On Sept. 12 1962, President John F. Kennedy famously declared that the United States would “go to the moon … and do it first, before this decade is out.”“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,” Kennedy said, “not because they are easy but because they are hard.”Then America followed through. Less than seven years later, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended from their lander and left humankind’s first lunar footprints.AdvertisementAdvertisementToday that pace of progress might seem impossible. On April 1, NASA is scheduled to launch Artemis II — America’s first crewed lunar spaceflight in more than a half century. Its mission is clear-cut: Send four astronauts around the moon and back in 10 days.But Artemis II’s mission is also … familiar. In 1968, three Apollo 8 astronauts circled the moon without landing, then traveled back to Earth.In other words, NASA already pulled off a version of Artemis II nearly 60 years ago — and did so without the long delays that have plagued Artemis II itself (which was previously scheduled to lift off, and then delayed, almost every year since 2021).How can going to the moon be so difficult if we already did it? Here are five reasons human space flight is such a big challenge today.RustinessThe last time humans set foot on the moon was in 1972, with Apollo 17. That was also the last crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit — period. Even uncrewed lunar landers fell out of favor soon after, with more than 35 years elapsing between one successful robotic landing on the moon’s surface (the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 in 1976) and the next (China’s Chang’e 3 in 2013).AdvertisementAdvertisement“There were decades when people were not developing landers,” one expert told the Guardian in 2024. “The technology is not that common that you can easily learn from others.”Turns out that it’s hard to resume human space exploration after a multi-decade hiatus — especially when complex new technologies need to be integrated with older ones.“We stopped, and then we forgot,” Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, recently told Scientific American. Just because you ran an Olympic marathon 50 years ago, Pace went on to explain, doesn’t mean you could do it again tomorrow.The Space Launch System (SLS), with the Orion crew capsule, at Kennedy Space Center in 2026.(Steve Nesius/Reuters)AmbitionDespite some superficial similarities, the Artemis program isn’t really Apollo, part two. Apollo sought to put people (briefly) on the moon. Artemis aspires to establish a permanent base there — a base that astronauts can later use as a stepping stone to Mars.AdvertisementAdvertisemen …
