The Artemis 2 crew is going around the Moon

Fifty-three years.

The last time a human being traveled beyond low Earth orbit was December 1972. Gene Cernan, Apollo 17, the last bootprint in the lunar dust. He said he’d be back. He died in 2017 without going back.

Fifty-three years. An entire human lifetime. A person could be born, grow up, have children, grow old, and die in the time between our last visit to deep space and our return.

Artemis 2 changes that. Four astronauts. An orbit around the Moon. Not a landing (that’s Artemis 3). But the first humans beyond low Earth orbit in more than half a century.

The crew

The crew includes the first woman and first person of color selected for a lunar mission. In 1972, every Apollo astronaut was a white American man. That was the reality of the era, the astronaut pipeline, the culture. Artemis 2 looks different. The program looks different. The ambition is the same.

I don’t want to overstate the symbolism. What matters most is the engineering: can Orion keep four people alive for 10 days beyond the Earth’s magnetic field? Can the SLS perform? Can the deep space communication systems handle the distance?

But symbolism matters too. Who we send says something about who we are. And who we are in 2025 includes a broader set of humans than who we were in 1972.

The gap

I keep coming back to the fifty-three years. How did we go to the Moon six times and then just… stop?

The usual answers: funding. Political will. The Cold War ended. The public got bored. NASA pivoted to the Shuttle and the ISS. The money went elsewhere.

All true. All insufficient. We went to the Moon. The most difficult thing humans had ever done. And then we collectively decided it wasn’t worth doing anymore. The greatest achievement in exploration history was abandoned not because it failed but because it succeeded and success wasn’t enough to sustain interest.

That’s a deeply human story. We are a species that does impossible things and then forgets why they mattered.

Artemis 2 is a reminder. A return. A resumption of a conversation with the universe that we paused for fifty-three years.

What I feel

I feel what I always feel when humans go beyond Earth. A mix of awe and anxiety and something I can’t name. The sense that we’re tiny and brave and possibly foolish and definitely reaching for something that’s worth the reach.

The Moon waited. It’ll be there when Artemis 2 arrives. The same craters. The same dust. The same silence.

But we’ll be different. Fifty-three years different. And maybe that’s enough to stay this time.

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