Space-Junk, and the High Cost of Caprice

After more than half a century, humankind is making ready to return to the moon. As Apollo did for nationalism and scientific advancement in the late 1960s, so Artemis shall attempt to do for globalism and progressive ideology in the 2020s.

NASA’s website introduces Project Artemis thus: “With Artemis missions, NASA will land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon …” That an agency ostensibly dedicated to hard science should so garishly adorn itself in the raiments of tribalism seems questionable.

Nevertheless, NASA is working up Artemis’s itinerary and load manifests in preparation for a 2024 blast-off atop a new Space Launch System rocket. Freed of hassles the likes of objectivity and pragmatism, mission planners intend to provision Artemis with surfeits of sentimentality, nostalgia, and whimsy.

In addition to prosaic requisites such as air, food, water, and fuel, Artemis’s Orion spacecraft will carry a host of symbolic trinkets moonward. These include: Girl Scout badges, LEGO figurines, digitized student essays, tree seeds, a pen nib with which Charles M. Schulz drew Peanuts cartoons, a Shaun the Sheep hand-puppet (Shaun the Sheep is a character from the popular Wallace and Gromit animation series), pebbles from the Dead Sea, as well as an assortment of flags, pins, and multicultural chachkies. In all, Artemis’s Official Flight Kit will contain approximately 120-pounds of mementos.

Explorers and pioneers have always festooned their persons and vessels with apotropaic items—tokens, talismans, charms—by which to bolster their courage in the face of the unknown, and remind them of the homes and loved ones they left behind at the call of adventure’s command. Space, however, is an altogether different, lethally dangerous, direly expensive frontier.

It costs $27,000 to transport one-pound of cargo from the Earth’s surface to orbit. Ergo, the 120-pounds of saccharine frivolities going aloft on the first Artemis mission will cost U.S. taxpayers a cool $3.24-million. Viewed against the $16.4-billion price-tag of the first four Artemis missions, a few million dollars may seem insignificant. What’s more, it speaks to a worrying willingness to prioritize perception and feelings over facts and necessities.

Shackleton, in 1916, would happily have traded his immortal soul for another 120-pounds of salt-port. Lovell, in 1970, would have done likewise for another 120-pounds of liquid oxygen. Whether or not Artemis’s crew finds itself wishing mirth were breathable, or LEGOs edible remains to be seen.

FMI: www.nasa.gov