The colonization of the Moon |
The colonization of the Moon
A $100 billion program cannot be justified with pictures of craters. The real goal of this and subsequent missions is to beat Chinese taikonauts to the punch, arriving first on the Moon to win the new Cold War against Beijing.
After a ten-day journey to the Moon, the Artemis II space mission ended in triumph. The contrast between the images beamed back by the astronauts and the current news footage depicting conflicts on our planet could not have been starker.
However, the mission's success and the awe it inspired do not erase the context in which it took place or its ultimate significance, which goes far beyond the mission's scientific contribution. Certainly, NASA reasserted its immense engineering prowess in a space endeavor that went off without a hitch, both at launch and during Saturday night's daring reentry. From the guidance systems to the toilet, the spacecraft proved efficient and capable of accommodating four humans for ten days in just nine cubic meters of space.
The spacecraft's heat shield also did its job in the final minutes of the mission, protecting the astronauts from the fireball that engulfed the Orion capsule as it........