Photograph: Bill Anders/NASA/EPA
If all goes to plan on Monday, the first vehicle in 50 years that is capable of ferrying humans to the moon will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The giant Space Launch System rocket will hurl aloft an Orion spacecraft, designed to carry up to six astronauts, on a 1.3m mile test mission labelled Artemis 1. If successful, the 42-day flight, which will take its unmanned Orion craft 40,000 miles beyond the far side of the moon, will demonstrate that the United States is once again ready to put humans on the lunar surface.
The achievement will come at a price, however. The US taxpayer will pay $93bn to fund the Artemis programme that will take humans back to the moon before acting later as a springboard to send astronauts to Mars. It is a colossal investment and there are nagging doubts that it is justified at a time when private space companies, such as Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, are developing giant reusable rockets that could slash deep-space mission costs. From this perspective, many analysts say that private enterprise should bear the brunt of ferrying people to the moon and Mars.
