Lunar Aspirations: The Quest for Moon Exploration and the Delays Behind It

In November 2022, a dormant Florida trembled under the thunderous roar of the world’s most powerful rocket – NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS).

Producing 8.8 million pounds of thrust at takeoff, it transformed night into day, surpassing the Saturn V as the largest, most robust and most formidable machine ever constructed.

Its uncrewed Artemis I flight test propelled an Orion capsule on a 25-day, 2 million km (1.3 million mile) journey around the Moon – the first instance in five decades that a deep-space mission was undertaken by a craft designed for astronauts.

Artemis I provided a much-needed booster for NASA’s ambition to bring humans back to our nearest celestial companion by 2024.

Regrettably, that esteemed deadline has elapsed.

Artemis’s sluggish advancement, years of development spanning a decade, and astonishing $93 billion expenditure contrast unfavorably with our previous lunar expedition – Project Apollo.

At that time, the Saturn V progressed from blueprints to the launch pad in six years, swiftly transitioning in 20 months from its 1967 debut flight to astronauts on the Moon by 1969.

It’s difficult to overlook the harsh factual reality: Artemis is taking significantly longer to traverse from A to B than Apollo did.

Chronicle of the Apollo missions

A deeper examination of Apollo’s history reveals an alternate narrative.

In 1961, the Soviet Union, once derided as a makeshift nation of potato cultivators, surged to the forefront of technology by launching the initial artificial satellite, sending live animals into space, and dispatching probes to the Moon.

These successes sparked troubling fears in America regarding a perceived ‘gap’ in missile development expertise.

If Russia held advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles, they could target American cities with impunity.

No such missile gap truly existed, yet technological victories provided the Soviets with a propaganda lance to utilize enthusiastically.

In April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first individual in space. President John F. Kennedy needed to restore US national pride – and swiftly.

In May, his intentions were made public. America would send a man to the Moon by 1970.

Kennedy was well aware that the Soviets eagerly pursued the same objective. NASA’s budget increased to meet the challenge, rising from 0.9% of federal spending in 1961 to 4.4% by 1966.

However, an unpopular conflict in Vietnam and social upheaval domestically – with issues such as racial inequality, poverty, rodent infestations in Harlem flats, uneducated youth, and the assassination of Martin Luther King – shifted public sentiment.

During the subsequent years post-1966, NASA’s funding experienced a gradual decline.

After achieving victory in the Moon race in 1969 with Apollo 11, the program faced abrupt changes: two Apollo missions were canceled, the Saturn V production line was dismantled, and aspirations for Moon and Mars bases were abandoned in favor of the Shuttle – a more cost-effective spacecraft.

The Shuttle period

Enhanced détente with the Soviets eliminated the necessity for a Space Race, drawing successive presidents away from lunar ambitions.

However, following the tragic loss of Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986, Sally Ride, the first woman astronaut of the United States, led a committee to outline NASA’s future.

Her Ride Report advocated for a lunar base housing a 30-member crew by 2010 and a Martian expedition in the 2020s.

By 1989, this vision had evolved into the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI), a multi-decade “journey into the future,” encompassing a Moon base alongside a Mars mission.

Then came the catch: it would require $500 billion. The fragile foundation of political backing crumbled.

NASA shifted its focus toward robotic exploration, adopting a ‘Faster, Better, Cheaper’ ethos that rendered human lunar missions infeasible.

The national space policy of 1996 made no mention of human expeditions beyond Earth’s orbit.

Subsequently emerged the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) in 2004, proposing a lunar return by 2020 along with new crew capsules, lunar landers, and heavy-lift rockets.

Although criticized as “Apollo on steroids,” VSE did produce tangible flight hardware, including a test launch of an Ares I rocket booster in 2009.

Regrettably, cost overruns derailed VSE. It fell behind schedule, was underfunded, and exceeded budget limits.

In 2010, Barack Obama terminated the initiative, removing the prospect of a human lunar return.

Nevertheless, in 2011, he approved the assembly of the SLS rocket, promoting a crewed mission to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025 and a Mars journey in the 2030s.

The era of Artemis

In 2017, Donald Trump shifted US space policy back toward the Moon.

NASA would now collaborate with international partners to develop a lunar-orbiting Gateway outpost, with commercial enterprises providing payload services, landers, rovers, and space suits.

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In 2019, the Moon mission had a target date: 2024.

It was designated a name: ‘Artemis’, the sibling of Apollo in classical Greek lore.

By focusing on a singular goal, the Moon, NASA circumvented ‘mission creep’, wherein complex ventures tend to accumulate expenses and the likelihood of failure increases.

The involvement of private industry would be crucial to the undertaking.

NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative financed companies to deliver robotic landers and rovers to the Moon prior to human visitation.

However, CLPS began hesitantly. One company exited while several others faced delays due to COVID-19, supply chain disruptions, alterations to landing sites, and various technical issues.

In 2024, Astrobotic’s Peregrine 1 encountered a propellant leak post-launch, thwarting its descent at Gruithuisen Domes on the Moon’s Oceanus Procellarum.

