By Staff Writer Jerri Clewis
One of humanity’s crowning achievements was the day we finally ventured beyond our planet and landed on the moon. Those landings, the culmination of thousands of years of slow but steady technological advancements, came to a halt just as quickly as they began, but a new age of space exploration is on the horizon.
President John F. Kennedy kickstarted the race to the moon in the 1960s during his “We Choose to Go to the Moon” speech, where he made the unbelievable claim that man would be on the moon by the end of the decade.
Kennedy’s claim was proven when Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, just one year before his deadline. The shuttle carried the first people to visit the moon—Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin. It was a historic moment that astounded people around the globe, but it was the beginning of an end.
After Apollo 11 safely returned home, another six trips to the moon followed. Five of those trips landed successfully, and 12 men walked on the moon in total. The last crewed mission was Apollo 17, which lasted for 12 days in December 1972. Apollo 17 was a record-breaking trip that recorded the longest spacewalk, longest lunar landing, and the largest lunar samples brought back to Earth, according to Royal Museums Greenwich.
NASA originally planned for 20 Apollo missions, but despite the rapid scientific advancements and discoveries of the Space Shuttle era, NASA canceled the remaining three Apollo missions. Part of the reason why the missions were scratched was because of money. The U.S. government originally estimated the project to be $7 billion, but in the end, the total was $20 billion. It was too expensive in the long run, particularly because of civil unrest in the US.
The Space Shuttle era was set against a backdrop of the Cold War, and the American public was less than pleased about the vast sums of money going toward space exploration while problems were happening on the home front. The moon landing was also a political statement, and once the goal was accomplished, NASA faced large funding cuts during the Kennedy administration, according to Royal Museums Greenwich. The combination of issues proved fatal for moon landings, and the trips ended.
After 50 years, however, things are changing. Another moon mission is underway and will involve a 10-day flight test around the moon and back to Earth, NASA announced on Monday. The Artemis II, as it has been named, is a joint effort between NASA and the Canadian Space Agency and will have a diverse crew of astronauts, including the first woman, the first person of color, and the first Canadian to go on a lunar mission.
Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist 1 Christina Hammock Koch, and Mission Specialist 2 Jeremy Hansen will leave for the moon in late 2024 to perform a full check of the Orion’s life support systems, which ran a test last November in an uncrewed mission.
The Artemis II mission is set to pave the way for not only long-term human exploration missions to the moon but also for future trips to Mars as part of a “Moon to Mars exploration approach,” according to NASA. Once Artemis II makes a safe return, NASA plans to have Artemis III land on the moon in late 2025 as the next step towards deeper space exploration.