Can NASA still do the impossible?

Mar 31, 2026 at 02:38 PM CDT

Image credit: Paul Hennesy/Anadolu via Getty Images

NASA says it is ready to send astronauts toward the Moon for the first time in more than half a century. This is the first crewed mission of NASA’s Artemis program. Ultimately, the goal is to return humans to the Moon and establish a long-term presence there. But what will it take to get there, and what stands in the way?

Being a video editor for some of the most profound sports networks may have introduced Donald Afari into the world of digital media but the spawn of in depth storytelling has kept him in the game.

Tags: Artemis I, Artemis II, NASA

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Speaker 0 00:00:02 We choose to go to the moon, we choose to go to the moon in this decay and do the other things. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard. More than 50 years ago, humans accomplished something many thought impossible. Ignition sequence start 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. All engines running commit, lift off. We have lift off. 11:22 AM Eastern standard time. We landed on the moon. One back light ality base here, the eagle has landed. It’s one small step for man, one by athlete for . NASA led the missions during the Apollo program when the United States was racing to reach the lunar surface. Flag is a beautiful picture. Astronauts landed on the moon six times, but the last time humans walked on the moon was in 1972. NASA administrator, Jared Isaac, man says the challenge now is getting back. The hardest thing right now is returning American astronauts to the surface of moon. We obviously haven’t done that in more than 53 years. So here’s the question. If we could do it, then why haven’t we returned? Even as size progress go into the moon, remain as Kennedy called it a hard thing to do and make it look easy when it’s not easy. Things are not simple, and that’s why it takes time, money, and effort to get it done. You know, it was popular, but it wasn’t popular with everybody. At its peak, NASA’s budget exceeded 4% of federal spending. Now it’s about 0.4%. Still the moon represents something bigger, a chance to push beyond what we know and expand the limits of human exploration. Now NASA’s Artemis program is ready to pick up where Apollo left off one boosters in tion and lift off of Artemis one. Artemis is our campaign to return astronauts to the moon and from there begin to build a, a more permanent presence over time. Jacob Bleacher is the chief exploration scientist at nasa designing and managing programs critical to the Artemis missions, the destination we’ve picked the south polar region of the moon. It has a very unique situation in which some of the impact craters or big depressions never see the sunlight. And so this is a really unique environment for us. And we think that over the entire history of the moon, billions of years, the moon surface may have collected volatile materials or, or water. These are materials that if they are exposed to the sun in an airless environment, they, they volatilize or become a gas rapidly. And so if we can find those resources on the moon, it’s great because, one, they’re great for science, but they could also be a resource for us to use. Water is very important to to life as we know it. If those shadow craters harbor those water ice deposits, they could support future space missions, astronauts at the base and even fuel rockets for deeper exploration. But only if there’s enough. It’s not that it’s any more difficult to go to the moon now than it was in the past, but we’re going to a different place, A place we’ve never been. The south polar region of the moon, it’s very unlike what most people are familiar with. If they’ve seen pictures or videos of the Apollo missions, the South Pole has a really beautiful terrain, but because the moon does not have an axial tilt, the sun doesn’t really rise and set above your head the way it does everywhere else on the moon. And so it just moves right around the horizon. It basically dances in a circle around you if you’re at the pole. And what happens then is you have these sweeping shadows that come across the region and it, it just makes the lighting very, very different than what we experience in Apollo. So it’s not that it’s more difficult, it’s just different. We are building a moon base. You are gonna build a moon base, you’re gonna need rovers, you’re gonna need lots of rovers on the surface. You’re gonna need comms, you’re gonna need navigation, you’re gonna need power. This is not lost. And this is a high priority. This is what’s so important in the national space policy is don’t just go back, go back to stay. That level of ambition raises the stakes haring back to the Cold War era when a space race against the Soviet Union fueled America’s push to leave blueprints and stars and stripes on the lunar surface. During the Cold War, the United States wasn’t just exploring space, it was racing the Soviet Union to the moon with global power and prestige on the line. The mission became a national priority and the money followed between 1960 and 1973, the US poured $25.8 billion into Apollo or more than 200 billion in today’s dollars. That urgency helped put astronauts on the lunar surface. Today, the race looks different With Artemis, the government’s projected to have spent around $93 billion through 2025. But now it’s competing with a long list of other national priorities and without the same singular focus. Progress can slow and timelines can stretch. During Apollo, NASA worked with contractors and universities, but the program ran as a tightly controlled system with one clear path to the moon. Artemis is more like an ecosystem. Multiple companies are building different pieces of the mission from spacecraft to landers, all of which have to come together in orbit before astronaut can even attempt a landing. That means more coordination, more complexity, and more opportunities for something to go wrong. But the idea is to move faster, test more often, and keep the program moving forward. Our average launch cadence was closer to three months throughout all those programs, not three years. We need to start getting back to basics and moving in these directions instead of a simple program like Apollo where everything went on one rocket. We’ve had this very complex architecture and that has led to a lot of delays. Artemis two is already seeing some of those challenges. The mission was originally set to launch March 6th, then pushed back to April 1st As NASA continued testing and working through technical issues to ensure the spacecraft is ready, the hydrogen leaks, we learned a tremendous amount in Artemis one. You know, and again, we refer to these as test flights, we’re still learning how these systems work. And just like in Artemis one, we observed a few leaks and we worked on how to fix those. We learned about that in our wet dress. We had a few leaks, but we’re learning how, how to deal with those and move forward. So I think, you know, we, we continue to learn, we continue to get better at this and, and we’re on a good path despite the difficulty. NASA’s once again, full throttle the moon really is our first foothold in taping, taking steps away from the earth. Before we take that jump, we want to kind of learn how to work and operate and live away from the earth here at the moon. That will help us understand how to operate so we can go to a place like Mars in the future. A former NASA engineer who helped develop systems for human space flight. Mark Jernigan says the moon is a test bed for future missions, but the moon is a test bed. If you can learn how to make ’em work on the moon, then I think it’s pretty readily apparent that you could have ’em work pretty well on Mars as well. This is an effort for all of humanity. Those innovations, those creative ideas, they feed right into everyday life. In other words, humans are not choosing to do it because it’s easy, rather because it’s hard for straight arrow news. I’m Donald Ari.

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