Talk about bad timing. Just as NASA finally pulled off one of those rare, cleansing acts of human achievement that make our species seem worth the trouble, the planet was busy doom-scrolling the Strait of Hormuz: oil panic, war and prospect of a global food crisis.
Into that murk came Artemis II, lifting off from Kennedy Space Center on 1 April and sending four human beings back toward the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. A civilisational achievement, blunted by civilisational crisis.
It should have owned the week. Instead, it became, in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph editor Ben English’s vast understatement “a welcome distraction” from the infernal news cycle.
Still, what a distraction. Artemis II was not a landing mission, but it was far from ceremonial. NASA designed it as a 10-day crewed test of the whole deep-space stack – the Space Launch System rocket (SLS), the Orion capsule, life-support systems, abort capability, crew operations, navigation, recovery, and the sheer business of keeping four people alive, functioning and useful beyond low Earth orbit.
Then after a translunar injection burn on 2 April (the rocket-engine firing that sends a spacecraft out of Earth orbit and onto a path to the Moon), Orion broke free, looped around the Moon on a free-return trajectory, and came home to splash down off San Diego on 10 April. Along the way, the crew broke the record for the farthest human spaceflight, reaching about 252,756 miles from Earth.
At a period in world politics where DEI is, er, under pressure, the crew itself was conspicuously rainbow-ish. Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian mission specialist Jeremy Hansen formed what NASA itself presented as a mission of several firsts: the first woman, the first person of colour and the first Canadian on a lunar mission. Hansen was also the first non-American to fly to the Moon’s vicinity.
So why did we stop doing this half a century ago? The visceral answer is that the Moon lost its mystery. The real answer is more drab and more revealing – politics, budgets, and purpose. NASA’s budget peaked in 1966 and was already declining before Apollo had even finished its job. Apollo 20 was cancelled because its Saturn V was needed for Skylab, and NASA had already shut down the Saturn V production line in 1968. Then budget cuts killed two more missions in 1970. In other words, the lunar programme did not end because America had exhausted the engineering challenge. It ended because (and excuse the pun) – the geopolitical, financial and curiosity stars no longer aligned.
But they do now.
Privatisation
The driving force is privatisation. The Artemis programme is architecturally different from Apollo in one critical respect: it does not belong solely to NASA. It is a public–private hybrid, and increasingly, the private component is the one doing the heavy lifting.
The origins of this shift trace back to the Obama administration’s 2010 decision to cancel what was then called the Constellation programme and direct NASA to purchase services from commercial launch providers rather than build everything in-house. That decision saved SpaceX from near-bankruptcy and injected venture capital into the space industry at scale.
The consequences have been transformative. SpaceX now dominates the US launch market, conducts five of every six American orbital missions, and generated approximately $8 billion in profit in 2025. Its Falcon 9 is arguably the most reliable orbital rocket in history. And of course there is Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, quietly spending billions towards the same goal, a little behind perhaps, but also building.
That single decision from the Obama administration has resulted in the biggest economic fuel of all – affordability, borne of private industry ingenuity instead of the bloat of state-sponsored project torpor. The future of Artemis will be a hybrid. NASA sets the safety envelope and national objective; the companies bring pace, reusability, continuous improvement, manufacturing aggression and at least some of their own capital.
NASA’s public case is that the Moon is a practice ground, laboratory, logistics hub and diplomatic platform for Mars and beyond. And so NASA now has the “Artemis Accords” with 61 country signatories (this is anon-binding international framework for how countries should behave in civil space exploration, especially around the Moon, Mars and other deep-space destinations), giving the programme an international political wrapper that Apollo never really needed.
This is against a backdrop of a new race. Reuters reports that NASA’s recent announcement of the new Artemis programme was driven in part by the need to beat China’s planned crewed lunar push around 2030.
Roadmap has changed
As for the next three Artemis missions, the roadmap has changed significantly in the past few weeks. Under NASA’s updated 2026 architecture, Artemis III is now a 2027 low-Earth-orbit demonstration mission rather than the first landing. Its job is to test rendezvous and docking between Orion and one or both commercial landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin, along with integrated checks of life support, communications, propulsion and the new lunar suits.
Artemis IV, targeted for early 2028, becomes the first crewed lunar landing of the new era, with astronauts heading to the south polar region.
Artemis V, planned for late 2028, is another surface mission and – according to NASA’s current plan – the point at which work begins on an actual Moon base. In other words – first dock, then land, then build.
The political and commercial barriers – sustaining the will, the funding, and the institutional coherence across administrations – are, as they have always been, the harder problem. The Moon is not going anywhere. Whether humanity’s return to it is permanent this time, or once again a chapter that ends prematurely, depends less on rocket science than on whether the US can hold its national attention long enough to finish what it started.
If not, NASA will lose primacy once again.
And then the entire space race will be between US private industries like SpaceX and Blue Origin, and the aggressive state-sponsored aspirations of a looming China.
Meanwhile…Iran, Lebanon, Hormuz. Ukraine, Trump. Sigh.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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