It’s Been a Long Road: Artemis II
- 3 hours ago
- 13 min read
By Tom Anderson.
The 2000s Star Trek prequel series Enterprise had a controversial opening sequence; not so much for the imagery used (which shows technological progress in exploration from wooden sailing ships to aeroplanes to spacecraft) but for the poppy theme song ‘Faith of the Heart’, very different from the approach taken in previous series. Despite being poorly received at the time, however, the song has become popular with astronauts in the real space programme, and is frequently used as a ‘wake-up song’ on the International Space Station – which features in the opening imagery, optimistically as at the time it was made, only a small number of modules were in orbit and there were doubts it would ever be completed.
The theme song begins with the lyrics "It’s been a long road getting from there to here" and that certainly sums up a great deal of the travails of the space programme. The United States, with its vast resources, has been at the forefront of space exploration for many years, though in the early days the Soviet Union sniped a number of important firsts (first satellite, first dog in space, first man in space, first woman in space, first space station). Unsurprisingly, the Enterprise opening sequence instead chooses to focus on the one big first the United States got and which everyone remembers: the Apollo 11 moon landing and the footprint of Neil Armstrong, an event so world-changing that the world is full of conspiracy theorists who would rather claim it was faked than confront the profound change it wrought on the world they live in.
Because of when Enterprise was made (2001-2005) its opening sequence does not feature anything of what would become the Artemis II mission, which at time of writing is due to launch in just a few days. Artemis II will be the first time since December 1972 that humans have travelled to the Moon, albeit not to land this time; it is somewhat analogous to the Apollo 8 mission from December 1968. It is a shame that Apollo 11 so overshadowed the other Apollo missions, because they were all fascinating in their own right, but that is a discussion for another day.
Just 12 people, all white American men, have walked upon the Earth’s nearest neighbour. The time gap since the last of them, Gene Cernan, departed the lunar surface is staggering. In December 1972, Joe Biden was a young fresh-faced politician who had just won his Senate seat for the first time by portraying himself as in touch with fellow young people. The Shah was still on the throne of Iran. The Vietnam War was still ongoing. Richard Nixon had just won re-election, and soon would be embroiled in the Watergate scandal. The United Kingdom had not joined the EEC (later the European Union) yet; the entirety of all the UK’s travails inside the EU and efforts to get out of it have taken place within that eye-blink of cosmic history.
The obvious question is just why has it taken so long for us to return to the Moon? In the 1960s, the incredibly rapid pace of technological development – in one lifetime, Patrick Moore met both the first man to fly an aeroplane and the first man to land on the Moon! – let science fiction writers to speculate about having not only a moonbase by now, but maybe even colonies on Mars and Venus too. This wasn’t necessarily optimistic sci-fi, either; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick’s book which became Blade Runner is set in a bleak post-apocalyptic world in which nuclear war has taken place, but people are encouraged to move to ‘the offworld colonies’ and the Replicants featured have escaped from one such colony, on Mars. In the book, as opposed to the film (where it’s 2019), the current year is 1992.
There were exceptions; Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, published just months after the last moon landing, more accurately predicts decades of wasted opportunities and complacency in the space programme. Clarke imagines a scenario where an asteroid impact wipes out northern Italy and all its cultural heritage, shocking the world into setting up an international SPACEGUARD to watch for an intercept other dangerous objects.
In the real history we’ve lived through, NASA has been hamstrung by the vagaries of American politics, with long-term planning difficult when a new President or a new Congress can tear up plans, adjust budgets and change priorities on a two- or four-year cycle. The space shuttle (originally known by the anodyne acronym STS or Space Transportation System) was envisaged as a reusable ‘space truck’ that would allow regular human access to orbit as casually and cheaply as air travel had become. It never succeeded in this goal, but did keep NASA in the human spaceflight business for another generation or two amid attempts at cutbacks.
