According to Nasa, the primary goal of the Artemis II moonshot was “a crewed test flight in lunar space”. This says nothing that was not true of the earlier nine manned moonflights, six of which actually landed astronauts on the lunar surface. So, what makes Artemis II worth all the hype?
First, demonstrate the ability of systems and teams to sustain the crew in the flight environment and through their return to Earth. Second, demonstrate the systems and operations essential to a crewed lunar campaign; this ranges from ground systems to space hardware, and operations spanning from development to launch, flight and recovery. Third, retrieve flight hardware and data to assess performance for future missions. Fourth, show emergency system capabilities and validate procedures such as to abort and rescue. Fifth, verify subsystems and validate data.
Each one of these was the deal in the manned Apollo moonflights—all of which happened in four short years between 1968 and 1972. Nothing manned moved lunarwards thereafter for 54 years. As Nasa struggled with establishment antiscientism, space monies were redirected to missile development in the Cold War. Nasa’s funding plummeted 42 percent from 1966 to 1972, when the Apollo programme ended—and the public mood in the US turned on a dime from cosmic triumphalism after the first 1969 moonlanding to “space fatigue”.
The Apollo 17 crew was the last to be more than 640 km from Earth. Since then, astronauts have only been in low Earth orbits, as a superswarm of communications satellites grew and the International Space Station was placed in orbit. For more than half a century, human spacefaring has stuck close to mater mundi, as if fearfully lashed to her so as not to fall overboard in the stormy cosmic seas. And all this despite having the tried-and-tested technology to get to Luna, hit it running, cast around for moonrocks and moondust, stick national ensigns in the regolith, and speed our way back. And splashdown using a methodology—re-entry thermal protection, parachute sequence, landing velocity, recovery operation—that has not changed a whit in decades.
There has been much hoopla about the distance from Earth that Artemis II covered—406,771 km. In 1970, Apollo 13—that legendary flight that survived an exploding oxygen tank and made its way back to Earth using the slingshot procedure—had covered 400,171 km. This means that Artemis II covered a mere 1.65 percent more distance than Apollo 13. For all the hoopla, Artemis II’s closest approach to the Moon’s surface was a distant 6,545 km, compared to the average of 110 km of the Apollo missions. Apollo 13 itself flew over the Moon’s farside at 251 km.
“At their much higher altitude,” Nasa’s Scientific Visualization Studio wrote on April 6, explaining the distance Artemis II kept from the lunar surface, “the crew will be able to see the entire disk of the Moon throughout their flyby.” So Artemis II’s announced USP: a sweeping view, panoptic of the Moon’s farside for all of 40 minutes—armed with, as Nasa says, “a fleet of cameras” and “a variety of digital handheld cameras”.
This has proved to be great for social media dissemination and chest-pounding. But the Nasa statement sounds bizarre in these times of superhigh resolution and AI enhancement: that “one of the most powerful scientific tools for observation are the four pairs of eyes observing lunar features with varying illumination and texture”.
Nor is it the case that the farside of the Moon is unmapped. While about 18 percent of the side has been occasionally visible due to oscillation and libration, it was first seen in its entirety in 1959 following the Soviet Luna 3 unmanned spacecraft’s swingby. Less than a decade later, in 1968, Apollo 8’s astronauts were the first humans to see the farside. Since then, it has been photographed in great detail by several Nasa missions, the motion-blurring and off-focus resolved by photographic stacking to eventually constitute a formidable repository of images.
There is prima facie little that is unique to the Artemis II mission—no explorative uniqueness, arduousness or consequential magnitude. Its mission objectives number 21, flight test objectives 115, demonstration flight test objectives 31. The first are a mix of the usual design, constructional, physiological and methodological testing protocols that have formed the baseline of every manned moonflight, plus some modern-day safety, electronics and communications procedures. The second are purely machine-testing procedures, and the potential limits of their stressability and reliance. The third are routine tasks related to water, physiology, cabin pressure, etc. Most of these tests and exercises have been carried out routinely at the International Space Station for 28 years.
Cost is not the issue here: each Artemis launch costs $4.1 billion, with the total Artemis programme to cost more than $125 billion until the planned Artemis IV moonlanding in 2025. Artemis II’s cost works out to four days’ worth of spending on the US’s war on Iran. It isn’t a puny spend, but it won’t break the bank.
Artemis II is an essential PR job dressed-up as prodigious science. It is a run-up to a Nasa moonbase project planned for 2029-32—with the cost to be borne largely by American taxpayers and supplemented by international and private-sector partners.
Kajal Basu | Veteran journalist
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)