The race is on, with the Artemis 2 mission coming as soon at early next month. I'm hoping to see it and future endeavors work well, so humanity begins a long voyage to the stars as a multi-planet species. I know that sounds odd in a blog about minimalist living and self-reliance for rural life, but to me the space program has always been about learning new techniques for doing things here on Earth, about new materials, for instance, that went into cordless tools I use as a DIYer or insulation I use to cut our energy costs. Splitting-maul and Moon rocket? Why not?
I've spoken at length about this with futurist Bryan Alexander, who shares my love for space travel. We are both puzzled by a rejection of human exploration by many on the Left and from the environmental movement. It amounts to a form of neo-Luddism at a time when many nations and companies are pursuing reusable launch vehicles. NASA's big SLS Moon rocket is not, save for the Orion capsule.
What critics ignore is how money is already being made in the heavens and how seemingly silly tourist flights resemble early aviation's first paying passengers. I don't think there's any way to stop this next Space Age, save for a Kessler Event (the film Gravity depicts that) making launches untenable and sends telecom back to the 1960s.
I'd claim that moving human energy and heavy industry into space would be a godsend for our home planet's ecosystem, especially when cleaner rocket fuels come into play. You'll find a few ideas about that here. As much as I dislike the billionaire associated with SpaceX, he has one thing right: we need to begin moving some of our people and energy off-planet. That does not mean abandoning our world to the slow ecocide currently under way.
At the same time, I've written of his megalomaniacal plans for Starship at my other blog; I suspect the derivative called the Human Landing System (HLS) will prove a disaster the first time it tries to land on an unprepared lunar surface. To me it's as bad an idea as von Braun's Nova rocket of the late 1950s, also marketed to NASA as a Moon rocket when its maker was really trying to build a Mars rocket in disguise and with public monies. Both Nova and HLS would try to land a skyscraper-sized rocket on the Moon.
The current US President, who pays no attention to details save those concerning his enormous ego, is pushing us to land by 2028, the final year (I hope) of his Administration. Doing that would beat China's measured program, which plans to land astronauts by 2030. I suspect the Chinese will make that deadline, and we'll lose an HLS lander or, worse, lives trying to beat that arbitrary date.
Perhaps Jeff Bezos' Blue Moon, an alternative lander from Blue Origin of less monstrous proportions, can get American (and I hope international partners') boots on the Moon safely and even begin the work of building a permanent settlement there.
By the time we make that next giant leap, we may have national leadership that is not anti-environmental and still pro-Space. We may then have both well-funded science and talented explorers happening beyond orbit.
It's one of the things that still gives me hope in a difficult time.
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