NASA’s Artemis II spacecraft is due to splash down in the Pacific Ocean off California on Saturday morning, ending a 10-day mission to the moon that should have brought heavenly joy to the heart of humanity.
Back on Earth, we’ve been distracted by joyless events that cast shadows on the light and dark sides of the moon.
We had not been there since the Apollo program ended in 1972, three years after Apollo 11 landed on the moon on July 20, 1969. The following day the Herald’s front page headline was reverent in its simplicity: “MEN ON MOON U.S. astronauts open a new era for mankind.”
On April Fool’s Day, the US returned, sending four astronauts on a journey around the moon.
NASA is counting on the Artemis II test flight to kickstart the entire Artemis program and lead to a landing on the moon’s south pole by two astronauts in 2028. China plans a crewed mission to the same lunar region as early as 2030.
After nearly three years of training, the three men and one woman crew is the first to fly in NASA’s Artemis program, a multibillion-dollar venture established in 2017 to use the moon as a stepping stone to Mars. Astronauts tested deep-space systems – life support, navigation and heat shielding – to prepare for future landings and conducted human health studies and geological observations. They also tried their hand at manually piloting the spacecraft.
Rightly, the flight is a remarkable achievement and a reminder of the brilliance of Yankee know-how and American exceptionalism at a time when goodwill to the US has crashed and plummeted to earth.
But whatever glory Artemis restores to the US, President Donald Trump can take little credit.
Soon after he was re-elected, Trump tried to cut NASA’s overall funding by 23 per cent and slice nearly 50 per cent of science programs until a rare bipartisan display in Congress stopped him last January.
Not to be denied, Trump displayed his petulant sense of bad timing and waited until Artemis II lifted off to resell the budget cuts, with the space industry warning of disruptions or cancellations to dozens of missions spanning planetary science, astrophysics and Earth observation.
It is absurd that the nation that has taken humans to the moon is also responsible for the madness that currently haunts the planet.
Trump, in concert with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, bombed Iran and plunged the Middle East and beyond into utter turmoil, recreating a scared new world of uncertainty.
Onboard Artemis II, the four astronauts looking back at the Earth cannot see borders, but their mission, a thing of beauty and human aspirations, provides the opportunity to both see our world from a distance, yet see ourselves more clearly.
On Saturday, the crew face the gravest danger of their journey during the final 15 minutes when they’ll scorch through the Earth’s atmosphere, relying on a 7.5 centimetre-thick heat shield that failed its last test. Humanity is on their wing with a prayer.
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