In November 2022, a slumbering Florida shook under the guttural growl of the world’s mightiest rocket – NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS).
Generating 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, it turned night into day, eclipsing the Saturn V as the biggest, beefiest and baddest machine ever built.
Its uncrewed Artemis I flight test boosted an Orion capsule on a 25-day, 2 million km (1.3 million mile) trek around the Moon – the first time in five decades that we’d seen a deep-space mission made by a ship built for astronauts.
Artemis I afforded a much-needed stimulus for NASA’s plan to return humans to our nearest celestial neighbour by 2024.
Sadly, that vaunted deadline has come and gone.
Artemis’s slow progress, decade-long development and eye-watering $93 billion price tag weighs poorly against our last lunar adventure – Project Apollo.
Back then, the Saturn V moved from blueprints to the launch pad in six years, nimbly sprinting in 20 months from its 1967 maiden flight to boots on the Moon by 1969.
It’s hard to ignore the stark empirical truth: Artemis is taking far longer to get from A to B than Apollo did.
History of the Apollo missions
But a closer look at the history of Apollo tells another story.
In 1961, the Soviet Union, once mocked as a ragtag nation of potato farmers, surged to the technological fore by launching the first artificial satellite, putting living animals in space and sending probes to the Moon.
These accomplishments raised gnawing anxieties in America of a ‘gap’ in missile-building know-how.
If Russia possessed advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles, they could strike American cities at will.
No missile gap actually existed, but the technology wins gave the Soviets a propaganda tool to wield with relish.
In April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. President John F Kennedy had to salvage US national pride – and fast.
In May, he went public. America would put a man on the Moon by 1970.
Kennedy knew the Soviets hungrily coveted the same goal. NASA’s budget sprang to achieve it, from 0.9% of federal expenditure in 1961 to 4.4% by 1966.
But an unpopular war in Vietnam and social unrest at home – racial inequality, poverty, rats in Harlem apartments, illiterate children, the assassination of Martin Luther King – shifted attitudes.
In the years after 1966, NASA’s budget progressively fell.
After the Moon race was ultimately won in 1969 with Apollo 11, change came upon the programme in a brutally brisk fashion: two Apollo missions cancelled, the Saturn V production line shut down, and plans for Moon and Mars bases binned for the Shuttle – a cheaper, more economical spaceship.
The Shuttle era
Improved détente with the Soviets no longer required a Space Race, distancing successive presidents from the Moon.
But after Space Shuttle Challenger’s loss in 1986, Sally Ride, America’s first woman astronaut, led a task force to chart NASA’s future.
Her Ride Report recommended a lunar outpost with a 30-person crew by 2010 and a Mars voyage in the 2020s.
By 1989, this vision had grown into the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI), a multi-decade “journey into tomorrow”, including a Moon base and Mars mission.
Then came the clanger: it would cost $500 billion. The shaky floorboards of political support collapsed.
NASA’s emphasis tilted next to robotic exploration, a ‘Faster, Better, Cheaper’ philosophy into which human Moon flights simply did not fit.
The 1996 national space policy did not mention humans voyaging beyond Earth orbit.
Next was 2004’s Vision for Space Exploration (VSE), a Moon return by 2020 with new crew capsules, lunar landers and heavy-lift rockets.
Although criticised as “Apollo on steroids”, VSE produced real flight hardware with a test launch of an Ares I rocket booster in 2009.
Sadly, cost undid VSE. It was behind schedule, underfunded and overbudget.
In 2010, Barack Obama cancelled it, eliminating a human Moon return.
However, in 2011 he authorised building the SLS rocket, advocating a crewed mission to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025 and a Mars voyage in the 2030s.
The age of Artemis
In 2017, Donald Trump tilted US space policy back to the Moon.
NASA would now leverage international partners to build a lunar-orbiting Gateway outpost with commercial firms facilitating payload services, landers, rovers and space suits.
By 2019, the Moon return had a deadline: 2024.
And it had a name: ‘Artemis’, Apollo’s twin sister in ancient Greek mythology.
By targeting a single objective, the Moon, NASA avoided ‘mission creep’, where complicated projects naturally accrue costs and failure becomes more likely.
Private industry would be key to the endeavour.
NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative funded companies to fly robotic landers and rovers to the Moon before humans.
But CLPS began falteringly. One firm dropped out while others were delayed by COVID-19, supply-chain issues, changing landing sites and technical maladies.
In 2024, Astrobotic’s Peregrine 1 sprang a propellant leak after launch, nixing its landing at Gruithuisen Domes on the Moon’s Oceanus Procellarum.
Then, Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 lander alighted near the Malapert-A south pole crater but broke one of its landing legs, tipped over and lost power.
