to the moon
Apr. 2nd, 2026 08:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacSo NASA has launched its Artemis II rocket to carry four astronauts on a non-orbital lunar flyby. I was a little startled by the news that this has actually launched, because the news on it has been very subdued. For something that's intended mainly as a publicity stunt, that's doing it wrong. Have there, for instance, been profile articles on the individual astronauts? Not in the news sources I read.
Leaving aside the question of whether this is what we should be spending our money on - a question raised with just as much urgency over the first lunar program - what most concerns me is a point raised by Jared Isaacman, the NASA director. He said it's not a successful mission until they safely splash down. He's right, and the same was said about the first lunar-era missions as well. But it was NASA's extreme operational competence which made those missions run mostly properly, and which saved the astronauts the not once (Apollo 13) but twice (Gemini 8) that equipment failure created potentially deadly situations. It's been over 50 years since we last sent a lunar mission, and since then we've twice lost crews in space, which never happened in the first lunar days. A lunar mission is a proposition of extreme risk requiring precision handling. Has NASA recovered its extreme competence? If the Artemis crew return safely, it probably has: it won't be just luck that gets them back. Let's hope they do.
Leaving aside the question of whether this is what we should be spending our money on - a question raised with just as much urgency over the first lunar program - what most concerns me is a point raised by Jared Isaacman, the NASA director. He said it's not a successful mission until they safely splash down. He's right, and the same was said about the first lunar-era missions as well. But it was NASA's extreme operational competence which made those missions run mostly properly, and which saved the astronauts the not once (Apollo 13) but twice (Gemini 8) that equipment failure created potentially deadly situations. It's been over 50 years since we last sent a lunar mission, and since then we've twice lost crews in space, which never happened in the first lunar days. A lunar mission is a proposition of extreme risk requiring precision handling. Has NASA recovered its extreme competence? If the Artemis crew return safely, it probably has: it won't be just luck that gets them back. Let's hope they do.
