On April 1 at 6:24pm, Florida time, a rocket will rise from Launch Complex 39B at Cape Canaveral and arc towards the moon carrying four astronauts. Artemis 2 will be the first crewed mission beyond low-Earth orbit since Apollo 17 splashed down in the Pacific in December 1972. Victor Glover will become the first person of colour to leave Earth’s neighbourhood, Christina Koch the first woman, and Jeremy Hansen, a Canadian, the first non-American. After ten days, having swung within 7,600 kilometres of the lunar surface, they will come home.
The date is apt. Artemis has become NASA’s most expensive April Fool’s joke, albeit one the agency is not in on. The programme has gobbled up some 93 billion US dollars, according to its own inspector general. The SLS rocket at the heart of the mission was supposed to fly by 2016 and cost five billion US dollars. It managed its maiden launch in 2022, unmanned, and each subsequent flight now runs to around 4.1 billion US dollars. The rocket is not reusable. Once it has done its job, it falls into the ocean, like the taxpayer money that built it.
For all that, the jubilation surrounding the launch is understandable. Humans haven’t ventured this far from home in over half a century. The crew will travel farther than any people in history, surpassing Apollo 13’s record by a slim margin. And Artemis 2 will put genuine hardware through its paces: life-support systems, navigation, communications and the Orion capsule’s heat shield (which sustained damage during the uncrewed test flight in 2022).
Boots on the moon
The trouble is what comes after. NASA’s original plan was for Artemis 3 to land astronauts on the moon. That goal has now been shunted to Artemis 4, pencilled in for 2028, with Artemis 3 demoted to a docking rehearsal in Earth orbit. The Lunar Gateway space station, once central to the whole architecture, has been scrapped. The original landing target was 2024. Eric Berger, Ars Technica’s veteran space editor, reckons it would take “a lot of miracles” for boots on the moon by the end of the decade.
The heart of the criticism is not that Artemis is pointless, but that it is pointlessly expensive. SLS was assembled from Space Shuttle leftovers: the same RS-25 engines, the same solid rocket boosters, even some of the same steel casings. The thinking was that recycling old kit would save money. It did the opposite. Cost-plus contracts with Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne meant every delay and redesign landed on the taxpayer’s tab. Engine and booster work alone has ballooned from a projected seven billion US dollars to over 13 billion US dollars. Michael Griffin, a former NASA administrator, told Congress the programme was “excessively complex, unrealistically priced” and “highly unlikely to be completed in a timely manner.” SLS has earned the nickname the Senate Launch System, a nod to the congressional districts whose jobs depend on keeping the factories humming.
SpaceX’s Starship looms over all of this. Fully reusable, capable of hauling 100 tonnes to low-Earth orbit, and projected to cost a fraction of SLS per launch, Starship is already contracted to serve as the human landing system for the eventual moon touchdown. The absurdity is hard to miss: astronauts will ride an expendable four billion US dollars rocket to lunar orbit, then transfer into a cheaper, reusable one for the actual descent. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman has hinted at retiring SLS after Artemis 3 and leaning on commercial alternatives.
The new space race
The geopolitical backdrop sharpens the stakes. China’s space programme is targeting a crewed lunar landing by 2030. Its Long March 10 rocket and Mengzhou crew capsule are in advanced development. A robotic lander prototype goes to trial in 2027. Beijing insists it is not racing anyone. Washington insists the same thing, just louder and more often. If further Artemis delays push America’s landing past 2029, China could get there first (or close enough to claim a propaganda win).
Is any of this reinvention? Barely. Artemis borrows its engines from the 1970s, its capsule design from Apollo-era thinking, and its procurement model from a bygone age of government contracting. The genuine innovation in crewed spaceflight is happening at SpaceX and, to a lesser extent, at Blue Origin, whose Blue Moon lander is also under NASA contract. What Artemis offers is continuity of a particular kind: the kind where large aerospace contractors get paid handsomely to do slowly what smaller firms could do faster and cheaper. Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, put it squarely. The SLS “cannot launch very frequently,” he told NBC News, and that infrequency is “a huge structural and safety risk.”
None of which means Artemis 2 is without value. Testing Orion with a crew aboard is essential if anyone is going to land on the moon this decade, whoever builds the rocket that gets them there. The milestone matters for morale, for international partnerships (the Artemis Accords now have over 50 signatories), and for the political oxygen the programme needs to survive. A spectacular launch buys time. But Artemis’s backers should not confuse spectacle with strategy. Sending four people around the moon in 2026 on a rocket designed to be obsolete on arrival is a feat of engineering and an act of institutional stubbornness in roughly equal measure. The moon is worth going back to. The question is whether this is the way to get there.
Photo: Dreamstime.
