On December 13, 1972, astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt concluded the third and final moonwalk of the Apollo 17 mission by unveiling a plaque that read:
“Here man completed his first explorations of the Moon
December 1972, A.D.
May the spirit of peace in which we came be reflected in the lives of all mankind.”
December 1972, A.D.
May the spirit of peace in which we came be reflected in the lives of all mankind.”
The following day, Cernan and Schmitt blasted off from the lunar surface. No one has returned since.
50 years later, with the launch of Artemis 1 on November 15, 2022, it appears that we have finally arrived at the cusp of a new age of lunar exploration. However, the road to this moment has been long and winding, because although the Artemis Program officially started in 2017, its roots can be traced back all the way to 2004. To give you a perspective of how long ago that was, NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers had just landed on Mars and the International Space Station was a mere six years old in 2004. At the time, NASA was still dealing with the repercussions of the Columbia disaster, and President George W. Bush announced that the Space Shuttle fleet would be retired by 2010. In that same announcement, Bush laid out his Vision for Space Exploration, a plan that aimed to bring humans back to the Moon and eventually, Mars. The lunar aspect of the plan envisioned the creation of a spacecraft known as Orion, which would be used to conduct a crewed lunar landing by 2020. To achieve this, two new rockets were to be built: Ares I, designed to carry crew to low Earth orbit, and the much larger Ares V, designed to carry the lunar lander into orbit and provide the means of propulsion for a lunar mission.
Unfortunately, major cost overruns and delays ultimately resulted in the cancellation of the Constellation program by President Obama after a single test flight of the Ares I rocket. Nevertheless, parts of the program, such as the Orion spacecraft, were revived in the NASA Authorization Act of 2010, which called for the development of a new heavy lift launch vehicle, which we now know as the Space Launch System. However, it wasn’t until 2017 that progress truly began picking up pace because that was the year that Space Policy Directive 1 was signed, which represented a massive change in American space policy. Under this new policy, the Artemis Program was formally created as a public-private partnership to land humans on the south pole of the moon and build a lunar space station, known as the Lunar Gateway.
Since 2017, the Artemis Program has accelerated rapidly. Multiple robotic support missions are currently in development, and numerous international partners have expressed their interest in participating, including Canada, Japan, and the European Space Agency. Just last year, NASA launched the CAPSTONE cubesat to test the feasibility of the orbit where the Lunar Gateway station will be constructed later this decade. Additionally, SpaceX’s Starship HLS, which will be used to transport Artemis astronauts from the Lunar Gateway to the surface of the moon, is also quickly nearing its first orbital test flight (scheduled for March 2023 as of the writing of this article). And of course, there’s the elephant in the room: SLS and Orion.
The uncrewed test flight of SLS as part of the Artemis 1 mission could not have gone better, and its success has set the stage for future crewed missions. Artemis II, currently scheduled for a 2024 launch, will send an Orion spacecraft with three American and one Canadian astronaut on a flyby of the moon, and Artemis III will finally bring humans back to the lunar surface the following year. Suffice to say, the puzzle pieces are coming together quickly, and the next few years are bound to be as exciting as the Apollo era. However, Artemis will not just be a repeat of Apollo, because this time, the moon will be used as a proving ground for technologies that will allow astronauts to take the next giant leap on Mars.
In closing, I want to leave you with the words of former US president John F. Kennedy. As we set sail on a new era of exploration, President Kennedy’s words echo to us more loudly than ever before:
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.”