NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, right, at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Monday.Bill Ingalls/The Associated Press
In going back to the moon, the United States is going back to the future.
Back to a future when space travel occupied the inviting far horizon of possibility, a future full of human daring and national purpose, a future where exploration and adventure − the very traits that prompted countless anthems to the country’s heritage − were the essence of the American character.
John F. Kennedy, the young president who set the country on its original mission to the moon, didn’t live to see the realization of his dream, fortified as it was by Cold War anxieties and rivalries. It was his great rival, Richard Nixon, who was in the White House to speak of “the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.”
For a decade − a tumultuous period otherwise marked by civil-rights strife, the divisive Vietnam War and generational tensions − the country had a goal bigger than mere prosperity and frightening power politics. It had its lunar objective and its heroes, too: first, Alan Shepard and John Glenn and Wally Schirra, the men in the silvery suits of Project Mercury; then the space walkers and rendezvous artists of Project Gemini; and finally Project Apollo and Neil Armstrong, whose giant leap for mankind was supposed to be the stepping stone to other planets and beyond.
Artemis II moon mission launch set for April 1
In the last year of the chaotic 1960s, an embattled country had achieved the seemingly unattainable, reaching a heavenly body that inspired fertility rites, influenced calendars and ruled the daily lives of early peoples, long forgotten, whose dreams nonetheless persisted.
One of the countless millions whose perspective and life trajectory were changed was the nine-year-old Chris Hadfield. That July day 56 years ago led to Mr. Hadfield spending 165 days in Earth orbit and becoming the first Canadian to perform a walk in space.
One of the astronauts headed back to the moon in the Artemis II mission’s Orion capsule will be Jeremy Hansen, born in London, Ont., seven years after Apollo 11. His presence in this mission prompts another back-to-the-future reflection − one of warm U.S.-Canada relations that was unchallenged in 1969.
Another whose life was transformed was Carl Walz, who logged 231 days of spaceflight over the course of four space shuttle missions between 1993 and 2002. “That moon-landing mission made me want to fly in space,” Mr. Walz said in an interview. “That feat shaped my entire academic career and life. And it changed the way we think about science.”
Now, with Artemis, artfully named for Apollo’s twin sister, America’s view toward the heavens is being transformed again.
What to know about NASA’s historic Artemis II moon mission
Engulfed in another controversial war, governed by a president even more divisive than Mr. Nixon, preoccupied with gasoline prices and worried about inflation, the country can still embrace a phrase from Mr. Kennedy’s youngest brother, Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. It was in his soaring convention speech, after he lost the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination, that he bellowed, “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”
In truth, the dream of voyages to the heavens never really died, it just grew dormant as the world, blasé, even bored with space achievement, hardly paid attention to the normalization of space travel, except of course when disaster struck with Apollo 13 (the crew escaped death after an explosion aboard the spacecraft), Challenger (the space shuttle broke apart 73 seconds into its mission) and Columbia (whose crew died in re-entry).
It was Mr. Nixon who struck the final three Apollo missions from the NASA agenda. He paid no political price for it; there were budget pressures, and the space agency failed to make the case to press on into the cosmos. “The reason humans have not been to Mars is, essentially, the result of a marketing failure,” wrote David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek in the 2014 book Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program.
Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen will be the first Canadian to fly beyond low Earth orbit. Hansen explains the stages of the Artemis II, a mission that will fly astronauts around the Moon’s far side.
In fact, lunar exploration was a mirror image of an earlier great adventure: polar exploration. It took almost as long, 45 years, for humans to return to the South Pole after Roald Amundsen reached it in 1911.
“There were geopolitical conditions that drove the space race in the 1960s,” said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. “Today, the world is different, and there are different competitive and co-operative forces driving the return to the moon.”
Now space travel has a new dawn, if not, to employ a slogan from the Kennedy years, a new frontier.
“With Artemis II, the United States is again showing the world its technological prowess,” said Douglas Brinkley, the Rice University professor and author of the 2019 book American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race. “This is the ingenuity of the U.S. writ large. Despite all its problems globally, space policy remains the enduring symbol of American innovation on behalf of mankind.”
The original lunar-landing module carried two large American flags, the flags of the 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories and those of the United Nations and other countries, including Canada. (Another Canadian flag was carried on Apollo 17 in December, 1972.)
The plaque the Apollo astronauts left on the moon said the delegates from a battle-scarred country at war on Earth “came in peace for all mankind.” The hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.