WE ARE GOING TO THE MOON: THANKS JO THE RISE OF PRIVATE SPACEFLIGHT COMPANIES, MANKIND WILL HAVE A FUTURE OFF-EARTH.

• Author: Berger, Eric

FOLLOWING 11 YEARS in which the space agency has had no launch capability of its own, NASA will soon attempt to fly its huge Space Launch System (SLS) booster for the first time. A few minutes after liftoff, the Orion spacecraft will separate from the rocket and zip into orbit around the moon for more than a month. No astronauts will be on board this much delayed initial flight. But on later flights, some will.

NASA has heavily promoted this first Artemis mission as a return to human moon missions. Because Artemis superficially resembles the Apollo Program, it would be easy to dismiss it as a mere rehash. The SLS looks a lot like the Saturn V that launched six Apollo missions to the surface of the moon. And while the Orion spacecraft is roomier and hosts modern avionics in its guts, in essence it is a larger version of the Apollo capsule. Our Chinese rivals mocked NASA for just striving to relive past glories, and even President Barack Obama in 2010 denigrated the idea of returning human beings to the moon as "been there, done that." Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon, sat in the front row as Obama said that, fuming quietly.

But Artemis is different. NASA's new space exploration plan is beginning as the agency starts to embrace the commercial space industry. Although the big SLS rocket and Orion were funded more than a decade ago through cost-plus contracts designed to reward such familiar corporate partners as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, more recent deals have gone through a genuinely competitive award process.

Significantly, in April 2021 Elon Musk's SpaceX beat a handful of serious competitors for a $2.89 billion contract to use its futuristic, silvery Starship vehicle to land astronauts on the moon. While Orion and SLS can take prospective moonwalkers to lunar orbit, NASA still needed a lander to carry humans to and from the surface. In a striking contrast with its earlier contracts, SpaceX did not create Starship at NASA's request. The company built the large rocket to one day fly human beings to Mars, an audacious but no longer insurmountable goal. SpaceX had invested billions in the project by the time NASA expressed interest in using the vehicle to ferry astronauts down to the moon from lunar orbit. Because SpaceX had invested so much already in Starship, NASA was able to buy a service--lunar landings--for a fraction of what other companies were offering.

NASA has a legitimate chance to return to the moon sustainably because private companies began competing with it and/or selling it services. That is probably the only way the U.S. will ever go back. NASA isn't about to return to its halcyon days when it had a work force of 200,000 and was spending 5 percent of the federal budget. After six lunar landings, in 1972 President Richard Nixon decided that America had more than honored its commitment to President John F. Kennedy's legacy of landing a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s. As Nixon directed the space agency to scale back its ambition, NASA's budget fell to less than 1 percent of federal spending. Today it is less than one-half of 1 percent.

Apollo's extravagant cost is just one of the reasons no human being has flown more than a few hundred miles off Earth's surface in half a century. One must know all the reasons NASA stopped trying to get to the moon if one is to understand how the Artemis Program is different from Apollo--and more importantly, why, thanks to private enterprise, it has a chance to succeed.

HOW NASA LOST ITS BOOST

IN 1972, EUGENE Cernan and Harrison Schmitt stared across a desolate lunar surface with a sense of regret. The two Apollo 17 astronauts knew that theirs would be NASA's final mission to the moon for a while.

Still, they didn't think it would be decades before a new generation of space travelers followed in their gray and dusty footsteps. Before he climbed into the Lunar Module for the final time, Cernan radioed back to Earth that people would return to the moon "not too long into the future." But he was wrong. When he died in 2017 at age 82, Cernan was still the last man to have been on the moon.

Why was Ceman's wish unfulfilled? Mainly because there was no strong reason to go back. Apollo's great goal was not a detailed exploration of the moon, nor to let us establish a permanent presence beyond the close confines of low Earth orbit. Apollo was driven by strictly geopolitical aims, reversing a series of Soviet firsts in space starting in 1957 with Sputnik.

Moscow's propaganda machine trumpeted each Soviet spaceflight as further evidence of the benefits of its culture and form of government. In 1960...