Contra Leo Zaroff on Artemis II

Artemis II is awesome and exciting. Basically none of that excitement is from the firsts it achieved or the records it set. It’s exciting because “Oh my gosh look at those pictures!” and “Space! Rockets! Whoooosh! Nyooomm!”

In case you are out of the loop somehow, Artemis II is the first crewed mission to fly around the Moon in over 50 years. It brought four astronauts: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch from NASA, and Jeremy Hansen from the Canadian Space Agency.

Leo Zaroff, of the current Inkhaven cohort, published a post called “Why Don’t People Care About Artemis II?”. I don’t just disagree with Leo’s premise, I was actively puzzled by it. People care about Artemis II. My relatives and coworkers who aren’t usually “space people” were excited about Artemis II. My overwhelming sense was that Artemis II is the most exciting world event that’s happened so far this year.¹

I’d been looking forward to Artemis II for decades. I remember watching the animations when the Orion capsule was first announced for George W. Bush’s Constellation program. Several canceled missions and project redesigns later, I got to watch the launch live on YouTube. I’m excited not because this mission saw the first woman and black person and Canadian to go to the Moon, nor because it broke the human distance record or brought the first toilet to deep space – though those are nice to have, too, I guess. I’m just excited purely because we finally went back to the Moon!

After 50 friggin’ years!

I get conceptually that people can be not excited about Artemis II. Sometimes I need to take a step back and remind myself that most people don’t know the story of the Apollo Moon Landings. Since you’re reading my blog you probably know at least a bit, but I’ve had to explain to several friends that no one’s been to the Moon since the 70’s, and that the Space Shuttle (and the other post-Apollo space missions) never went farther from the Earth’s surface than Boston is from DC.

Apollo was a miracle of the Cold War.  Our civilization was effectively speed-running landing on the Moon, with two competing superpowers both working toward that goal at the moment when it had just become technologically possible.

But once the US declared victory, the incentive to risk lives and treasure flying to the Moon evaporated.  We made 6 landings (out of 7 attempts), but we didn’t even finish out the entire planned program.  The last three Apollo landings, Apollo 18, 19, and 20, were canceled and their hardware was redirected to Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project – both of which were great programs in their own right, but not the same.

So we’ve had the technology to go to the Moon since at least 1969, when we actually did go to the Moon.  I can tell you about the politics and funding and safety hazards and all the other things that got in the way of us going back to the Moon.  But today I’d rather focus on the part where we actually went back.

Sure, it’s not a landing. Sure, Apollo 8 did a more technically challenging flight path in 1968. But I wasn’t there for Apollo 8. My parents were barely born. About 80% of the world’s population was born after the last Apollo mission.² For most of us, this is our first time we could look at the Moon and know someone was flying up there along with it.

And I have to hand it to the public relations team.  Artemis II had a much higher bandwidth back to Earth than any of the Apollo missions, thanks to an experimental laser communication device supplementing the normal radio transmissions.  But they still had to carefully choose which photographs they’d send back in high resolution – and they chose brilliantly.  The crescent Earth setting behind the lunar surface to hearken back to Apollo 8’s world-famous “Earthrise”.  The full sunlit view of Mare Orientalis, looking like an eye staring at the astronauts.  The eclipse as the capsule passed into the Moon’s shadow – a happy coincidence thanks to the mission’s final April 1st launch.  Plus they had the perfect mascot with them: Rise, the plush “zero gravity indicator” of a cute little Moon with an Earthrise hat.  The marketing was exquisite, and I’m sure that it helped to reach so many more people around the world.

So yes, it’s disappointing that it took this long to replicate an achievement from 1968.  But people went to see the space shuttles launch even once we they’d started numbering into the 3 digits.  Space is awesome, and I’m glad that so many of us are able, at least vicariously, to fly to the Moon once more.

Coming Soon: Going Back: The Khwarazmian Empire