From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject The Uncomfortable Truths of American Spaceflight
Date November 15, 2021 5:35 AM
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[The Artemis program didn’t transpire because a bunch of lunar
scientists got together in a room and decided to do it; it exists
because Trump sought to bolster his presidential legacy.]
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THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTHS OF AMERICAN SPACEFLIGHT  
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Marina Koren
November 10, 2021
The Atlantic
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_ The Artemis program didn’t transpire because a bunch of lunar
scientists got together in a room and decided to do it; it exists
because Trump sought to bolster his presidential legacy. _

,

 

Update your calendars, everyone: NASA isn’t going to put people on
the moon in 2024. The space agency announced yesterday that it is now
aiming to send a crew to orbit the moon, Apollo 8 style, in May 2024,
and then land astronauts on the surface, à la Apollo 11, sometime in
2025.

If your reaction to this news is something like, _Wait a second,
what? NASA is trying to land people on the moon again?_—that’s
fine. There are many
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pressing matters to occupy Americans’ minds than what NASA may or
may not be doing, and when. The Biden administration isn’t really
talking it up either.

The current moon effort is called Artemis, named for Apollo’s sister
in Greek mythology, and it arose during the Trump administration:
After NASA officials made clear
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to Donald Trump’s annoyance, that they couldn’t pull off a Mars
landing before the end of his first term, the president pivoted to the
moon, and in 2019 directed
[[link removed]] NASA
to land Americans on the lunar surface in 2024, shaving four years off
the agency’s then-goal of 2028. The Biden administration embraced
the Artemis program in February and, until now, NASA had held onto
2024
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reworking the previous administration’s promise to take “the next
man and the first woman” to the moon to “the first woman and the
first person of color.” The White House has barely breathed a word
of it all year. President Joe Biden hasn’t publicly name-checked the
program, and during a speech
[[link removed]] at NASA’s Goddard
Space Flight Center in Maryland last week, Vice President Kamala
Harris mentioned only one moon landing—one that happened more than
50 years ago.

NASA is “getting geared up to go,” Bill Nelson, the NASA
administrator under Biden, told reporters with enthusiasm yesterday,
to plant another flag, to build habitats, to take what astronauts
learn on the lunar surface and use it for future missions to Mars.
Americans haven’t visited the moon since 1972, and the remnants of
the Apollo landings sit like ghostly ruins
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American flags bleached white by the sun’s rays, the boot prints
still etched into the regolith, the rovers coated in a thin layer of
moon dust. That’s right: Astronauts actually drove on the moon
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a century ago. If NASA could do all that then, repeating a moon
landing now—with all the computing power and other technological
advances that humanity has amassed in the accruing years—seems like
it should be a breeze.

But as the new delay shows, it’s not. NASA and its commercial
contractors are developing an arsenal of new equipment for these
missions—rocket, lander, life-support systems—and they have a
tremendous amount of work left to do. The spacesuits that NASA began
developing in 2007 won’t be ready
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at least 2025. The agency is not entirely starting from
scratch—after all, it did this 50 years ago!—but the effort to
return to the moon seems almost like a hassle now. So why is America
going back at all?

In the 1960s, NASA had the budget, the political will, and the Cold
War momentum to sprout a moon program and pull off a landing in a span
of eight years. Some administrations since President John F.
Kennedy’s have vowed to return—George W. Bush, for example, called
for a landing in 2020—but the special circumstances that fueled the
Apollo era have vanished. NASA’s funding accounts for just half a
percent of the annual federal budget, compared with the 4.5 percent
the agency enjoyed during the Apollo days. At every presidential
election, NASA braces for a new shift in directive; Barack Obama took
a “been there, done that” stance
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the moon, before Trump pivoted
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back.

John Logsdon, a longtime space historian who attended the Apollo 11
launch, once told me
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the national drive that fueled the Apollo era has weakened. “That
impulse is certainly less widespread than it was 50 years ago,” he
said. And indeed, our motivations for traveling beyond Earth seem less
intuitive now. In my years as a space reporter, most of the questions
that have framed my stories about the American space effort have been
fairly straightforward. _Who?_ NASA usually, but, more often these
days, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. _What?_ A rocket, a rover, a
telescope. _When?_ T-minus minutes for a rocket, seven months for a
Mars-bound probe, years for one heading to Jupiter. _Where?_ A
launchpad in Cape Canaveral, inside the rings of Saturn, beyond the
asteroid belt. The _why_ has often been more difficult to pin down,
particularly for the risky, expensive missions that involve putting a
human being on board. But there has always been a feeling of certainty
in it. Now that human beings have figured out how to leave the planet
and go somewhere else, why would we stop?