The shuttle successfully captured the imagination of people around the world, and though it last flew in 2011, often one encounters cases where people don’t seem to be aware it’s not still around – a profound measure of the cultural impact it had. When I went to the Kennedy Space Centre in 2000 (narrowly missing out on the opportunity to see a shuttle launch, no I’m not still bitter about it) I reflected on the profound (to me) thought that only 5 fully functional space shuttles were ever built (Challenger, Columbia, Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis), when you consider the millions upon millions of space shuttle toys, models and representations that were ever produced. It is interesting also to reflect that Star Trek and the shuttle programme were always intimately linked – the original prototype (without engines) was named Enterprise after a fan campaign, and in the TV series Enterprise the second ship in its class would be named Columbia in honour of the recently-lost shuttle. Later, Discovery would be a natural choice of ship name for a later Star Trek series.
The shuttle also sums up a lot of the political problems with the US space programme. For example, the Challenger disaster happened (as Richard Feynman famously proved) due to a failure of the O-rings on the solid rocket boosters used to provide a lot of the lifting power, which were reused after each flight. The reason why the shuttle uses solid rocket boosters of that specific type is because they had to be manufactured at a factory in Utah, which limits the width of the booster segments because they have to be able to be transported through certain tunnels. Why Utah? Because they needed the support of the Congressional representatives from that state. It’s the same reason why (earlier) NASA’s command and control centre is, famously, in Houston, Texas. These political considerations are in contrast to the reason why Cape Canaveral in Florida, which is a purely geographic concern; the farther south (or rather, closer to the equator) a launch point is, the less fuel it takes to reach orbit. Jules Verne predicted way back in the 19th century (in From the Earth to the Moon) that a US space launch site would be built there; his other option was southern Texas, which has since become the site of SpaceX’s commercial ‘Starbase’ launch site.
The move to the space shuttle, and toying with the idea of space stations (which eventually became a collaboration with Russia) meant that the hardware and lessons learned from the Apollo programme slipped away. This isn’t entirely true, as the shuttle’s liquid fuel engines were ultimately derived from those of the Saturn V, but it is a big part of the reason why we now have to repeat a lot of the milestones already passed for Apollo, such as the Artemis II mission resembling Apollo 8. Notably, NASA were certainly aware of the loss of capabilities from retiring the expensive Saturn V, and almost from the very beginning of the shuttle programme there were concepts for a ‘Shuttle Derived Launch Vehicle’ (SDLV) which would allow America to retain the heavy launch capability needed for moon missions (or lifting large satellites into orbit).
From the beginning, most SDLV concepts were in-line, with the iconic unpainted orange fuel tank being stretched, solid rocket boosters added like the shuttle, and shuttle engines added to the bottom of the tank. Such a vehicle would lose most of the reusable elements of the shuttle, but would not have to lift the weight of the shuttle itself, meaning more could be devoted to a heavier payload. However, SDLV concepts intended to run in parallel with the shuttle were repeatedly cancelled. One attempt at a cheaper compromise was Shuttle-C, a design which was essentially an unmanned space shuttle still perched on the side of the tank, but with no wings or crew and only the engines behind a large payload. This also did not happen. Part of the reasons why NASA were reluctant to embrace such a proposal was that they stuck to a narrative that the shuttle was necessary for some satellite launches for which it really wasn’t, as there was a fear that Congress would cut back on crewed flights. The shuttle did have the advantage that its payload bay and Canadarm device could recover and repair satellites already in orbit – as famously done with the Hubble Space Telescope – but this missed the point that it would have cost rather less to just build a new satellite every time.
Partly due to the Challenger disaster, the US military eventually got fed up with waiting for shuttle launches whose cadence never lived up to the original claims, and did their own unmanned satellite launch programme on the side, known as Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV). This made use of ballistic missile-derived Titan rockets (which had already been used for the Gemini programme) and later Delta and Atlas rockets. An industrial espionage case involving the companies behind these two rocket families, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, eventually led to them forming a joint venture, the United Launch Alliance. Due to lack of US investment in liquid fuel engines post-space shuttle, the Atlas V ULA launcher used engines bought from Russia, but after Putin’s first unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and intervention by Congress, a new launcher (Vulcan) was created using engines produced by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space company.