Such bumps in the road are part and parcel of high-risk spaceflight. Yet CLPS continues.
"NASA is conducting a comprehensive campaign of lunar science using Moon-orbiting spacecraft, CLPS landings, human missions through the Artemis campaign and US experiments on international robotic spacecraft," explains Alise Fisher of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
"The agency has many upcoming missions and payloads designed to both look for water ice on the Moon as well as to demonstrate our technological capability of drilling for ice should we find it."
Private sector steps in
At time of writing, Firefly’s Blue Ghost is due to land at Mare Crisium mid-January 2025 and Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 targets a February 2025 south pole landing with its PRIME ice-mining drill and spectrometer.
Astrobotic’s Griffin 1 in September 2025 was to fly the VIPER ice-seeking rover, but cost and schedule overruns saw NASA cancel VIPER last July.
With the US, Canada, Europe, Japan and the United Arab Emirates set to build the Gateway in lunar orbit, at least 47 nations spanning Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania have, since 2020, signed the NASA-led Artemis Accords, a non-binding, multilateral agreements to peacefully explore the Moon.
And with revised emphasis on a 2024 landing, NASA switched gears to a commercial Human Landing System (HLS) built by private spaceflight companies.
In 2021, SpaceX was picked to build Artemis III’s lander for the first human touchdown since 1972.
SpaceX is also building Artemis IV’s HLS for a 2028 launch, with Blue Origin tapped for Artemis V in 2030, though both will conduct uncrewed Moon landings before committing to human missions.
"Astronauts will look for evidence of surface ice in and around small and shallow shadowed craters at the Moon’s south pole during the Artemis III and Artemis IV missions," says Fisher.
"Where accessible, ice samples are planned to be retrieved and returned to Earth by astronauts on the Artemis V mission."
Since 2023, Starship and its Super Heavy booster adopted an iterative development, incrementally testing the spacecraft’s capabilities, learning as much through its failures as its successes.
Last October, the Super Heavy made a controlled return to the launch pad for the first time, a key step in Starship’s goal of rapid reusability.
But part of the plan for Starship’s HLS system is that it must be fuelled in Earth orbit before eventually going to the Moon, a highly intricate process that has not been tried, much less perfected.
SpaceX will test Starship refuelling in 2025, before ramping up flight cadence to launches every three weeks.
However, congressional watchdog the General Accounting Office indicates there is only a 70% chance it will be ready by 2028.
Dreams with a deadline
After Artemis I, NASA hoped to fly the crewed Artemis II around the Moon in November 2024, then land astronauts near the lunar south pole on Artemis III in December 2025.
NASA has delayed Artemis II until 2026, citing heat shield, life-support system and battery concerns.
Artemis III has correspondingly moved to 2027, but Starship delays mean that might slip again.
Later missions will assemble the Gateway, explore the surface and fabricate a long-term, sustainable base in the 2030s.
Artemis has attracted commercial partners, with AxiomSpace, Prada and Nokia developing Artemis space suits, while Toyota, General Motors, Michelin and others vye to build the Lunar Terrain Vehicle, and Goodyear works on bringing airless tyre technology to an airless world.
"The teleoperated Lunar Terrain Vehicle is being designed to be able to enter permanently shadowed regions at the south pole for up to two hours of exploration," says Fisher.
"NASA will select science instruments for the Lunar Terrain Vehicle in 2025 and the vehicle is planned to land no later than 2029."
Why has it taken NASA so long to get back to the Moon
Some question why Saturn V blueprints cannot be dusted off and the old rocket remade.
But its 1960s technology has been superseded by modern boosters – SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and Starship, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan – which are cheaper, safer, more capable, more reliable.
Today, NASA’s budget (not just for Artemis) sits at 0.48% of federal spending.
While this is just 10% of the federal spending enjoyed by Apollo, it is in a much more stable position, with bipartisan support in Congress.
Multiple stakeholders, from treaty-bound national governments to contract-bound commercial partners, also assure the political sustainability needed to achieve long-term goals.
Artemis is taking longer than Apollo did, but at less cost.
Adjusted for inflation, Apollo’s $25.4 billion price tag equates to $182 billion today, twice Artemis’s running total.
Apollo’s breakneck pace was also fed by a national goal and a looming geopolitical menace that Artemis lacks.
But there’s something else. Artemis was marketed to land a woman and person of colour on the Moon, a powerful, visceral image, understandable to all – and a pledge that Artemis is not ‘Apollo redux’ but new history in the making.
What are your thoughts on the Artemis programme to return humans to the Moon? Let us know by emailing contactus@skyatnightmagazine.com.
This article appeared in the January 2025 issue of BBC Sky at Night Magazine