In Greek mythology, the sun god Apollo and the moon god Artemis were twins born to Leto after she had an extramarital affair with Zeus. As the main point of NASA's Apollo program of the 1960s was to land men on the moon, not the sun, Artemis would have been a better name for it.
There's an old saying in engineering that if there's not enough time to do it right, there's somehow always enough time to do it over. I'm not sure that applies to NASA's Artemis program, which is currently aimed at what looks to me like an Apollo do-over, but it all depends on your point of view.
One point of view that's very popular in some circles these days is what might be called the Original Sin of the White Male. In the dark ages preceding the civil-rights movement of the 1960s and second-wave feminism of the 1970s, if you were not a white male you were out of luck. Most doors to professions were slammed in your face, and these injustices tainted any cultural or national achievements with racism and sexism, including the successful landing on the moon in July of 1969 by—you guessed it—white males.
In many historical religions, people tried to make up for their past sins by sacrifices designed to please the gods. If you look at the main webpage for NASA's Artemis program, the first sentence you will see is this: "With Artemis missions, NASA will land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before."
When I read somewhere that one of the main goals of the Artemis program was to remedy the white-males-only record of lunar flights, I didn't want to believe it. But there it is, in—pardon the expression—black and white, right on their webpage. When you look into the history of the program, it's a little more complicated than just wanting to make up for Apollo by sending women and people of color to the Moon. But obviously, NASA has chosen to make that feature a big selling point to the public.
The problem that democracies have with any large-scale program that lasts longer than four years is to keep them going despite the winds of political change that blow through Washington at least that often. In the early 2000s, NASA conceived something called Constellation, which was its effort to put people back in space after the end of the Space Shuttle, which wound down in 2011. The Obama administration cancelled Constellation except for the Orion spacecraft, which was then folded into something called the Space Launch System (SLS). One way or another, with various name changes (the name was changed to Artemis during the Trump administration), the program has limped along with funding that is, relatively speaking, a pittance in fraction-of-GNP terms compared to Apollo.
Well, not that much of a pittance, actually. One estimate places the total cost of Artemis, assuming it actually gets off the ground by 2025, at $93 billion. If expressed in 2020 dollars, the 1960s Apollo program cost $257 billion, not quite three times as much. So Artemis isn't that much of a bargain. And we still haven't got a single person—of any color or sex—off the ground under its auspices, while Apollo spent most of the 1960s in rehearsals of various kinds.
Until Hurricane Ian came along, NASA was planning to launch Artemis 1, the first shot in the Artemis series, on Sept. 23. Problems with fuel tanks on Sept. 12 led launch officials to postpone the scheduled launch, and then concerns about Hurricane Ian pushed the next tentative launch date to November of this year.
Artemis 1 will not be a manned (womaned?) flight. Only some satellites and flight-test dummies will be aboard. The SLS rocket is attributed to (I kid you not) the Aerojet Rocketdyne Northrop Grumman Boeing United Launch Alliance. If that isn't a creature of politics, I don't know what is. The newer private-rocket company SpaceX is prime contractor for the Human Landing System (HLS), which is planned to get people from lunar orbit down to the moon. But that won't be an active part of the Artemis 1 launch, which is mainly to see if the launch rocket works.
After a certain point, large organizations develop a kind of default mode that they will operate in unless strong external forces are brought to bear on them. NASA's default mode, for the last decade at least, has been to seek funding for projects that have a political appeal wide enough to motivate enough federal support to provide contracts for as many contractors as possible, while keeping one eye on a goal that can be achieved if NASA only had about twice as much funding as it ever gets.
For a time, around 2010, several of my undergraduate engineering students spoke admiringly of space programs and expressed a desire to get involved in them. One of them, the smartest undergraduate woman I've had in my electromagnetics class in twenty years, even ended up working for Blue Origin. But lately, the bloom has come off the space-exploration rose, and the highest ambitions many students have these days is just to land a job that will let them pay off their student loans before they retire.
When Neil Armstrong uttered his first words on the moon—"one giant leap for mankind"—I wasn't aware of any women or girls who felt excluded because he said "mankind" and not "humanity." He couldn't get away with that today, because the original sin of the white male plays such a prominent role in the public's consciousness these days. It's an open question as to whether redressing this wrong at a cost of $92 billion is worth it. Of course, a lot of other good and useful things may be done by returning to the moon with an eye toward using it as a base for wider-ranging exploration of space. But can't we concentrate on the job at hand, and take integration of people of color and women and other minorities in stride, rather than making it the main focus, which is what NASA seems to want it to be? The problem with that is that we'd have to decide what the main job is, and the answer to that question is far from clear.
Sources: NASA's Artemis webpage is at https://www.nasa.gov/specials/artemis/.
The Artemis project cost estimate is from https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/years-late-and-billions-over-budget-nasas-most-powerful-rocket-finally-set-for-takeoff, the Apollo cost estimate is from https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo, and I also referred to the Wikipedia pages on the Artemis program and the Artemis HLS development program.
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