Artemis will take Americans to the moon for the 1st time since 1972. Why has it been so hard to go back?

On September 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy declared that the United States would “go to the Moon…and do it first, before this decade is out.”

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do other things,” Kennedy said, “not because they are easy but because they are difficult.”

Then America followed. Less than seven years later, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped off their lander and left humanity’s first lunar footprints.

Today, this pace of progress may seem impossible. On April 1, NASA is scheduled to launch Artemis II, the first U.S. crewed lunar spaceflight in more than half a century. Its mission is clear: send four astronauts around the Moon and return in 10 days.

But Artemis II’s mission is also… familiar. In 1968, three Apollo 8 astronauts circled the Moon without landing, then returned to Earth.

In other words, NASA already made a version of Artemis II almost 60 years ago – and did so without the long delays that plagued Artemis II itself (which was previously scheduled for liftoff, then delayed, almost every year since 2021).

How can getting to the Moon be so difficult if we’ve already done it? Here are five reasons why human spaceflight is such a challenge today.

Rust

The last time humans set foot on the Moon was in 1972, with Apollo 17. It was also the last crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit, period. Even unmanned lunar landers fell out of favor soon after, with more than 35 years passing between one successful robotic landing on the Moon’s surface (the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 in 1976) and the next (China’s Chang’e 3 in 2013).

“There were decades when people weren’t developing landers,” one expert told the Guardian in 2024. “The technology is not so common that you can easily learn from others.”

It turns out that resuming manned space exploration after a decades-long hiatus is difficult, especially when complex new technologies need to be integrated with older technologies.

“We stopped, and then we forgot,” Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, recently told Scientific American. Just because you ran an Olympic marathon 50 years ago, Pace continued, doesn’t mean you could do it again tomorrow.

Ambition

Despite some superficial similarities, the Artemis program isn’t really Apollo Part Two. Apollo sought to (briefly) send humans to the Moon. Artemis aspires to establish a permanent base there – one that astronauts can then use as a springboard to Mars.

It’s a much more ambitious goal, and it defines every facet of Artemis: the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that propels astronauts beyond Earth’s atmosphere; the Orion spacecraft in which they can spend every four 21 days; separate next-generation spacesuits for launch and entry as well as surface exploration; robotic landers on commercial rockets that deliver equipment to the Moon itself; and finally, the reusable rocket and human lander system – either SpaceX’s Starship or Blue Origin’s Blue Moon – which will eventually orbit the moon and dock with Orion before transporting the Artemis crew to and from the surface.

In short, there are more moving parts today than in the 1960s, which means more potential delays.

Motivation

In the 1960s, the United States competed with the Soviet Union in an existential space race. Conventional Cold War wisdom decreed that the superpower that arrived first on the Moon would strengthen its military dominance – and project precisely the kind of soft power that could influence newly independent countries to choose democracy over communism.

There is some clarity in the head-to-head competition, and the United States immediately mobilized to beat the Soviets to the moon. Now that clarity is gone. In its place is a more nebulous (and less urgent) goal: international cooperation in the name of scientific discovery. Japan, Canada, the United Arab Emirates and the European Space Agency are all collaborating with the United States on Artemis.

As a result, one president’s spaceflight plans are often canceled by the next, only to be resurrected later in a different form, and delays pile up while countries do the important work of being on the same page about the future of space and supplying hardware to the cause.

Money

Between 2012 and 2025, the United States spent approximately $93 billion on the Artemis program. Total spending is expected to exceed $105 billion by 2028, the year the first Artemis astronauts are expected to land on the Moon.

It’s not a small amount. But Apollo cost more than three times as much: about $320 billion in today’s dollars, according to the Planetary Society. Similarly, about 4 percent of the federal budget was spent on NASA during the Apollo era. Today, the space agency is lucky to get 1%.

Experts say the change is wise. “There’s no reason to spend money like it’s a war,” John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University and founder of the Space Policy Institute, told Scientific American. “There really is no national or political interest that can serve as a basis for this type of mobilization at this point.”

But reasonable or not, less funding almost always means slower progress.

Security

Given the scientific and cooperative nature of current lunar missions – not to mention all the advances in computer modeling since the 1960s – it would be irresponsible of NASA not consider all possible safety consequences of Artemis – for the astronauts themselves and for the wider environment.

This wasn’t quite the case in Apollo’s time. Back then, swaggering fighter pilots were converted into astronauts and thrust into space the same way they had previously been deployed for war: with the knowledge that they were doing something very, very dangerous. The risk was worth the reward (i.e. winning the space race).

But today, engineers can run detailed simulations of Orion’s materials and the stresses the capsule will be subjected to, including high temperatures and intense acceleration forces — and that’s exactly what they’ve been doing for years.

Even then, Artemis I – an uncrewed mission to orbit the Moon launching in 2022 – showed that Orion’s heat shield broke differently than expected; that the spacecraft’s bolts faced “unexpected melting and erosion”; and that the electrical system experienced anomalies that could endanger the future crew.

It took NASA time to resolve these issues – just as it will take time to resolve problems with, say, Orion’s life support systems that arise during its first crewed mission. Building land infrastructure is slower and more expensive today than in the 1960s; the same goes for exploring the cosmos.

Some will say the compromise is worth it. “For Artemis, having a more robust rocket system, asking people what they think, keeping them safe, and working with global partners are probably better for this world – even if it doesn’t translate into an off-world opportunity,” Scientific American concluded in its recent article on the subject.

In other words: at least NASA continues to do difficult things, even if they have become (much) more difficult.