[CLIP of NASA’s Artemis II splashdown: “Integrity about to complete a journey spanning 694,481 miles from its launch from the Kennedy Space Center back on April 1st, and a trip around the moon.”]
Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. For our weekly science news roundup, you’re listening to a special space episode.
[CLIP of NASA’s Artemis II splashdown:  ”Splash down confirmed at 7:07 PM Central Time, 5:07 PM Pacific Time. From the pages of Jules Verne to a modern day mission to the moon, a new chapter of the exploration of our celestial neighbor is complete Integrity’s astronauts back on earth.”
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“A perfect bullseye splash down for Integrity and its four astronauts.”]
Pierre-Louis: That’s the crew of the historic Artemis II mission splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego last Friday. Although the mission is over, NASA’s moon ambitions are far from finished. But why?
Here to tackle that question is a group of SciAm staffers, Lee Billings, Claire Cameron, Emma Gometz and Joe Howlett. Hi, everyone!
Joe Howlett: Excited to talk.
Claire Cameron: Happy to be here.
Lee Billings: I’m thrilled.
Emma Gometz: Thanks, Kendra.
Pierre-Louis: Okay, so just so we know, can you rank from a scale of one to 10, 10 being very interested and one being you’d rather watch paint dry—I’m gonna own it: I think I’m probably the biggest space hater at the table. I’m gonna give it a solid three. I like a good night sky, but that’s about all I’m interested in. I like my space fictional. How interested are you in space, especially space travel?
Gometz: I’m Emma Gometz. I’m a newsletter editor at SciAm.
Oof, I feel like, optimistically, like, being generous, probably a five. I feel like there are some things that are so incredibly cool about space. I love the new JWST visuals and the new “Earthrise” photo. I think, like, artistically, I feel like it’s really beautiful and inspiring. But there’s also a lot of stuff that feels boring, too. [Laughs.]
Billings: I’m Lee Billings. I’m a senior editor covering space and physics here at Scientific American.
Well, I’m biased, of course, so I’m not gonna give it a 10—I’ll give it, like, an eight. And the reason I wouldn’t give it a 10 is just because Earth is the coolest planet that we know of out there. The coolest stuff that we know over the entire universe is going on right here. And I think that space enriches and contextualizes our existence here, but we can’t lose sight of the fundamental importance of terra firma.
Howlett: I’m Joseph Howlett. I’m a staff reporter.
I mean, it, it changes, but right now it’s at its zenith, yeah. [Group laughs.] I’m, I’m at a 10 this week, I would say. I mean, it’s—watching these people go around the moon and—I don’t know. It’s just been really exciting and inspiring, and I’m not …
Pierre-Louis: But have you ever seen a sloth try to cross the street? [Laughs.]
Howlett: A sloth—sloths can be a 10 too, right? Like …
Gometz: That’s true. It’s unlimited 10s. Like, everything can be a 10.
Cameron: I’m Claire Cameron. I’m the breaking news director at Scientific American.
I’m probably around about an eight as well. I agree that Earth is the coolest planet, but I also think that space exploration can be some of the most inspiring and humanizing moments out—in our history, and we don’t get a lot of them.
And especially now, you know, space exploration is kind of—we feel like it’s heating up, but actually, we haven’t done anything like the Artemis II mission for a very long time. And so I think it’s really important to set ourselves in context. But I also think it’s important to explore for humans; I think humans need it in order to be creative and innovative, so I think it’s pretty cool.
Pierre-Louis: So, Lee, before we dive into the future Artemis missions, can we talk about how Artemis II has fared?
Billings: Yeah, of course! So Artemis II has been almost flawless. It was a 10-day mission that’s kind of a shakedown of the Orion capsule and the Space Launch System megarocket that sent it up into space, and things have gone extremely well.
The Orion capsule has shown it can dock in orbit with something, even though it hasn’t docked with anything yet. That’s gonna be important for Artemis III, which is supposed to happen next year.
The European-built Orion main engine has performed extraordinarily well, to the degree that there are these correction burns that they haven’t had to do because the main engine did its job so well on the “translunar injection burn” that happened on April 2 that sent them to the moon.
There have been some problems. The one that we have talked about, I think, the most here, and many other outlets have as well, is the potty problems. This is the first time that a fully functioning toilet has gone around the moon on any lunar mission. That has not gone to plan.
Pierre-Louis: Claire, can you talk a little bit about the future of the Artemis mission, since we know—like, Lee kind of hinted at, like, there’s gonna be an Artemis III and an Artemis IV. Sort of, like, what’s on dock for future lunar missions?
