If you’re under the age of 53, no human being has ever left low Earth orbit in your lifetime. Just nine spaceflights, all under the Apollo Program, took human beings beyond Earth orbit at all. And they all took place in a four-year burst between December 1968 and December 1972.
Tonight, NASA attempts to change that.
Artemis II is scheduled to launch at 11.24pm this evening, blasting four astronauts (three Americans and one Canadian) off on a ten-day mission that will take them around the ‘dark’ side of the Moon, before slinging them back to a safe splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
These days, NASA is used to its astronauts tiddling to and from the International Space Station, which orbits the Earth at a distance of a mere 250 miles above our heads. Artemis II will instead take humans to an apogee 250,000 miles from home.
Tonight’s launch is simply in a different category to anything we have seen from any space agency, public or private, since before Britain joined the European Economic Community, the opening of the Sydney Opera House, or the start of impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon. In fact, astonishingly, every single time a human being has left low Earth orbit has been between Richard Nixon’s first election and his impeachment proceedings.
Now, if everything goes to plan, Artemis II will beat the Apollo record for the furthest humans have ever travelled from Earth – travelling 4,600 miles beyond the far side of the Moon.
But it hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows to get here. Under its initial timetable, Artemis was meant to have landed humans back on the Moon two years ago, in 2024. Tight money from Congress delayed development. And the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that will launch tonight has been riddled with issues.
Compared to the reusable rockets being developed by private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, the expendable SLS looks like the last gasp of a bygone era, when spaceflight was far more expensive – precisely because it lacked the innovation that only genuine competition creates. When the taxpayer is footing the bill, you end up throwing away your rocket every time you use it.
The SLS looks like a rocket from the past, mainly because it largely is. A hodge podge of older technology, Artemis II will fly on four RS-25 engines inherited from the Space Shuttle, which first flew in 1981, and on two shuttle-derived solid rocket boosters. Its striking orange Boeing-built core stage is the only main structural element developed as new in the 21st century.
Indeed, sadly, Artemis’s SLS can send only about 27 tonnes towards the Moon. This compares with the Apollo Program’s Saturn V, which could hurl roughly 45 tonnes onto a trans-lunar trajectory.
NASA has previously boasted about procuring elements of the SLS from suppliers across all 50 states and Puerto Rico. While this helps sell the project in Congress, this is not the most cost-effective way to build a Moon rocket. Perhaps that is part of the reason why Artemis quickly evolved into a programme in which the landing craft would be commercially developed rather than built and owned by NASA.
If Artemis II goes to plan over the next ten days, Artemis III will next year fly another identical rocket in order to test docking in space with one or both of the (as yet unbuilt) commercial landing crafts. Artemis IV will then aim to land on the lunar surface in 2028, as the first mission in a series of landings that will begin to build a permanent base on the Moon.
And yet, for all the waste and bureaucratic bloat behind it, Artemis II still matters hugely. And for all the criticisms that could be made of NASA over recent years, I will still feel a shiver when those engines ignite, setting humans back on course to a frontier abandoned half a century ago.
Perhaps that is the most extraordinary thing of all: even an overpriced, politically-engineered, expendable relic-rocket can stir the soul and make us look back up to the stars. This is a necessary step in the new space age. Going back to the Moon rips open once more that raw ambition, hope and excitement that Apollo once gave the world. And this time, private enterprise will help keep us there.
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