The origins of the Artemis programme lie in the aftermath of the Columbia disaster in 2003. There had been half-hearted talk of replacements for the ageing shuttle for years, including the Lockheed Martin X-33 / VentureStar project for a single-stage-to-orbit vehicle; I well remember in the early 2000s it being assumed that this would inevitably succeed the shuttle, and a version of it can briefly be seen in the aforementioned Enterprise opening sequence. The X-33 prototype was infamously cancelled by NASA when elements were as much as 90% complete, though NASA’s stated reasons were that the technology simply was not there for a sufficiently light fuel tank. Later, it was succeeded by the ‘Orbital Space Plane’ (OSP) plan for a shuttle replacement, which had originally – somewhat inexplicably to my mind – been the X-38 project to build a dedicated lifeboat for the International Space Station and no other purpose.
I remember at the time seeing an image of four proposals for the OSP (one of which eventually became Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser which is still being worked on at present) and being surprised that one of them looked more like an Apollo-style capsule than a plane at all. As it turned out, it was this proposal which was the most far-sighted.
In 2005 the administration of George W. Bush began the Constellation programme. After years of singing the praises of reusable spaceplanes, the US now abandoned them practically overnight (or at least that’s how it seemed) in favour of once again embracing the familiar Apollo-style capsule architecture. This time, however, the vehicles would be shuttle-derived. Allegedly (and infamously) the core concept was scribbled on a napkin by NASA Administrator Mike Griffin. Two vehicles would be built, the Ares I (a capsule and upper stage launched atop a single shuttle solid-rocket booster or SRB) and Ares V (a Saturn V-sized rocket similar to the old in-line SDLV proposals, with a tank and engines at the back and two SRBs). The Ares I would lift the Orion spacecraft, a bigger Apollo that could either carry astronauts to the space station or to rendezvous in orbit with an Earth Departure Stage and the Altair lunar lander lifted with by the Ares V. Thus the same architecture could serve both regular flights to the ISS and more occasional ones to the moon. The name ‘Ares’ (Mars in Greek) was chosen because of the Constellation programme’s stated goal of treating the Moon as just a stepping stone to eventually land on Mars.
Bush’s father had been one of the more pro-space US presidents and had previously begun the Space Exploration Initiative in 1989. That programme had come to little in the end and it was not long before Constellation also became troubled. Griffin’s plan kept running into the issue that the current SRB design was not enough to lift either an Orion singly or an Ares V core in pairs. This meant that NASA had to stretch the SRB from four segments to five (and even that looked doubtful for Ares I) which immediately started to undermine the supposed advantages of using ‘off-the-shelf’ shuttle hardware.
The timeline had originally envisaged a manned lunar landing in 2018, but that date kept slipping back and back. The first prototype launch for the Ares I model, Ares I-X, did not take place until 2009, after Bush’s presidency had ended, and even then it was only a normal 4-segment SRB with a boilerplate top. I remember being an active user of the Nasaspaceflight forums at the time and seeing endless proposals for alternatives. One I remember was the idea of taking the Ares I upper stage and adding two 3-segment boosters, one on either side, rather than one below. An interesting idea but, again, drifting farther and farther away from the ‘off the shelf’ model.
A much more significant criticism of Constellation came from DIRECT, a proposal made by a group of space engineers and enthusiasts including NASA employees. DIRECT proposed lunar launches via a pair of rockets which looked superficially similar to Ares V but used off-the-shelf components and four-segment SRBs to save time and money. These rockets were later titled the ‘Jupiter’ series, in parallel with the old Saturns from the Apollo programme. The huge problem with DIRECT from the point of view of NASA’s leadership was that it made sense as an architecture to reach the Moon, but the same rockets could not be used to send Orion to the space station. It was pointed out at the time that the existing Delta IV Heavy rocket could do this, and without any of the safety concerns some had raised about using a solid-fuelled first stage. But (or so its advocates claimed), using the Delta was ‘not invented here’ syndrome for NASA’s leadership.
Meanwhile, during all this the commercial space sector – with a lot of hopeful companies in the 90s that sunk without trace – was finally coming into its own. After three failures with the small Falcon 1in 2006-2008, Elon Musk’s SpaceX underwent a remarkable acceleration and produced the reusable Falcon 9 rocket which has radically transformed the space launch market.
