Artemis: Going Back to the Moon — This Time to Stay
NASA's Artemis program aims to return humans to the Moon for the first time in over 50 years, and build the foundation for a journey to Mars.
- Part 1 — Project Mercury: America's First Astronauts
- Part 2 — Project Gemini: Learning to Fly
- Part 3 — Project Apollo: One Giant Leap
- Part 4 — Artemis: Return to the Moon
Fifty years after the last Apollo astronaut left the Moon, NASA is going back.
The Artemis program — named for the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology — is more than a nostalgia mission. The goal isn’t to repeat what Apollo accomplished. It’s to establish a sustained human presence on and around the Moon, and use it as a stepping stone to something farther: Mars.
Why Go Back?
Apollo answered the fundamental question: can humans travel to and from the Moon? Yes.
Artemis asks a different set of questions. Can we survive there for extended periods? Can we extract useful resources from the surface — water ice locked in permanently shadowed craters near the South Pole, for instance — to support long-duration missions? Can we build the logistics chain that a Mars mission will eventually require?
Apollo landed at equatorial sites. The lunar South Pole, which no human has visited, is scientifically distinct: its permanently shadowed craters may hold water ice billions of years old, undisturbed since the early solar system. That ice is both a scientific archive and a potential resource — split it into hydrogen and oxygen, and you have both rocket fuel and breathable air.
The Hardware
The centerpiece of Artemis is the Space Launch System (SLS) — the most powerful rocket NASA has built since the Saturn V. Taller than the Statue of Liberty and producing 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, it surpasses even Saturn V in raw thrust.
Crew will fly in Orion, a deep-space capsule designed to support four astronauts for up to 21 days without additional hardware. Unlike the Apollo command module, Orion is designed to be reused across multiple missions.
For actually landing on the Moon, NASA selected a modified version of SpaceX’s Starship as the Human Landing System — the first time a commercial vehicle will carry NASA astronauts to the lunar surface. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander is being developed as a second option for later missions.
Artemis I: Proving the Rocket
On November 16, 2022, SLS lifted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39B for the first time. Artemis I was an uncrewed test — an Orion capsule carrying no crew on a 25-day journey to the Moon and back.
The numbers were extraordinary. Orion flew more than 1.4 million miles in total. At its farthest point, it reached 268,563 miles beyond Earth — 40,000 miles past the far side of the Moon. No spacecraft designed to carry humans had ever flown so far from Earth.
On December 11, 2022, Orion entered the atmosphere at 25,000 mph and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, 50 miles off the coast of Baja California. The heat shield, the systems, the parachutes — everything performed.
The rocket worked. The capsule worked. The mission was a success.
What Comes Next
Artemis II will carry four astronauts on a free-return trajectory around the Moon — no landing, but the first crewed journey to the vicinity of the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. The crew will fly within 4,600 miles of the lunar surface before looping back to Earth.
Artemis III aims to land humans at the lunar South Pole for the first time in history. That crew will include the first woman and the first person of color to walk on the Moon.
Beyond the initial landings, NASA’s longer-term plan involves Gateway — a small space station in a near-rectilinear halo orbit around the Moon. Gateway will serve as a staging hub for surface missions, reducing the logistics burden of each landing and enabling longer stays. The first elements of Gateway are planned for launch before Artemis IV.
The Difference This Time
Apollo was a sprint. Ten years from Kennedy’s speech to a bootprint in the Sea of Tranquility, driven by Cold War urgency, national pride, and a hard deadline.
Artemis is structured as a marathon.
The geopolitical context is different — Artemis is a genuinely international program, with partners from Europe (the European Service Module powers Orion), Japan (habitation modules for Gateway), Canada (a robotic arm), and over 20 other nations participating under the Artemis Accords framework.
The commercial dimension is different — SpaceX, Blue Origin, Astrobotic, and dozens of other companies are building hardware that NASA previously built itself. This changes the economics. Starship’s cost per flight may eventually be a fraction of what Saturn V cost in inflation-adjusted terms.
And the stated goal is different. Apollo’s goal was a footprint — to get there before the Soviets, demonstrate capability, and come home. Artemis’s goal is a foothold — the beginning of a permanent human presence beyond Earth.
Fifty years is a long gap. But the Moon hasn’t gone anywhere, and neither has the impulse that first sent humans there: the desire to go farther than we’ve been.
This is Part 4 of the America’s Space Exploration series. Start from the beginning with Project Mercury.