But I’m old enough to remember – vividly --
the Apollo flights of the late 1960s and early ‘70s. A lot of Artemis looked … familiar.
Yes, of course the technology is light-years
ahead of what they got by with in the 1960s. Good to see the capsule full of
screens and digital readouts. The colour pictures and videos were great. The
iPhones they carried had infinitely more computing power than everything on
Apollo 11. Even the cameras they used to photograph the lunar surface had
hundreds of times higher resolution than those of 1968. And in fifty years the
crewcut can-do white-guy fighter jocks of Apollo have morphed into a diverse and
laidback quartet who gushed affection and love back to the home planet. They
probably set off with much more confidence about getting back home than
Armstrong and Aldrin, too. So: much change.
But during their flight someone noted that the time from the
Wright brothers’ first flight to Apollo is almost the same as the time from
Apollo to Artemis. I can’t help thinking the first half delivered much more
change than the second one. I guess those were the easy bits.
There is still no space plane. The space
shuttle (that could at least fly down to an airfield) was a dud, and the space
station is going to be “deorbited” long before a replacement takes shape. There is still
no permanent facility either in earth orbit or circling the moon, and none spoken
of. Elon Musk is no longer promising to go live on Mars. Just as their predecessors
did, the Artemis crew went up on a pillar of flame and came down to bob
awkwardly in rubber boats. Artemis III will make its moon landing with the same
capsule-and-lander process that operated in the 1960s. Indeed the whole Artemis
program seems to follow pretty much the well-worn flight path and landing methods
of Apollo, and the astronauts still lack the relay satellites that would allow
communication from behind the moon. Anything like routine space travel remains
in the realm of science fiction.
I have never forgotten reading an observation,
not long after Apollo, that the first trips to the North and South Pole were
hellishly difficult and dangerous voyages. But when people went back there,
those were routine journeys using new submarine and aircraft technology that made the poles an afterthought. I
thought then it might be like that with the moon. After the dangerous and risky and incredibly
expensive flights of Apollo, the next people on the moon would just drop in as
part of a general achievement of spacefaring.
It’s still damn hard just to achieve earth orbit and
return. No space planes, no liveable platforms parked above earth and moon, let alone Mars. It’s still absolutely cold and dark and airless everywhere up
there, and we still live at the bottom of a deep gravity well that strongly
resists us going up and out. Spacefaring is still a long way away.
Next time I dip into a galactic space war
novel or a world-building epic of routine travel and trade across and beyond
the solar system, I won’t be thinking that’s any closer than it was in the
sixties.
Update, same day: Molly Ungar responds:
Thank you for your excellent comments on the Artemis II mission. We are also fans, and as we watched the splash-down and crew retrieval, we decided then and there to re-visit two films: “The Right Stuff” and “Apollo 13”. Both are as engrossing as when they were first released.
However, thus far I’ve not heard of any goal attached to the Artemis program other than that of mining for critical minerals on the moon, which of course reminds me of the movie “Alien”, and look how that turned out. I would say that the Cold War “space race” buoyed up government and public interest until the U.S. declared victory and departed the field.
Like yourself, we were interested in the changes you point out, and noticed how much was familiar.
