Travel to space has become commonplace. Over the last three decades, nearly 300 people have flown to and from the International Space Station, some of them residing there for months at a time. In the last several years, the rocket startup Blue Origin has launched a series of day trips just over the threshold into space — high-end carnival rides for celebrities including Katy Perry, Gayle King and William Shatner.
The imminent Artemis II lunar mission is different.
NASA’s spaceflight, scheduled to lift off Wednesday evening, will carry four astronauts on a round-trip all the way to the moon, a thousand times farther away than the space station, and they’ll have to break free from Earth’s gravity to do so. It’s a trip that only two dozen humans have ever taken, and the last time it happened was in 1972.
Artemis II’s Orion spacecraft will also take its four astronauts farther than any humans have ever traveled into space, on a long arc reaching 4,700 miles beyond the far side of the moon. By contrast, the Apollo astronauts 50-plus years ago were snuggled into a lunar orbit just 70 or so miles from the surface.
This will be a massive achievement for NASA in its own right. It is also a harbinger of a new and disruptive era in the still-unfolding Space Age.
Yet it hardly seems to be making a dent in the national conversation.
For sure, there’s a lot going on here on Earth that’s on the front of many people’s minds. Military conflict. Government gridlock. Political protests. Anxiety 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 right around the first moon landing in July 1969, Apollo 11‘s one giant leap for mankind.
I was a kid when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin put their bootprints into the dusty lunar terrain, and I vividly remember the nonstop TV coverage. I eagerly tuned in to see the splashdowns as the astronauts from all the Apollo spaceflights returned to Earth. It was a gripping, heroic narrative.
Those Apollo moon missions were the culmination of the first wave of space exploration, a decade and a half filled with remarkable feats, one after another.
The Artemis missions mark the start of a whole new era of space exploitation.
Building a lunar base
Artemis II won’t put astronauts on the lunar surface. Like the historic Apollo 8 mission in December 1968 — the first to send humans beyond Earth’s orbit, the one that gave us our first view of our planet as a blue orb against a sea of deep black — it’s a flyby in preparation for an eventual landing. That touchdown by astronauts will happen in the Artemis IV mission, currently scheduled for early 2028.
NASA’s longer-term goals include the establishment of a lunar base to achieve “an enduring human presence” on the moon. That outpost will become a hub of activity for an ambitious range of activity, from scientific investigations to power generation to the building of sustainable and habitable infrastructure.
The Apollo missions brought back a few moon rocks and dust samples. Souvenirs, basically. In the years ahead, the US and other countries will be looking to unlock the moon’s natural resources, extracting minerals with industrial value and tapping into water ice for, well, survival, but also creating fuel. NASA and others have been giving serious consideration to the opportunities for commercial space mining, including on the moon.
NASA’s efforts have also roped in SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos, two of the richest humans on the planet.
The US space agency isn’t alone in wanting to put boots on the moon. China has plans to put its own crews there in 2030. Russia, India and other countries have been busy with their own (uncrewed) lunar lander programs.
We aren’t far off from a new and unprecedented round of great power competition, with real stakes, not just bragging rights.
In March, NASA shared this artist’s concept of what an eventual moon base might look like.
Factories on the moon
And then there’s Musk, almost a nation-state unto himself. Long obsessed with spreading human consciousness across the solar system, long fixated on Mars as the starting point, the man behind SpaceX rockets and Starlink satellites has reoriented his grandiose attention to our nearer neighbor.
Earlier this year, Musk said he’s shifted his focus to “building a self-growing city on the Moon,” potentially “in less than 10 years.”
It would no doubt be an industrial city more than a cosmopolitan one — “a permanent presence for scientific and manufacturing pursuits,” Musk wrote in February when announcing SpaceX’s acquisition of his xAI company. “Factories on the Moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space.”
Let that sink in: factories on the moon.
In the near term, there will be no shortage of Musk-made satellites launching from Earth. Over the last few years, SpaceX has put 10,000 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit, estimated to be 85% of all satellites in an increasingly crowded belt around our planet. As big as that number sounds, it’s a fraction of what Musk has in mind.
Here’s where AI enters the picture.
In that February announcement, Musk also wrote of “launching a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers.” AI data centers in space is an idea having a moment: Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, maker of the chips powering the AI revolution, seems keen on the idea as well.
NASA, meanwhile, has its own plans for a “competitive commercial ecosystem” in orbit.
The Artemis II crew, from left to right: commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen.
‘The common heritage of mankind’
All these plans will be tested by hard engineering and economic realities. Musk envisions launching rockets every 10 days to support the construction of that moon city. NASA is targeting a moon landing every six months to start, with a potentially faster cadence to follow. But moon shots are more complicated than rocket launches to orbit.
The first moon landing program ended with the Apollo 17 mission, even though several more flights were planned. President Richard Nixon curtailed the effort because of the cost. Focus shifted to space stations and the space shuttle — and the shorter commute to low Earth orbit.
Costs and commerce will inevitably be at the center of the conversations we’ll need to have as a nation about what we do on — and to — the moon. We need to be talking more, too, about how we care for the ever-more-congested realm of satellite-strewn space just outside our atmosphere.
That can all start right now. Pay attention to this Artemis moon mission. Thrill at the adventure: watching the rocket soar into the sky, tracking Orion’s long flight out and back, giving thanks for a safe return.
And heed the words of the UN’s hopeful moon agreement of 1979 and its framework for exploration and use of our one natural satellite: “The moon and its natural resources are the common heritage of mankind.”
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