A few motivations drive American space travel today, some old and some
new: national prestige, geopolitical power, economic opportunity,
scientific knowledge. But space exploration can achieve each of those
goals only to a limited extent. Certain American politicians warn of a
new space race with China, but exploration projects these days rely
more on international cooperation
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The private sector is developing missions to mine the moon for
resources, but the commercial market for them doesn’t yet exist
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Some argue that space travel can lead to better technology on Earth,
but that’s difficult to imagine now, when the most recent flashy
development on the International Space Station consisted of tacos
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with green chiles the crew grew on board. And science and discovery,
perhaps the purest motivations, are subject to political whims. The
Artemis program didn’t transpire because a bunch of lunar scientists
got together in a room and decided to do it; it exists because Trump
sought to bolster his presidential legacy.

Ignoring the reality of America’s ambivalence toward space travel is
becoming much more difficult. Public-opinion surveys in recent years
have shown that Americans want the country to prioritize other kinds
of space activities; in a Morning Consult poll
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in February, survey participants said the United States should focus
more on climate-change research and the study of asteroids that could
strike Earth. Only 8 percent said sending astronauts to the moon
should be a top priority, and 7 percent said the same for a mission to
Mars. Gil Scott-Heron’s words in “Whitey on the Moon,” from
1970, still resonate: “Can’t pay no doctor bill / But Whitey’s
on the moon / 10 years from now I’ll be payin’ still / While
Whitey’s on the moon.”

For years, NASA has insisted that Americans cared about space
exploration anyway, and presented the Apollo effort as a product of
national unity. (It wasn’t
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polling shows that the moon program was unpopular for most of the
1960s, with the exception of a survey conducted in the immediate
aftermath of the Apollo 11 landing.) As one space-policy wonk told me
recently: “They’ve been coasting on the fact that a significant
amount of people think that space is cool and they don’t have to
argue why they do this.”

During yesterday’s call with reporters, Nelson, the NASA
administrator, gave a hodgepodge of the usual reasons for a moon
mission: bolstering scientific discovery, providing economic benefits,
inspiring future generations of scientists and engineers, beating
another nation to it. This time it’s China, which seeks to land its
own astronauts on the moon soon. “We have every reason to believe
that we have a very aggressive competitor in the Chinese,” Nelson
said, and “we want to be the first back.” But by trying to
highlight the appeal of space travel on all fronts, NASA risks making
its rationale so amorphous that it appeals to no one. Over the years,
I’ve spoken with many people who think deeply about space travel,
and when I ask some of them about the _why_s, they admit, a little
sheepishly, that there might be no compelling reason to send people
into space—robots, yes, but people, maybe not. They seem hesitant to
even say it aloud, as if to do so were blasphemous. But we shouldn’t
be afraid to examine why that is, and even dwell on the ambivalence.
And the truth is that the reasons are not so clear.

In the end, NASA doesn’t need to sell the greater public on a moon
mission, only congressional lawmakers who decide budgets. And the
agency has tied its future in space to entrepreneurs who don’t
really need to provide a rationale to the public either. The CEOs of
space companies are not beholden to American taxpayers, even though
their companies benefit from taxpayer money (and they can make penis
jokes to millions of people on the internet
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being fired). Until recently, the Artemis effort was tangled up in a
turf war
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Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk: Bezos’s Blue Origin had sued
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over the agency’s decision to pick Musk’s SpaceX to build lander
technology for Artemis missions. Blue Origin had pitched its own
lander too, and the company accused NASA of a “flawed” selection
process. NASA said it couldn’t work with SpaceX until the conflict
was resolved last week, when a judge ruled against Blue Origin’s
claim. Now that the matter is settled, Nelson said that he and his
leadership team will visit SpaceX’s facilities in South Texas early
next year to inspect the technology that might put Americans on the
moon again in 2025.

When you consider their motivations for space exploration, NASA and
SpaceX are an unusual pairing. Musk, as I’ve written before
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can talk forever about the urgency of turning humankind into a
multiplanetary species without incurring much resistance. NASA, a
government agency, can’t rely on such fringe ideas. Public officials
must trot out the usual reasoning that has underpinned the American
space effort since its beginnings, and present the wonder of space
travel as proof that “we can meet any challenge” on Earth, as
Biden said
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American leaders have ridden this logic for 50 years. In the next 50,
they might have to accept that it isn’t as compelling as they think,
and that the American populace might prefer some more earthly proof
first.

_MARINA KOREN is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She covers all things
space._

_THE ATLANTIC. Be surprised. Be challenged. Be a subscriber.
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