Five years ago in another publication I asked a simple, uncomfortable question about the Project Artemis moon program: Why? At the time, the program was a Trump-era relic (est. 2017) being kept on life support by the Biden administration with a fresh coat of "identity politics" paint. By promising to put "the first woman and person of color on the Moon," NASA attempted to justify a grab-bag of rationales that never held up under scrutiny.
Finally, after myriad failures and delays, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman confessed at a news conference, "This is just not the right pathway forward," announcing a series of huge changes and a yet another landing delay until 2028. (At least.)
He’s right. But the only actual path forward is none. Both Florida and Texas still have the death penalty so let’s kill it.
If the priority is geology, we’ve already been beat to the punch by machines. China has successfully retrieved lunar samples robotically and shared them internationally. Unmanned missions are cheaper, safer, and—crucially—more frequent.
Even the "Mars proving ground" argument has withered. While Elon Musk has tempered his timeline for a Martian colony, NASA’s own robotic fleet has been running a masterclass in endurance. One Mars rover is nearing 14 years of service; another has passed five. The U.S. sends a new one about every decade where they conduct sustained exploration without the need for life-support systems, launch-abort contingencies, or $4 billion-per-flight rockets. So far at least, the denizens have refrained from invading Earth.
As for the diversity rationale: it is genuinely unfortunate that Apollo was a product of an era where military test pilots—a white, male-dominated field—supplied the entire astronaut corps. But times have changed. The Space Shuttle and ISS programs have long included women and minorities as a matter of course, and NASA’s latest class is majority female.
Acknowledging that Apollo was a product of its time is reasonable. Spending $105 billion to symbolically "correct" it is not. You don't remedy a half-century-old demographic imbalance by burning the equivalent of the annual GDP of Oman on a rocket that launches once every three years. If your primary justification for a $100 billion mission is representation, you’ve effectively confessed that you’ve run out of better reasons.
Geopolitically, we are told Artemis signals resolve against China. But the decisive arenas of the 21st century are quantum computing, AI, microelectronics, and cyberwarfare. A breakthrough in encryption or AI autonomy would shift the global power balance overnight; a footprint on lunar regolith would not.
Yet, the U.S. continues to funnel a mere $1 billion annually into quantum development while pouring $105 billion into Artemis to date. (The original budget up to the first landing was $28 billion, but we’re used to that sort of thing.)
We are winning a 1960s race while losing the 2020s one.
Isaacman’s recent restructuring is less of a refinement and more of a surrender. Artemis III, once the triumphant return to the surface, has been relegated to Low Earth Orbit. The Lunar Gateway has been sidelined. Even more damning was Isaacman’s admission that a low launch cadence causes "workforce skills to atrophy."
Launching an extremely complex rocket once every few years allows workforce skills to atrophy. An operational system that cannot be operated frequently enough to maintain proficiency is a structural failure. Meanwhile, the commercial sector is lapping the government. SpaceX already handles two-thirds of NASA's launches at $62 million per flight, while the SLS demands over $4 billion per mission. Artemis III will now essentially consist of a multi-billion-dollar government rocket validating privately developed hardware that was built faster and cheaper.
Apollo succeeded because it was a sprint backed by Cold War urgency and a blank check. It was never meant to be a scalable model. Artemis is replicating the architecture of the 1960s without the urgency or the budget to match.
The Moon isn't a chokepoint or a decisive domain; it’s just a destination. Like Kalamazoo and Timbuktu, but rather farther. If Artemis IV finally lands in 2028 (and don’t hold your breath), it will prove we can do with billions and massive supercomputers and AI what we once did with slide rules. The real question remains: what problem is this actually solving? Until we answer that in concrete strategic terms, Artemis isn't a program of exploration—it’s just a monument to institutional momentum.
The Moon will still be there if and when we actually have a reason to go.