Whatever one might say of Musk himself (most of it unprintable these days) it is hard to explain just how much Falcon 9 has changed the world. Perhaps the easiest way is to note that until recently, Wikipedia had a single page for “[year] in spaceflight" that included all orbital launches. In 2018, its editors had to split the orbital launches into two pages of their own. In 2025, they had to split it into four. There have been so many Falcon 9 launches that it will no longer fit on one page.
Back in the 2000s, a friend who told me he’d had a dream about living in a country ruled by an authoritarian regime which, among other things, required there be at least one space launch per day. At the time, that was a ridiculous dream. Nowadays, it is almost a reality. Let’s take the start of this year, January 2026. There were Falcon 9 launches on January 3rd, 4th, 9th, 11th, 12th, 14th, 17th, 18th, 22nd, 25th, 28th, 29th and 30th – thirteen in all. That’s only Falcon 9 launches, not counting others made by China, India and other American launch providers.
Twenty years ago, in January 2006, the total number of spaceflight launches from any source was two.
SpaceX is the best known and most influential commercial spaceflight company, but Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has also been making more gradual progress, there are many smaller US companies, and commercial spaceflight has also begun spreading to China and other nations. Quite by accident, SpaceX has all but killed the once dominant Russian space launch market, which ironically likely only survives now because NASA pays the Russians to launch Soyuz craft to the space station.
In 2009, newly elected President Obama saw the troubled Constellation programme to be "over budget, behind schedule, and lacking in innovation". He held the Augustine Commission, which saw counter-proposals such as DIRECT and a modernised take on the Shuttle-C design. In the end, in a bit of an Orwellian move (as I remember seeing to my horror) the Constellation icon disappeared from NASA’s website overnight to be replaced with ‘Commercial Space’. Obama planned for future missions to the ISS to be provided by commercial providers such as SpaceX, despite the fact that they were a considerable distance from being able to do so at the time. In the end, SpaceX’s Dragon capsule has flown crews to the ISS, albeit taking a decade to begin before the first one arrived in 2020. I am sure Obama does not regret giving Elon Musk more funding and limelight at all in hindsight.
In the end, Ares I and Ares V were cancelled and replaced with the uninspiring-sounding SLS or Space Launch System (evocative of the shuttle’s original name of Space Transportation System). In some ways the SLS resembles the DIRECT proposal, at least to a casual look, though it does have 5-segment SRBs (which were finally produced in the end). The Orion capsule did survive and still forms the basis for the Artemis II mission, but the Altair lander was cancelled and eventually replaced with largely back-of-the-envelope wishful thinking about commercial space providing one of those. (The fact that a lander version of SpaceX’s troubled Starship project has not yet materialised is now forcing a rethink of NASA’s timeline, if only some past experience had hinted at this). The original service module was replaced with one created by the European Space Agency derived from its uncrewed ATV supply spacecraft. I am sure with his reputation for eloquent, gracious rhetoric the current president will be sure to acknowledge the European (and Canadian) contributions to Artemis II.
In my recent book The Tenacity of Hope I, rather optimistically and unrealistically, imagine that one consequence of a delayed Obama presidency is that the Constellation programme manages to stick to its original timeline and we have a crewed lunar landing in the 2010s. As someone who has followed the space programme all my life, it is easy to get used to disappointments and pessimism. So often, hopeful projects have been cancelled, sometimes seemingly at the last minute NASA has sometimes seemed in a loop of making Powerpoint slides and always having the American football pulled away from them like Charlie Brown.
As costs have mounted, we are frequently inundated with calls to strip NASA of its funding altogether and just let commercial space handle it. Yet, despite everything, despite all the travails of politics and economics, that long road, we are finally here. It is eight years after the original projected time for a lunar flight, almost four years since the uncrewed Artemis-I tested the launch architecture on a circumlunar flight, but nonetheless it is happening. It has slipped under the radar for so many people, but my hope is that it once again inspires the people of the world to look beyond as the Apollo programme once did.
GO FOR LAUNCH!
Tom Anderson is the author of multiple SLP books, including:
The Look to the West series
The Surly Bonds of Earth series
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among others.
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