Subsequently, Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 lander landed close to the Malapert-A south pole crater but fractured one of its landing legs, toppled over, and lost power.

Such setbacks are intrinsic to high-risk space exploration. Nevertheless, CLPS persists.

“NASA is executing a broad campaign of lunar science utilizing Moon-orbiting spacecraft, CLPS landings, human missions via the Artemis campaign, and US experiments on international robotic spacecraft,” states Alise Fisher from NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

“The agency has numerous forthcoming missions and payloads aimed at both locating water ice on the Moon and demonstrating our technological abilities to drill for ice if discovered.”

Private sector involvement

As of this writing, Firefly’s Blue Ghost is set to land at Mare Crisium mid-January 2025, and Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 is targeting a south pole landing in February 2025 with its PRIME ice-mining drill and spectrometer.

Astrobotic’s Griffin 1 was planned for a September 2025 mission transporting the VIPER ice-seeking rover, but budget and schedule overruns led NASA to cancel VIPER last July.

With the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates preparing to construct the Gateway in lunar orbit, at least 47 nations across Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Oceania have signed the NASA-led Artemis Accords since 2020, non-binding multilateral agreements aimed at peacefully exploring the Moon.

With renewed focus on a 2024 landing, NASA shifted its approach to a commercial Human Landing System (HLS) developed by private spaceflight companies.

In 2021, SpaceX was selected to construct the lander for Artemis III, marking the first human landing since 1972.

SpaceX is also crafting the HLS for Artemis IV set for a 2028 launch, with Blue Origin chosen for Artemis V in 2030, although both will conduct uncrewed Moon landings before committing to crewed missions.

“Astronauts will search for signs of surface ice in and around small and shallow shadowed craters at the Moon’s south pole during the Artemis III and Artemis IV missions,” asserts Fisher.

“If accessible, ice samples are intended to be collected and returned to Earth by astronauts on the Artemis V mission.”

From 2023, the Starship along with its Super Heavy booster embarked on an iterative development process, progressively testing the spacecraft’s capabilities and gaining as much knowledge from its failures as its successes.

In October of last year, the Super Heavy successfully made a controlled return to the launch pad for the first time, a significant milestone in Starship’s ambition of rapid reusability.

However, part of the strategy for Starship’s HLS system is that it must be refueled in Earth orbit prior to proceeding to the Moon, an extraordinarily complex operation that has yet to be attempted, much less refined.

SpaceX plans to test Starship refueling in 2025, before increasing flight frequency to launches every three weeks.

Yet, congressional oversight agency the General Accounting Office suggests there is merely a 70% probability it will be ready by 2028.

Visions with a deadline

Following Artemis I, NASA anticipated launching the crewed Artemis II around the Moon in November 2024, followed by a lunar landing for astronauts near the south pole on Artemis III in December 2025.

NASA has postponed Artemis II until 2026, citing issues with the heat shield, life-support system, and battery concerns.

Consequently, Artemis III has shifted to 2027, but delays with Starship may lead to further postponements.

Subsequent missions will focus on assembling the Gateway, surveying the lunar surface, and constructing a long-term, sustainable base in the 2030s.

Artemis has drawn interest from commercial collaborators, with AxiomSpace, Prada, and Nokia developing Artemis space suits, while Toyota, General Motors, Michelin, and others compete to manufacture the Lunar Terrain.

Vehicle, and Goodyear is working on introducing airless tire technology to a world without air.

“The remotely operated Lunar Terrain Vehicle is being crafted to access permanently shadowed areas at the south pole for as much as two hours of exploration,” remarks Fisher.

“NASA will choose scientific instruments for the Lunar Terrain Vehicle in 2025, with plans for the vehicle to touch down no later than 2029.”

Why has NASA taken so long to return to the Moon?

Some individuals ponder why the Saturn V designs cannot be revived and the old rocket recreated.

However, its technology from the 1960s has been overtaken by contemporary launch vehicles – SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and Starship, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan – which are more economical, safer, more efficient, and more dependable.

Currently, NASA’s budget (not solely for Artemis) accounts for 0.48% of federal expenditures.

While this represents only 10% of the federal financial support that Apollo received, it benefits from a considerably more stable situation, with bipartisan backing in Congress.

Various parties, from internationally bound national authorities to contract-committed commercial entities, also provide the political continuity required to reach long-term objectives.

Artemis is taking longer than Apollo, yet at a lower expense.

When adjusted for inflation, Apollo’s $25.4 billion expense is equivalent to $182 billion today, double Artemis’s current total.

Apollo’s rapid progress was also driven by a national objective and an imminent geopolitical threat that Artemis does not face.

However, there is another aspect. Artemis has been promoted to land a woman and a person of color on the Moon, a striking, visceral image that resonates universally – and an assurance that Artemis is not merely ‘Apollo redux’ but the beginnings of a new historical chapter.

What are your views on the Artemis program aimed at returning humans to the Moon? Share your opinions by emailing contactus@skyatnightmagazine.com.

This article was published in the January 2025 edition of BBC Sky at Night Magazine