without landing on it, and then returning to Earth. NASA is evaluating every aspect of the mission, including space-toilet reliability and manual-pilot controls. On April 10th, Artemis II is expected to splash down in the Pacific Ocean.
Some issues demanded attention soon after takeoff. Just before maneuvers that would move the spacecraft out of Earth’s orbit and into a lunar trajectory, the capsule flashed an emergency message: a suspected cabin leak. Jeremy Hansen, a Canadian astronaut on the mission, mentally prepared to don a spacesuit and figure out how to get the crew home. The message turned out to be a false alarm. Other difficulties have been more down to Earth. “I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working,” Reid Wiseman, the mission commander, told Mission Control. The crew has learned to navigate shipboard life, too. Victor Glover, the pilot, reported that the spacecraft was uncomfortably cold, and donned a knit cap. Then there was the question of where one sleeps while weightless. Koch took to hanging from the ceiling, like a bat.
NASA has hailed the mission’s many firsts. Most notably, its diverse crew was travelling farther from Earth than anyone ever has. Key moments in the mission were memorialized with charmingly clunky scripted remarks. “When the engine ignites, you embark on humanity’s lunar homecoming arc and set the course to return Integrity and her crew safely home,” Chris Birch, the capsule communicator in Mission Control, told the crew. Koch replied, “With this burn to the moon, we do not leave Earth—we choose it.” This is NASA’s most important crewed effort in a generation, and so far it has been textbook. Close observers of the space program are not only celebrating milestones but feeling a wave of relief. Artemis II follows thirty years of false starts.
This week’s mission represents a beginning and an end. It gives NASA a new focus beyond the moribund I.S.S., and it sets the stage for a revived space race. This time, the main rival is China, which has a disciplined and effective program, called Chang’e, to land humans on the lunar surface by 2030. (Like Artemis, Chang’e is named after a goddess of the moon.) Artemis also represents the end of something essential. Artemis II is arguably a product of Old NASA, and it would still be recognizable to the architects of the Apollo missions. Although it features cutting-edge alloys, carbon-fibre composites, and digital avionics, the mission is managed by the same NASA centers. Many of the same contractors that built Apollo hardware were responsible for building Artemis II, often in the same buildings.
Beginning with Artemis III, in the name of efficiency, NASA will start handing major elements of the lunar program over to private companies, including SpaceX and Blue Origin. NASA will neither build nor own the next generation of lunar landers. It will basically hire a rideshare service to bring its astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface, and it will even rent its spacesuits from a contractor called Axiom Space. In the Trump Administration’s budget for the fiscal year 2026, it sought to cancel the Artemis rocket, known as the Space Launch System, in favor of commercial alternatives still in development, such as SpaceX’s Starship. The NASA of old was spread across the country so that many communities would benefit from its investments; the new space program will be increasingly privatized and concentrated in Texas and Florida. One wonders if it can live up to NASA’s longstanding motto: “For the benefit of all.”
To land the first two men on the moon, in 1969, NASA depended on about four hundred thousand workers. Only three years later, the Apollo program ended, and the technical capacity to build, assemble, and operate millions of parts quickly degraded. By the time President George H. W. Bush laid out systematic goals for NASA, in the late eighties, it was no longer feasible to repeat what had worked before. Bush envisioned multiple advances: a space station, a return to the moon, and a Mars landing. But setting foot on the moon again would require starting largely from scratch, technically and psychologically. “NASA programs require sustained political support and financial support over many years,” Emily A. Margolis, the curator of contemporary spaceflight at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, told me. “During that time, the multiple Presidential Administrations and Congresses valued spaceflight differently. NASA had to work against that challenging backdrop.”
The Clinton Administration abandoned the Bush plan in favor, ultimately, of the International Space Station. In 2004, President George W. Bush called for the creation of what would become the Constellation program, which sought to complete the station before moving on to lunar missions, and then to landing astronauts on Mars. President Barack Obama cancelled Constellation, prioritizing an asteroid landing and opting to try for Mars next. But the first Trump Administration ended the Obama program, instead establishing the moon-focussed Artemis program. President Joe Biden’s support cemented Artemis within NASA. “Artemis is a survivor program,” Margolis said. “The Orion crew capsule was part of the Constellation program. Three of the rocket’s four engines flew on Space Shuttle missions.” The Artemis launch vehicle, in turn, was based on Constellation’s Ares V design, and its booster rockets were an innovation of the Space Shuttle era. “NASA often reutilizes technologies that ultimately survive political transitions,” she told me.
The Apollo program was centrally planned and ruthlessly methodical. Back then, the path to the moon was more or less a straight line. Commercial spaceflight is comparatively laissez-faire. SpaceX and Blue Origin are developing their technologies independently; a breakthrough by one company is not a breakthrough for others. Both companies are also years behind schedule. SpaceX is now supposed to land Artemis astronauts on the moon in 2028, using its Starship system, but significant technical barriers remain. Starship is as yet incapable of reaching the moon, let alone delivering a lander to it. The China National Space Administration, in contrast, has spent the past few years landing rovers on the far side of the moon and retrieving moon rocks for study. About four years ago, China built its own sophisticated space station, called Tiangong, a dramatic demonstration of its human spaceflight capability. Its path to the moon looks a lot like Apollo’s. The next flag on the moon may well be a Chinese one.
As fantastic as NASA’s missions can seem, there is something intimate and relatable about the agency. Every year, more than a million people tour the Johnson Space Center, in Houston, and tens of thousands attend space camp, in Huntsville, Alabama. “It’s a rare and incredible thing that NASA welcomes the public—the American taxpayers and others—to come see what they do,” Margolis said. “NASA’s business is space exploration, not hospitality, but the visitor centers create good will among the people who fund this program.” The public is invested in each mission; Magellan may have sailed the world, but “we” went to the moon. Will we feel the same way when NASA astronauts climb out of a SpaceX moon lander? The commercial space race is defined by secrecy and competition, not collaboration. At SpaceX’s Starship facility in Texas, armed guards stand watch. A sign outside says that if you want a tour you should get a job there.
Only three types of crewed spacecraft have ever flown to deep space: Apollo capsules, Apollo landers, and now the Orion capsule. NASA compares Orion’s interior to that of a Winnebago camper van. When I sat in a replica used for training simulations, at the Johnson Space Center, the space felt small for one person. Four inhabitants seemed inconceivable. The Artemis II astronauts are unable to stretch out an arm without touching someone else—and that’s the least of their worries. Every square foot of a spacecraft, at pressure, is under about one ton of force. In the vacuum of space, Orion essentially wants to blow up. If its heating system fails, the crew could freeze to death. They depend on rebreathers to keep them from dying of carbon-dioxide poisoning or hypoxia. During reëntry, only a few inches of heat shielding will separate their feet from the exterior of the spacecraft, which will warm to five thousand degrees—about half as hot as the surface of the sun. Even when things are going well, an astronaut in flight is remarkably close to oblivion.
The Artemis II astronauts approached the apex of their journey knowing that, on April 6th, they would lose sight of—and communication with—Mission Control. The far side of the moon, which is never seen from planet Earth, would be the size of a basketball at arm’s length. For about forty minutes, they would be truly alone. In an interview from space, Koch, her hair floating in a crown around her head, told NBC News about the curious duality of space exploration: they were speeding through the heavens, but she felt as human as ever. One minute, she was gazing out at unfamiliar parts of the lunar surface, thinking, That is not the moon that I’m used to seeing. The next, she said, her mind was on more terrestrial matters: “Hmm, maybe I should change my socks.” ♦