As soon as next month, the Artemis II mission will launch for the Moon — the first humans to leave Earth orbit in more than half a century. As TIME writes, it’s been half a century since “the crew of Apollo 17 came home, the Apollo moon program was canceled, and the translunar trail went dark.” Now, as the stage sets for a space superpower showdown 250,000 miles from home later this decade, Washington, Beijing, and a nervy space community are closely following along.
On Deck…After a hydrogen leak during this week’s wet dress rehearsal pushed launch to NET March, Artemis II will conduct a ten-day lunar flyby, stress-testing Orion’s systems and implementing a revised reentry trajectory after Artemis I’s heat shield issues.
In the hole…Artemis III, nominally slated for next year, aims to put boots back on lunar regolith, with SpaceX contracted to land Starship and two Americans at the south pole.
The Right Stuff
At a NASA press conference last September, Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman said something worth sitting with:
When I look at the future, when we talk about what is our legacy, I don’t want to look five or ten years in the future. I want to look 100 or 200 years in the future. I hope we are forgotten. If we’re forgotten, then Artemis has achieved its goals. We’ll have humans on Mars and on the moons of Saturn, expanding our presence in the solar system. Perhaps we inspired some children, and that might be our footnote — encouraging someone like Susie or Johnny to pursue their dreams. That, to me, would be truly magical.
A commander readies his crew to ride a controlled explosion a quarter-million miles into the void, and takes aim at the most humble victory imaginable: to be forgotten. Because if Wiseman becomes a footnote, it means we kept going. It means that in 2126, Susie looks up and knows the stars belong to her.
Friends, this is The Right Stuff. Our astronauts remind us that greatness requires running toward hard, unglamorous work — or as Shackleton’s apocryphal ad put it — toward hazardous journeys, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, and constant danger.
A nation rises to the size of the problems it chooses — in space, and right back here on Earth.
Godspeed, Artemis II.