Despite the Trump administration’s insistence that the U.S. must win a race back to the moon with China, NASA looks increasingly unlikely to succeed, experts say. Meanwhile China insists it isn’t in a race at all yet looks poised to win the 21st century’s lunar scramble.
The first Trump administration unveiled its Artemis lunar landing program in 2017, aiming for astronaut boots on the moon in 2024 and an eventual “Artemis Base Camp” a decade later. These would not be Apollo-style flags-and-footprints sorties but rather longer-duration missions meant to support the construction of an eventual Artemis Base Camp lunar outpost; as such, they require bigger rockets and spacecraft—and more complex hardware for surface operations. After a long delay, the program’s first crewed lunar flight, Artemis II, is scheduled for next year sometime between February and April. Launched by the space agency’s costly Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, the mission will fling four astronauts around the lunar orb and back to Earth. It will be the first human mission to—albeit not on—the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.
Pathetic and inexcusable.
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