Artemis II mission's NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Christina Koch, Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen and NASA astronaut Victor Glover pose for a group photo after viewing the Orion spacecraft off the coast of California on Saturday.NASA/Bill Ingalls/Reuters
Readers of a certain age will remember a common rhetorical device that framed the ambition and competence required to pull off lunar exploration as more than mere achievement. They were a reminder of what was possible. For example, “if we can put a man on the moon, we can [fill in your favourite cause or biggest peeve].”
The expression dropped out of the popular lexicon as the moon landings receded into history. But the Artemis II mission, which splashed down safely Friday, should serve to reinvigorate the same – though less gendered – spirit.
If those astronauts can fly around the moon and travel farther from Earth than any other person has done, imagine what else humanity can achieve.
Photos taken on the journey include a reminder of one of the biggest items on the collective to-do list. It’s hard not to see one image – a blue dot of life, hanging in the inky cosmos – as anything other than a symbol of the grandeur and fragility of earth, and our responsibility to take care of it.
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The Artemis mission could one day lead to colonies on the moon, or Mars, which would be amazing achievements. But space will remain a terribly hostile place for humans. While some small numbers might one day live on another planet, we might, in the meantime, want to consider protecting the one we already inhabit.
Unfortunately, the planet is under growing strain.
The past decade was the warmest on record. A sustained increase in the global temperature of more than 1.5 degree above preindustrial levels, long seen as a tipping point, appears increasingly inevitable.
Summer ice in the Arctic is thinning by about 12 per cent a decade, NASA says. Rising seas could imperil 100 million buildings, according to a McGill University study.
These changes risk making large areas of the world unlivable. Addressing the threat will be hard, but it is doable. And the original moon missions provide a sort of road map.
When U.S. president John F. Kennedy announced the moonshot, in 1962, he acknowledged the scale of the difficulty, laid out specific goals and warned that the average person would have to pay more to achieve them. He put the task in terms anyone could understand – rocket engines with the power of 10,000 cars being floored – while promising technological breakthroughs yet to be invented.
The 64-year-old speech can be found online and is well worth a watch. It was a mix of practicality and optimism, but the overarching theme was a sense of determined purpose. The United States wasn’t going to the moon some day. They were going – and coming back safely – that decade. It was going to cost the average person, but the benefits to science and national prestige would be immense.
“That challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win,” Kennedy said.
The Apollo program cost the equivalent of $310-billion (U.S.), adjusted for inflation. Three of its astronauts died during a prelaunch test. But the country persevered. Less than seven years after Kennedy made his speech, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking on the moon.
Contrast Kennedy’s clarity of purpose with the muddled approach countries take to climate change. Any sense that people would have to pay or change their way of life to achieve a better planet is studiously ignored. Goals are vague, or unrealistic, and decades in the future. A 30-year plan that doesn’t have rigorous milestones along the way is more of a fantasy than a plan.
Imagine a leader that would level with voters, explaining the risk of climate change in terms they can understand and convincing them of the need for action. Going to the moon required the patience to work toward a goal, the discipline not to get sidetracked and the willingness to dedicate the necessary resources.
The challenges facing humanity can seem impossibly hard. Insurmountable, even. But then, so once was slipping the bonds of gravity and rocketing into space.
Space missions lay the groundwork for discoveries and journeys that could be lifetimes away, breakthroughs as yet unimagined. And they give people licence to dream big today. The ambition and determination of space travel is reason to believe that humanity can achieve great things.
If we can fly around the moon, we can come to grips with climate change.