Had the polar chill eased its grip on America’s eastern seaboard and if a hydrogen leak had not intervened, Artemis II would have lifted off from Cape Canaveral, US this weekend to put four-member crew in orbit around the moon, a preliminary step to putting astronauts on the lunar surface. The serially-delayed Artemis mission has now been pushed to March. But there is no sense of disappointment in the space industry, the US government or enthusiasts worldwide. What does this signal?
Apollo 11, which put the first men on the moon in 1969, was a mission driven by Cold War rivalry. The space race was on, the USSR had put a dog, a man and a woman in orbit, and the US needed to pull a more dramatic stunt. Such a sense of urgency is missing today in a project that initially was to take flight in November 2024.
Perhaps it’s because space is no longer a State monopoly and its role as a marker of national prowess is diluted. Perhaps the US doesn’t believe it is in a contest, or feels it has anything to prove. That is what the present administration in Washington had said when it sought election, before it became embroiled in tariff wars and other shows of strength.
But there’s the human factor: what do the majority expect from a moonshot when things are falling apart? Days before the Artemis II launch was deferred, the Doomsday Clock was set forward to 85 seconds to midnight―the closest it has ever been to that hour. The clock, created by the scientists who built the first nuclear weapons, is a visual expression of the proximity of the human race to self-annihilation, graphically represented by the clock striking midnight. In 2025, it was set to 89 seconds to midnight as “national leaders and their societies” had failed to change course away from the precipice.
The Doomsday Clock was originally set to seven minutes to midnight in 1947, after World War 2 was ended by nuclear bombings and the colonial era began to unravel. It was advanced to three minutes to midnight in 1949, when the USSR tested its first atom bomb at Semipalatinsk, and it held steady in 1950 despite the Korean War. It was advanced by a minute in 1953, after the US tested a hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll and the USSR matched its achievement nine months later.
In the 1960s, as the world agreed upon the importance of limiting nuclear weapons and testing, the clock moved back again to 7 minutes and even 12 minutes to midnight in the early 1970s―marking the end of atmospheric testing and the era of SALT I, the anti-ballistic-missile treaty, and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
In 1974, Indira Gandhi ordered the Pokhran I test and the clock jittered forward to nine minutes to midnight. It reached three minutes to midnight in 1984, when the Reagan administration sought space-based anti-ballistic-missile systems. The collapse of the Soviet Union lulled threat perceptions, and the next spike was provided by the Vajpayee government’s Pokhran II test in 1998, and Pakistan’s answer. The clock was again at nine minutes to midnight, and it was blamed on the leadership failure of the US and Russia in disarmament.
The two countries had the largest nuclear weapon inventories. This is still the case, and the clock has again been moved forward due to their leadership failure. Meanwhile, China and India have acquired strategic and economic importance to enter the lists, and their leadership isn’t in great health either.
Last year, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which sets the Doomsday Clock, had warned of multiple threats facing human civilisation―what the World Economic Forum acknowledges as a ‘polycrisis’. They include immediate threats like the US abdicating its leadership responsibility in climate action and choosing fossil fuels. Also, AI companies should have been regulated instead of being treated like freestyle prize-fighters in an international technology tournament. Relatively distant concerns also figured, like ‘mirror life’, based on molecules that are chirally opposite to those found in nature―such life forms can run amok, but they don’t exist yet.
This year, the clock has been advanced because the world’s leadership has ignored last year’s cautions and has intensified competition instead of cooperation. Tariff wars, threats to territorial sovereignty, indifference to the rule of law, the growing irrelevance of multilateral organisations and the celebration of muscular nationalism and might-is-right politics are urging smaller nations to arm themselves, perhaps even with nuclear weapons. In an order dominated by the strong, everyone else will try to bridge the difference.
Perhaps Artemis II does not spark the world’s imagination like Apollo 11 did because our civilisation is fundamentally changed. The way to the moon leads to Mars, and then to human habitation and industry on other worlds. In 1969, this was an inclusive story, and space exploration was understood to be for the benefit of all. Now, in a world of deepening inequalities, it’s hard to believe that the most powerful will not get the first tickets out―perhaps after reducing the world to a dystopia. If the rest of humanity doesn’t have a stake in space, no wonder they don’t care about moonshots.
Pratik Kanjilal | SPEAKEASY | Senior Fellow, Henry J Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, Fletcher School, Tufts University
(Views are personal)
(Tweets @pratik_k)