Cameron: Yeah, so with Artemis II having successfully completed its mission, we are now looking at Artemis III. Artemis III is currently slated to lift off sometime next year.
This test will basically have a look at whether or not the Orion capsule can do the things in orbit it will have to do to get from Earth into lunar orbit and then to the moon. So you have to basically be able to make a stop-off in lunar orbit and then be able to travel down to the moon in a lander and come back up and then be able to come home. So we need the capsule to show that it can do that with whatever the lander is going to be.
At the moment we’re not sure what the lander is going to look like, just because it hasn’t fully been tested or built yet. But there are options: It could look like SpaceX’s Starship. It could also look like a Blue Origin vehicle that they’re developing as well. So that will be what they’re testing. They’re also going to test how well their spacesuits will fare in orbit as well. That’s something that they didn’t test on Artemis II.
And then after that we have Artemis IV and Artemis V. That’s going to be happening in 2028. We’re going to start seeing the launch cadence start to really pick up. So they’re starting to aim for two launches to the moon a year. Artemis IV, hopefully, we’ll get from that stop-off in orbit point to actually landing people on the moon and coming back up.
And then from there it’s lunar landings all the way. So, you know, NASA sometimes, very optimistically, is like, “Oh, Artemis 100,” you know? Like, “We’ll keep it going forever because there’s really no end to this program.” Like, the Apollo program ended at Apollo 17 for a lot of reasons, but NASA is sort of saying that this program will potentially never have an end, as long as the space agency exists.
Pierre-Louis: One question for people who are not so into space: We’ve landed on the moon before—how does the Artemis landing missions differ from, say, I believe, Apollo 11?
Cameron: Yeah, so we have landed on the moon before. We’ve gone around the moon in the same way that, you know, Artemis II did with Apollo 8 before. The main difference is that the Artemis program is not so much a proof of concept so much as trying to build the capacity to stay.
So we’re not staying for a couple days and coming back. We instead are moving towards a permanently staffed research station on the moon, in the same way that we have a permanently staffed research station in Earth orbit, which is the International Space Station.
Pierre-Louis: Many Americans are struggling to put food on the table. The federal government has gutted health care for millions of Americans. With the war going on right now, people are struggling to afford gas, and then they’re seeing price tags like $23 million, I believe, for the toilet on Artemis. I think the Artemis mission through 2025 has been estimated to cost somewhere around $90 billion. And many people are asking, “Could we not be spending this money differently?”
What would you say to people who have those concerns, especially people who don’t really care that much about space? I’m gonna give it to Joe.
Howlett: I was kind of on this tip early on in the mission, like, in the Slack channel with all these other people reporting on Artemis II. I come from particle physics—like, that’s where a lot of my coverage is—and, like, the biggest price tag we’ve ever heard of is the Large Hadron Collider, which is around $10 billion. And the funding situation isn’t good for a lot of science right now, and it’s tough to see these price tags that, like, dwarf any scientific experiment that I’ve ever cared about before.
But I don’t think it’s zero-sum. That’s at least, like, probably the way of thinking of it. Like, there’s a lot of government excess. There’s a lot of ways that we’re spending taxpayer money that I would rather take from and that I think the space program is, like, a worthy endeavor. I think we should be doing it all. I think we should be doing lots of basic science and learning about the universe.
I think the James Webb Space Telescope, for example, which has been giving us these stunning images of faraway galaxies, is doing more exploring of the universe than any astronaut, any human, is capable of doing with their own body going to a place. But that doesn’t mean we can’t also do that thing. And, like, I had amazing feelings looking at those JWST images, but it’s a different feeling to see astronauts embracing or, like, giddy with excitement over the sights on the moon, and looking at those photos it’s something we all see in the sky every day; it’s different than a black hole that’s super distant. I don’t know. We could have it all, I think. [Laughs.]
Pierre-Louis: Emma, do you wanna chime in?
Gometz: Yeah, I mean, I agree with both of you. It’s interesting. I feel like my day-to-day life, I’m thinking about what you’re talking about: prices. I’m thinking about, like, the socioeconomic state of the world. Like, it feels so real and immediate. But I don’t wanna let that push the wonder and curiosity out of my life. Like, I don’t wanna let that prevent me from doing something that is ultimately about connecting with the mysteries in the world around me.
I actually recently interviewed an astrophysicist, who was telling me about how she wanted to, like, study space since she was five years old. And she was telling me about how when a solar eclipse happened in her town, everybody came outside, and they put buckets of water and were, like, looking through, like, the reflections, and people are, like, just so excited to hear about our solar neighbors. And it produces this giddiness and childlike joy in people, and I think that that’s a beautiful thing.
