The Artemis II mission is set for launch from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida shortly before lunchtime tomorrow.
It will be the first time Nasa astronauts have been sent the Moon’s way since the last lunar landing, by Apollo 17 astronauts, in December 1972.
With war raging in the Middle East, the global economy shuddering and power-hungry leaders hellbent on securing their own legacies whatever the cost, any reminder of how utterly insignificant we are is worth having.
Astronauts who have made the 380,000-odd kilometre trip to the Moon have gained a unique perspective of the Earth and pondered why the ‘‘tiny pea, pretty and blue’’, in the words of Neil Armstrong, was so wracked by war and violence.
Aboard Apollo 8 which, like Artemis II is due to do, only circled but did not land on the Moon, commander Frank Borman, Bill Anders and Jim Lovell were the first people who witnessed the ‘‘Earthrise’’, on their fourth orbit as they emerged from the dark side of the Moon.
‘‘Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilences don’t show from that distance. From out there it really is ‘one world’.’’
One world? That’s an exciting concept, one well worth striving for.
But down here there’s little sign of that being anything other than a pipedream.
On board Apollo 11, the first voyage to land on the Moon, commander Armstrong said if he blotted out the Earth with his thumb he ‘‘didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small’’.
If awareness of how infinitesimal we are in the universe was fuelling our insecurities, fighting for supremacy may possibly just make some smidgeon of sense.
Instead, people are violently jockeying for position because it is thought easier than living peacefully.
It is carrying on in blissful ignorance of the fact our lives are inconsequentially short and we live on a mote.
The hunger to explore is deep in humankind’s DNA. So, it is natural we turn our attention to the darkness beyond to see what is out there.
There’s a romanticism about travelling into space. The thrill of the unknown and the risks, of making great discoveries, fire the imagination and have been the driving force behind all space missions in the past nearly 70 years, since the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1 went into orbit in October 1957, followed a month later by Sputnik 2 carrying Laika the dog.
In April 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, followed by the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, in June 1963.
Since then, depending on your definition of its limits, about 650 people have travelled into space.
Artemis II takes over where the Apollo missions of the late 1960s and early 1970s left off. While much of the Apollo programme focused on scientific discovery — Apollo 17’s lunar module pilot Harrison Schmitt was a professional geologist — Artemis aims to kickstart efforts to establish a presence or base on the Moon, which may then be used for missions to Mars.
The crew of four on Artemis II will be keen to get going. The training for a space mission is mind-boggling, but astronauts also require vast amounts of patience before a launch.
According to Nasa, its astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, will spend the first day carrying out tests in orbit around the Earth before heading to the Moon on day two. They are scheduled to circle about 10,000km from the Moon on April 6 before splashdown off San Diego on April 10.
The cost of the Artemis programme has been a truly eye-watering $US93 billion or so. But then United States President Donald Trump has already spent about $US36b on the war in Iran in the past month.
There will always be shock-horror reactions to the cost of space exploration. But some argue the expense is worth it for the sake of human knowledge and understanding of our place in the scheme of things.
But not if we are only doing it to find another planet to wreck after this one.
