Back to the Moon! What Took So Long?

M.A. Dworkin

Kennedy Space Center - Why it has taken over fifty years to finally decide it was time to go back to the Moon is the question that is sitting on most people’s minds nowadays. The official explanation has nothing to do with technology. It has more to do with funding, specifically cutbacks in the NASA budget over the years that moved away from deep space exploration towards operations in low-Earth orbit via the Space Shuttle and  the International Space Station (ISS). But there are many who find that explanation only half-correct. 

JFK (President John F. Kennedy) got all the funding he needed when he promised in 1962 that we would land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. Unfortunately, he didn’t live to see the accomplishment he set the entire country on course to achieve. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong uttered the words: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” 

The step out onto the Moon’s surface was viewed by 650 million people. It marked the first of 12 men to walk the surface of the Moon during six Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972. But since then not another American voice could be heard bounding through the blackness of the Milky Way Galaxy. Zip. Nada. Not even a grain of interest uttered by an American President to go back up there and explore that cold looking orb and find out if there really is a man in the moon or an alien base on the dark side. 

“Competition is a great way to mobilize the resources of a nation and concentrate on something extremely challenging,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman at a Artemis II post-launch press briefing as he alluded to the 1960s Russian threat of beating us up there. “And that’s what we did in the 1960s. We became competitive. Competition can be a good thing. We certainly have competition now.” 

Mr. Isaacman was apparently referring to Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space programs that appear to be doing interstellar dives through black holes to be the first to establish colonies on the Moon and land a human on Mars. 

“After a brief 54-year intermission NASA is back in the business of sending Astronauts to the Moon,” Mr. Isaacman  added.  

At 6:35 pm EST, on March 31, 2026, the heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS), NASA’s most powerful rocket, producing 8.8 million pounds of thrust, blasted off into a clear blue sky, under a full moon, from the Kennedy Space Center, as thousands of people gathered along Florida’s Space Coast to cheer the four-person crew, that included the first Black man and the first woman assigned to a lunar mission, as they sat inside the Orion spacecraft on a 10-day, first crewed-flight around the Moon in over 50 years. 

The Artemis II crew will spend a day in orbit around Earth, testing the Orion capsule’s life-support and navigation systems, checking every detail of their capsule before firing the main engine that will propel them to the Moon, traveling a record distance of some 405,000 kilometers into space.

If all goes well, the crew will fly past the moon - but not land on its surface - in about six day’s time. NASA is hoping this mission will lay the groundwork for future flights that will deliver Astronauts to the surface of the Moon and eventually establish a base there, that would sound the charge of building a colony on the Moon and eventually blasting off from there to Mars. 

Exciting stuff? To some. But apathy for what happens in space nowadays seems to run wild. Many think it is not much more exciting than the Honeymooner's Ralph Kramden expressing his dislike of his wife Alice’s antics by shouting: Bang! Zoom! Right to the Moon, Alice! But seriously, what has been the real reason behind it taking so long to even send an exploratory mission such as the Artemis II up there to the surface or even into orbit around old Luna? 

“We got bored. By the time Apollo 17 came around, public interest had dropped enormously,” claims one scientist close to the Apollo missions. 

But there is another interesting explanation floating around academic and psychiatric circles, one that might explain a lot of the machismo chest-beating by world powers that has been going around in contagion as of late. An explanation that might also indicate how the collective psyche of the powers that be in the U.S. government have looked at such ventures over the years. It might have nothing at all to do with the wonders of space exploration. Nothing at all to do with advancing the education of mankind, even though we are in the continual process of slip-sliding our way through the universe via space probes and powerful telescopes, looking for the answers as to when the planet was born, how and why the Earth came into being, and are we in fact here alone? Such questions are no longer front and center in the massive $7 trillion U.S. budget. Such questions would be far too afield from our current way of thinking. We prefer to think of better ways to build deadlier bombs, to carelessly alter the climate until the planet becomes unlivable, to pollute the skies and the oceans until there is no clean water or pure air left to breathe. 

The truth is, the Apollo missions that brought us to proudly stand on the surface of the Moon were plainly driven by the Cold War “space race.” Who would get there first, us or the Russians? Who would then be capable of dominating space and dropping bombs down from high in the sky? 

Here’s the real 4-1-1. Once the U.S. proved its superiority over Russia in the space race, the political motivation to fund further missions diminished. The educational motivation vanished completely.

“NASA’s programs also require sustained political will and financial support across multiple Presidential Administrations,”said Emily A. Margolis from the Smithsonian Institute. “I have studied the space agency’s efforts to engage the broader public to convince American taxpayers that their programs hold value for the nation. The story of NASA’s efforts to return humans to the Moon is long and winding, demonstrating the complexities of turning grand ambitions into real missions.” 

Still, in this day and age, official reasons remain that the Moon is a “Death Trap”  with significant risks, including lunar dust that can damage the equipment along with the many hazards from a surface filled with cratered terrains. 

And so the cons have for a long time outweighed the pros. We have shifted our focus to sustainability, toward developing technology for a long-term presence on the Moon and preparing to lift off from its dusty forbidden surface to the next great adventure: The Red Planet of Mars.     

Yet, of course, none of the hazards and negative thinking mattered back in the 1960s when we were hell-bent on beating the Russians up there. And still, many ask, what has changed? Are there still big competitive motivators like the Russians who are looking to take control of that seemingly  smiling orb? Are Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk looking to beat NASA to the Moon? Looking to plant their own flags on the dusty surface? And are the head honchos at  NASA saying: “I’ll be damned if we’re going to let them beat us to it. Damned if we’re going to let a couple of big shot retailers take over the far side. Claim it as their own.” 

It seems not much has changed in fifty-odd years. If the only thing on your mind is beating out the other guy, and not advancing civilization, it’s unlikely that anything will ever really change, at least not for a long time.