Amid Earth’s profane scrums, Artemis has recaptured the public’s fascination with space

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David Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics. He teaches at McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy.

The ferocious roar emitted by the two strapped-on solid rocket booster engines that are to catapult the Orion spacecraft toward the moon on Saturday will be a grace note in the dirge of contemporary American life.

Here on Earth, Americans are fighting about abortion and gun control, lining up to oppose Donald Trump or to stand in solidarity with him, hurling brickbats in fractious midterm congressional elections and tossing around easy talk about civil war. But for one brief moment in the country’s current civic hell, Americans’ eyes will be on the heavens.

NASA has sent 355 people into space on 135 Space Shuttle missions – 14 of them with Canadians on board – and, eventually, hardly anyone outside their families were paying much notice. And Saturday’s test flight in the new Artemis mission will have no passengers: They will come later, in the second flight, scheduled for 2024 with a Canadian astronaut on board. Yet, by returning to the moon for the first time since 1972, Artemis has rekindled interest in the space endeavour.

This is one of the very few times this phrase will actually have real meaning: We are going back to the future.

Back to the excitement that space travel once held for an entire generation. Back to the moon, and the dream of interplanetary travel. Back to a sense of national purpose that the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo progression gave to Americans even at a time when the country was riven by conflict over civil rights and the Vietnam War.

“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people,” then-president John F. Kennedy said almost 60 years ago this month, challenging the country to place a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. “For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man.”

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Today the use of “man” as a synonym for humankind is an anachronism; if the 1967 Montreal world’s fair were to be held now, for instance, it would not carry the sobriquet “Man and his World.” The Artemis program reflects that. In Greek mythology, Artemis was the goddess of the hunt and nature who was associated with the moon, and the twin sister of Apollo, the namesake of NASA’s third human spaceflight program. This time, a woman and a racialized person will be aboard the landing vehicle that touches down on the surface of the moon in the mission’s later phase.

Canada will play a part, too, including with the 8.5-metre-long Canadarm3, which is to be outfitted on the Lunar Gateway that will orbit the moon during the landing missions. “More than five decades ago, the United States accepted JFK’s near-impossible challenge and succeeded,” Liberal MP Marc Garneau, Canada’s first astronaut in space, told me. “It’s time to take the next step. There are compelling reasons for returning to the moon, and I’m so glad Canada will be there.”

No single project in the past half-century has captivated the world’s attention remotely like the 1960s’ lurch toward the lunar surface. There were skeptics and opponents, to be sure; they cited legitimate concerns that we would be distracted from earthbound poverty, health and hunger crises. But still, the space race, as it was known, was enthralling, and for a time heroes walked on the moon and strode the Earth.

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One of them was John Glenn. The former astronaut built his 1984 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination less around his record in the Senate than on his profile as an American hero. I remember, reporting from one of New Hampshire’s small lake towns during the campaign, when he encountered a set of twins, born in February, 1962, the month he became the first American in orbit. They shook hands and introduced themselves. One of the twins was named John. The other was named Glenn.

Like so many Americans of my time, I had occasion as a parent to employ the space challenge for my own purposes. My children, now in their 30s, may know one passage from Mr. Kennedy by heart. It comes from that space-challenge speech, and whenever they faced difficulty I would remind them of the words of the 35th president:

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Words to live by, on Earth as well as in the heavens.

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