The Uncomfortable Truths of American Spaceflight
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, many, many more 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 , 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 NASA to land Americans on the, 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 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.
