Our grandson, Jack, asked me how I felt about Artemis II, given my NASA Apollo background. The more I thought about my answer, the more I realized how mixed my feelings are. I wrote him a longish, rambling letter, part of which I decided to post here to my blog. Maybe I can make it a bit less rambling in this format.
Most of all, there's an odd mixture of detachment and nostalgia. That's also how I felt about the last few Apollo missions after I had already left NASA. I left right after Apollo 15 and hadn't contributed anything directly to 16 and 17, but I still felt connected to them. At the same time, they were something I watched on television from the outside, just like all the other Muggles. Of course, that lack of connection applies completely to Artemis, and yet much of Artemis II looked so much like Apollo that I still felt a tug. Not that I'd want to be back working those long hours (literally round the clock in the case of Apollo 8), doggedly crunching numbers while wishing I was home with my wife and son. It got even worse when I was in graduate school at the University of Houston (where I got my MS in math) while working at NASA. I was a zombie for a couple of years or so. It was only doable because I was in my twenties. I don't miss any of that, of course, and yet at the same time, I miss knowing that I was contributing to something so grand and amazing, something that was also my boyhood obsession. At the same time as all of that, it all seems very long ago and far away — which it is.
I feel a lot of sadness and bitterness about the murder of Apollo by feckless politicians and anger at the American public for their fickleness and lack of imagination and for being so easily manipulated. I feel the same way about the death of the Shuttle program, on some of the early planning for which I also worked. If China beats us to the moon, which they well could, it wouldn't surprise me at all if Artemis gets canceled.
After Apollo, I worked at Martin Marietta on the Viking Mars lander missions. My contribution there was more significant than it was for Apollo, and the missions were great successes, but it wasn't emotionally fulfilling the way Apollo was. Yes, those were landings on Mars (Mars!), and the very first ones. But the landings were unmanned. There was no photograph of a suited astronaut stepping out onto the Martian soil. Still, it kept me connected to the magic of space exploration. At least, it did until the major part of the work was over and Martin M. told a whole bunch of us, "Thanks so much, guys. There's the door. Good luck." Nowadays, Denver is one of the centers of the aerospace industry, but not so in those days, so good luck was scarce unless one was willing to relocate, which I was not. In the end, I saw reports about the two Vikings landing Mars (landing exactly where they were supposed to! thanks partly to me!) and the results of their digging in the Martian soil on TV with the rest of the, as before, Muggles.
As I said, China might beat us to the moon. Perhaps Artemis II will touch down on the moon before the Chinese land there, but at this point, we’re only planning one Artemis launch per year. In other words, we'll keep doing grand-gesture missions, whereas China is moving steadily ahead with solid commitment to establish a permanent base and then keep expanding it. They'll beat us in the long term.
However, I think the results will be bad for any humans who stay there long term because of the effects of low gravity on the human body. Add to that being confined to small quarters surrounded by instant death. Even researchers in Antarctica go bonkers fairly quickly, and that's with normal gravity and the ability to go outside occasionally with lots of warm clothes and no spacesuits required. Emotionally, I thrill to the idea of humans in space. It was my boyhood dream to be one of them. But the more we learn about the effects of zero and micro gravity on the human body, among the other dangers, the more I think that we need to focus on robotics and AI for space exploration. Advances in medicine could change that in the future, but that's much longer term than advances in robotics and AI. In the end, the moon, Mars, and all the rest of space might not belong to us but to our robot servants.