Is it worth a million billion dollars? I don’t know. I mean, I think that in comparison to all the ways the government is spending the money, having a slice of it be to get to know our universe and have this be, like, an on-ramp for people to learn more about science, to learn more about the world around them just because it’s cool, I think that’s a good way to use money.
Billings: Well, I just wanna say—I’m trying to represent [a] kind of extreme part of the audience here, I think—but there is also this issue of whether or not humans ever need or want to become multiplanetary. And I know that that seems so grandiose to say that it’s somehow ridiculous and absurd. But it’s not, from the viewpoint of this is actually something that we can do, and, and when I say “we,” I don’t just mean the United States; I don’t just even necessarily mean humanity. I mean, like, Earth’s biosphere, right?
The origins of life remain deeply mysterious. We don’t know whether or not we’re common as dirt out there or extremely rare—again, life itself. And if you think, if you have some sort of, again, grandiose vision for what the purpose of life is and what it might be, then it might actually matter what we do right now with the opportunities we have to make life multiplanetary. And I think that that is something that we can’t properly gauge and we can’t properly evaluate because we don’t have all the data there. But I think it’s—it is, to some degree, conservative, in fact, to try to make that happen.
Pierre-Louis: So that’s an interesting segue to my next question, which is coming from me as a climate reporter, which is: whenever I hear this conversation about humans becoming a multiplanetary species, I’m like, “We have a habitable planet, and we’re destroying it.”
And that kind of ties into, a little bit, how I feel about these rocket launches, which I know, like, on an individual basis, they’re not the reason why we have climate change, but they are really climate-intensive. And so when I hear this talk about recreational space travel, and when I hear this talk about amping up the cadence of going to the moon, I’m like, “We’re increasing emissions at a time when we need to be drastically decreasing them, for purely exploratory reasons.” And it’s difficult for me to reconcile those two. Claire?
Cameron: Yeah, I mean, I understand where you’re coming from, and we don’t really have a full accounting of how emission-intensive the missions are, so it’s really hard to put a number on, like, how does it compare to some other source of emissions, like cars or, or aviation.
It’s kind of coming back to this idea of, like, well, does it need to be one thing or the other, or can it be both? So for me I think that you can have these launches to space— should we be working very hard to make them as, like, unintensive, as environmentally and ecologically sound as possible? Absolutely. And, you know, like, there are aspects of that that are already happening, making sure that, like, you know, launches don’t take place in places with, like, you know, endangered wildlife or something like that.
But then, you know, it is going to become a more pressing problem, not only for us here on Earth, like, as the climate warms and as we increase the cadence, but then also, like, if we’re thinking about, like, an environmental toll, we have to start thinking about orbit as well. The orbit around our planet is increasingly cluttered. A lot of it is junk, and that junk is going to keep growing and growing and growing, so you can start to think about orbit as becoming essentially, like, not a landfill but a place full of rubbish. And that’s kind of hard to think about.
But at the same time these missions and the technology that we use and NASA itself, so much of its work is to do with Earth science, so much of it is to do with tracking climate change, to do with looking at what is happening on our planet, what mechanisms are driving it, and using that data to try and mitigate it.
Pierre-Louis: That’s a smaller chunk of NASA’s budget.
Cameron: It is, but I don’t think that they are divorced from one another. And again, there are other things that we could be doing here on Earth that wouldn’t preclude space missions to try and mitigate climate change.
Pierre-Louis: Right, and I guess what I’m saying is, is we’re not doing those things. But we have this expansionary vision of, like, setting a base on the moon and potentially going to Mars and doing this, like, really large exploratory thing and, like, trying to become a multiplanet species, but we’re not taking care of our home as it is.
I think for me, if we were doing a good job of being stewards of the Earth, then sure, and potentially, we could be good stewards on Mars. But we haven’t learned to take care of our own home. How can we go out into space and be good stewards in space?
Cameron: I think it’s a valid criticism. I think some people who are, like, more enthusiastic about space travel would say, well, “Don’t worry because we’re actually going to take all the heavy industry off of Earth and we’re gonna do it somewhere else. You won’t need to see cobalt mines in, like, the [Democratic Republic of the Congo] because we’re gonna start mining asteroids instead. And don’t worry about factories or data centers because those are going to go into space, too. So all these big drains on energy, these big fossil-fuel, like, pollution-intensive industries, don’t worry about them because they’re not gonna be on Earth anymore. Earth will be, like, some perfect park instead.”
