The Artemis Programme
Why Returning to the Moon Is Nothing Like Going the First Time
NASA is sending humans back to the Moon for the first time in half a century, and almost nothing about how they're doing it resembles Apollo.
The Idea
The Apollo programme was a sprint — a geopolitical demonstration that the United States could plant a flag before the Soviets did. It worked, and then it stopped. Twelve men walked on the Moon between 1969 and 1972, and no human has been beyond low Earth orbit since. Artemis, NASA's current lunar programme, is built on an entirely different logic. The goal is not a visit but a foothold — a sustained human presence that eventually serves as a staging point for Mars. The architecture reflects this. Where Apollo was top-down, government-owned, and built by contractors working to NASA specifications, Artemis is a patchwork of commercial partnerships, international agreements, and inherited infrastructure. SpaceX is providing the Human Landing System — the vehicle that will actually touch down on the lunar surface — while Axiom Space is building the new spacesuits. The European Space Agency is supplying the service module for the Orion capsule. Canada, Japan, and the UAE are partners. It is less a national mission than a coalition. What makes Artemis genuinely new is where it is going. Not the equatorial highlands of the Apollo sites, but the lunar south pole — a region of permanent shadow in deep craters where water ice is confirmed to exist. That ice is the reason everything changes. Water can be split into hydrogen and oxygen: rocket propellant. The Moon's south pole isn't just a destination; it's a potential refuelling depot for the solar system.
In the World
In November 2022, the uncrewed Artemis I mission sent the Orion capsule on a 25-day journey around the Moon and back — the first flight of NASA's Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever successfully launched. No humans aboard, but the seats weren't empty in any meaningful sense: one mannequin, named Commander Moonikin Campos after a NASA engineer who helped save Apollo 13, wore an actual flight suit studded with radiation sensors. Two other torso-shaped phantoms made of materials that mimic human tissue recorded what a woman's body would experience on a deep-space journey, because understanding radiation exposure for female anatomy is one of the specific gaps Artemis is designed to close. Artemis II, scheduled to carry four astronauts — including the first woman and the first person of colour to travel to lunar distance — will loop around the Moon without landing, a deliberate echo of Apollo 8's 1968 rehearsal. Then Artemis III is the landing itself, targeting the south polar region near the Shackleton Crater, where the rim catches almost perpetual sunlight for solar power while the crater floor holds ice in permanent darkness just a short drive away. The first person to walk on that surface will do so in a landscape no human eye has ever seen in person: ancient, airless, and hiding what might be the resource that makes humanity a multi-planetary species.
Why It Matters
There's a version of this story that's easy to dismiss — another big space announcement, another slipped timeline, another reason to be sceptical about whether it actually happens. Those concerns are legitimate; Artemis has faced delays, cost overruns, and fierce congressional scrutiny. But the underlying shift in logic deserves attention even so. For most of spaceflight history, the Moon was a trophy. Artemis treats it as infrastructure. If water ice at the south pole can genuinely be extracted and converted to propellant at scale, it rewrites the economics of reaching anywhere further — Mars, the asteroid belt, beyond. The Moon becomes a harbour rather than a destination. There's also something worth sitting with in how international and commercial this effort is. The decisions being made now — who has access to lunar resources, how the south pole gets divided up, which norms govern behaviour on another world — are genuinely open questions with long consequences. The Artemis Accords, a set of bilateral agreements the US has signed with over 40 nations, are a first attempt at lunar governance. Whether they hold, and what they leave out, matters as much as the rockets.
A Question to Ponder
If the Moon's water ice does become a viable source of rocket propellant, who should decide who gets to use it — and on what basis?
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