The Burdens and the Hopes, Part II
What the success of Artemis I means for us all
By all accounts, the first mission of NASA’s Artemis Program went even better than the space agency — or anyone else — could have hoped. After numerous delays and false starts over the years – including two previous launch attempts – the titanic Space Launch System rocket finally roared and rumbled into the sky from Kennedy Space Center in the still of the night last November 16. The powerful orange rocket performed brilliantly from a technical perspective, catapulting the new Orion crew vehicle into lunar orbit with pinpoint accuracy. From its perch around the Moon, Orion beamed striking lunar vistas back to Earth in real time and captured incredible images of the Earth, Sun, and Moon all in a single frame before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean after nearly a month in space.
More than that, though, Artemis I gave America and the world a much-needed dose of optimism and a renewed sense of possibility at the end of an otherwise abysmal year marked by war, inflation, and the still-glowing embers of a global pandemic. It does feel as if the the country turned a corner, however haltingly and fleetingly, at the end of 2022 — not the beginning of the end of our long national bad acid trip, maybe, but the perhaps the end of the beginning. In that respect, at least, Artemis I serves as a vivid emblem of our own uncertain emergence from our recent national travails and doldrums — a faint and flickering flame of hope and ambition that requires active attention to endure and prosper. All in all, Artemis I shouldered the nation’s almost entirely unacknowledged burdens and hopes with unexpected ease.
For all the success of its first mission, Artemis still carries a touch of the sublime about it: the program itself resides in the unsettled space between success and failure, that uneasy twilight between hope and fear where the past, present, and future all exist at once. It’s a realm where nothing has been quite decided just yet and the possibilities, both good and bad, remain wide open before us. That’s what now lends Artemis its nervous energy, a certain live-wire sense of exhilaration we feel as we strike out on the unknown path ahead. While we have a destination and a strong inkling of how we’ll get there, we don’t quite know if we’ll be able to make the journey itself.
There also remains an undercurrent of apprehension, one that arises whenever we embark upon on bold, demanding enterprises that test our collective abilities and stretch our shared imaginations to their limits. That’s to be expected whenever we take on challenging ventures that could yield potentially enormous benefits but give us no inherent guarantee of success.
This kind of tense excitement marks a distinct shift from the foreboding atmosphere that occasionally lingered over Artemis I as it sat on its Florida launch pad last fall. Artemis I was something of a shot in our national arm: an injection of optimism to help inoculate us against the creeping despair and national pessimism that’s threatened to overwhelm the country in recent years. To the question of whether or not America still possesses the requisite drive and self-confidence to conjure up and then carry out large and complicated national enterprises like returning astronauts to the Moon, Artemis I gave us an energetic if decidedly conditional answer in the affirmative.
In that respect, Artemis I looks less like an elegy for our once-lofty national aspirations and more like the harbinger of better and even more impressive things to come — not just for NASA and America’s space exploration program, but for the nation and even the world as a whole. Still, it’s important to remember that this one mission represents just one spark, however hopeful and not the whole flame. That’s in part what makes Artemis itself so invigorating and sublime right now: we’ve made it through the first part of this arduous journey, and that means we just might be able to make it all the way to our destination. There’s much that could still go wrong and fall apart, but there’s now a real possibility that we’re still able to accomplish a national project of this magnitude and complexity.
Artemis can’t hold a candle to its elder twin brother Apollo when it comes to sheer awe and inspiration – and indeed the epochal achievement of Apollo only grows more impressive with each passing year and each advance in technology and engineering. But Artemis doesn’t need to be anything other than itself; for this program to chase after its more illustrious forbears would be a fool’s errand. Instead, we ought to take Artemis on its own terms, content with the actual wonders and feats it’s only just begun to show us with this first mission.
That makes Artemis more than just a reenactment of past glories, a reminder of what we were once able to accomplish but no longer seem to be able to do. Artemis now tells us what we can do in the present and the future, that we can stand on the shoulders of earlier explorers and forge our own path at the same time. We don’t need to entertain the melancholy thought that this mission and this time pales in comparison with the achievements of the past – much as we admire and hold in reverence Apollo or any other previous triumphs, we’re able to make our own mark in our time.
Nonetheless, the success of Artemis I shouldn’t leave us with giddy optimism, much less lead us to indulge Panglossian delusions about our present and future. It’s still far too early to know with any confidence whether Artemis will be seen as our next giant leap or one last, doomed attempt to reach for the stars before we push ourselves of a precipice of our own making. For my part, I’m more hopeful about Artemis and America now than I was before the first launch attempt at the end of August last year. But I also know that too many things can go wrong in science and engineering, national politics, international affairs, or any number of areas to allow that fundamental optimism free rein. But I do feel that we can at least we can grant ourselves a sliver of hope that maybe we’ll manage to make it through our difficult present – if not necessarily the full-blown sense that the future will be brighter than today.
Above all, though, Artemis now speaks even more to our need for faith in ourselves and the future than it did before. We’re anxious to see what comes next, and whether or not we will succeed – but we now know that Artemis can succeed. And that makes all the difference as we turn the next page of our story.