So, you know, like, that’s obviously, like, a very maximalist view, but that is something that a lot of people are trying to make happen.
Pierre-Louis: Which I think brings us to kind of our final question for everyone, which is: What is the difference between space exploration and space colonialism?
Gometz: I think that it comes down to the individual emotional circumstances of people who are behind these projects. I think that there are definitely conscientious scientists who are extremely enthusiastic about doing these missions because it’s gonna benefit the lives of people on Earth, and then there are people who are doing it because it’s a fun thing for them and they have the money to do it.
And that’s the part that is hard for me about watching space travel and these big things because I think that it doesn’t feel like a choice. [Laughs.] It feels like I’m just watching these things happen, and we’ll become a multiplanetary species, and nobody cares about me or my family or my community.
And so I think, like, it feels like space colonization when the messaging is, “Oh, this is because we’re the greatest species or the greatest country or the greatest company behind this, and it’s good for the sake of doing it because it’s good for our personal identities; it’s good for our in-group identities,” or whatever.
I think it’s cool and it’s exploration when it’s about connecting people, connecting people across the world, to witness something that, you know, we all share because we’re all here in the universe together, or because we’re learning about medicine in space, or we’re figuring out how to lower the human toll of things like mining or, or something like that. It’s about the why, I think, to me.
Pierre-Louis: Anyone else wanna chime in?
Billings: I think that’s a very good answer that Emma gave. I do think it’s a little—it’s hard for me to properly answer that question, I feel like, because I feel like what those terms mean—especially “space colonialism,” what that means varies depending on the person who’s asking and the person who’s answering. There’s a, there’s a very subjective element to that.
And I only say that, actually, to mostly zoom out. And one thing that does concern me a lot in terms of space science is the idea that we will go colonize Mars, for instance. And I think by doing so we might actually erase any chance we have of finding a second genesis of life there or really figuring out what happened on Mars and how it lived and how it died and especially if any life actually got there because the instant you land a human being on Mars, that’s a huge contamination.
And right now there’s actually a lot of arguments back and forth at high levels about what sort of contamination standards we should have for that. And I worry about us going there kind of too soon or, or too full bore, in a way that could make it impossible for us to really answer that question.
The moon on the other hand, way less worried about.
Howlett: Yeah, I think it’s about what you do to a place. Like, I don’t know, last week we were talking—there was some conversations about things left from the Apollo missions on the moon, like debris, poop bags, right? And I’m kind of bummed out by the poop bags. Like, when I see these beautiful pictures of this, like, rocky neighbor orbiting our planet that, like, we always see in the sky, it looks so untouched, and I definitely would like it to stay that way.
Like, I also, like, when I hear about mining, terraforming, all this kind of stuff, I get that the idea is that these meteors, these other planets, they might not have existing sentient life, so it’s okay to do these extractive practices. But, like, I don’t know—there’s a long history of exporting extraction to make your home look prettier, and everything always kinds of ends up back on your doorstep. So it’s hard to imagine a future where there’s no penalty for just taking things. So I would like us to figure out another way, yeah.
Cameron: I think for me it kind of comes down to, like, capital and control. So, you know, we’re talking about the moon. Even, like, research efforts on the moon, there is an aspect of control that goes into that. This is a U.S. mission, the Artemis missions. China also has lunar ambitions. There is an element of the U.S. wants control versus China wanting control and, like, will that become, like, a geopolitical problem? Like, potentially, and, you know, a lot of people would say it already is.
As far as further down the line, like, if we go to Mars or if we try to go even further afield, like, is it colonization? I think in some ways, yes, it probably would be, but I think it also opens up opportunities for thinking about what that actually means for a future humanity that is not the humanity that we are now. Like, we can’t guarantee that at that time, like, human societies are going to look the same as they do now. And so, like, I think it’ll be so dependent on the exact context that it’s happening in because we just don’t know if the dynamics and the pressures that we’re facing today are going to be the dynamics and the pressures that we’re going to be facing at that time. Like, our historical context will also have changed. And so TBD.
Pierre-Louis: Well, this has been great. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today.
Gometz: Thanks, Kendra.
Billings: Thank you, Kendra. I really enjoyed your thoughtful questions.
Howlett: Thanks so much for having us.
Cameron: Thank you.
Pierre-Louis: That’s all for today! Tune in on Wednesday, when we’ll take a look at how Pokémon shaped science.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Kendra Pierre-Louis, along with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Kendra Pierre-Louis. Have a great week!