Nehaveigur

We have concrete plans to return to the moon. Artemis 2 is a crewed mission scheduled for a lunar flyby in September 2025, and one or two years after that Artemis 3 will perform the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972.

One of the most remarkable things about the Apollo program that put Neil Armstrong and 11 other astronauts on the moon between 1969 and 1972 was that it happened so soon. None of the world’s resources could’ve made this happen in any previous decade, and that we’re only now returning to the moon means that without the special circumstances of the Cold War space race, the first moon landing may only have happened many decades later. Dan Parry in Moonshot argues that Kennedy’s interest in space was less than whole-hearted. His death was almost as significant as his initial speech to congress. America had the feeling that it had to honor the dead president’s pledge to go to the moon.

It helps to consider Neil Armstrong’s life to conceptualize how early on the moon landings happened. The following points are based on Moonshot and A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin:

• During the early 1950s, an average of one test pilot a week was killed in an air accident. When he became a test pilot himself, Armstrong felt that he had missed all the great times and adventures in flight.
• The launch of Apollo 11, which carried Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon, was witnessed by Charles Lindbergh, the first man to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a plane 42 years earlier.
• As a test pilot at Edwards Air Force base, Armstrong and his wife lived in a cabin among the Joshua trees, without electricity or running water.