When the Apollo 17 astronauts returned from the moon in 1972, they couldn’t have known that they would be the last humans to travel deep into outer space for more than 50 years. But no astronauts have ventured beyond Earth orbit since, even as Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden have all planned lunar missions. Finally, NASA is preparing to send people back to the moon on the Artemis II flight, scheduled to lift off in the fall of 2025. Why has it been so difficult?
This new mission is similar to the Apollo 8 flight of 1968, when three people circled the moon without landing and then traveled back to Earth. Artemis II will send four astronauts on a 10-day trip around the moon on the first crewed test of NASA’s new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion space capsule. Although the U.S. has had decades to get better at such journeys, the upcoming trip resembles its mid-century cousin in that it will be far from easy.
Choosing to do things “not because they are easy but because they are hard” is part of the rationale President John F. Kennedy gave in a famous 1962 speech trying to galvanize support for the Apollo program. And what was true then remains so today—in fact, reaching the moon may be even more difficult than it was decades ago.
NASA’s Artemis program has been plagued by long delays, cost overruns and surprise problems. It has those in common with many terrestrial programs, such as subway upgrades and highway construction, which also seem to take much longer, and often cost much more, than they did in the (dubiously) good old days. Is it really harder to build great things now? And when it comes to the moon, why should replicating a feat the U.S. accomplished more than half a century ago take so long?
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