Nasa

Last Thursday's explosion of the New Glenn rocket, on its launch pad during a test, could hardly be worse news for America’s return to the Moon. Just two days earlier, NASA had unveiled its plans for a Moon Base, which relied heavily on Jeff Bezos’s rocket and his Blue Origin series of lunar landers. As investigators, safety and clean-up crews inspect the wreckage, NASA will be contemplating a major rethink. The options aren’t good. Explosions on the pad are among the worst things that can happen because of how long repairs can take. If a rocket is to explode, engineers pray that it takes place in the air.

The key event in the return of the Artemis II crew was the moment of real drama during what mission controllers call Entry Interface. The capsule is 400,000 feet above the Earth and still traveling at 25,000 miles an hour. They were among the fastest humans even though they did not break the incoming speed of the Apollo 10 mission. It is only fourteen minutes until splashdown in the Pacific, there is no turning back, no second chance, re-entry will happen no matter what. A few hours earlier the crew donned their orange so-called crew survival suits and lowered their visors. In essence these are personal spacecraft providing everything they need to survive for up to six days. Their water-cooled inner suit was keeping them cool even though the cabin temperature was normal.

Weren’t those images beamed back from the Artemis II mission something to catch the breath in the throat? If something in you wasn’t stirred by the sight of Earth, glimpsed through the window of the space capsule past the silhouetted face of the astronaut Christina Koch, I don’t think you can be fully alive. And what about the thought that for the first time in history, human eyes will look directly on the dark side of the moon; or that the inhabitants of that spacecraft will travel farther from our home than any humans have ever done? That for a few tens of minutes before earthrise, they will be wholly out of contact with home as they travel through the vast dark? Stir the soul it might; but why, some will reasonably ask, should we be doing it at all?

Even Elon Musk has to face a dose of reality every once in a while. Technology and politics have forced him to turn his gaze away from Mars, for the moment at least, to put Americans back on the surface of the Moon before China gets there. But it might already be too late. If America has any chance of beating China, it now seems inevitable that the next American human landing on the Moon will not be by Musk’s Starship but using a craft being developed by his rival Jeff Bezos. Announcing the pivot, Musk wrote on X: “For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years.