Artemis 1 sits waiting on the pad at Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39B, shackled to earth by a persistent issue with the hydrogen cooling system. The great rust-colored booster will now head to space no sooner than next Friday, so it sits, swathed in a veil of venting mists, as of pausing to reconsider its mission.
Part of me is fascinated by the space program and the “return to the moon.” I remember sitting in my parents’ room in the director’s cottage at Camp Wooden Acres, watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin step onto the moon. I distinctly recall being disappointed by the video quality, which was so inferior to the animation and models that Nick Hollinrake used on CTV to demonstrate the complexity of the landing. (The rabbit ears could only pull in CJOH-TV from Cornwall, ON.) But I also remember the excitement as I gripped a handful of my parents’ chenille bedspread.
Space was a great adventure, and I was too young to think about the world, and the cold war, except for articles in my dad’s collection of National Geographic Magazines about Hyman Rickover and “Our Nuclear Navy,” and Green Berets organizing Hmong irregulars in Vietnam. The Russians were people who wore fur hats and high boots, and spoke in the movies with the same accent as Mr. Berkov. I knew nothing about the “space race.”
Nor did I really know about the costs.
In terms of the human cost, I do remember being fascinated by a photo from the front page of the Montreal Star that lined the sock drawer of my dresser at home. It showed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee standing proudly with their Saturn IB rocket on the launch pad in the background. Even then, at the age of five, I could read well enough to know that they had died in a terrible fire, but that seemed more heroic than tragic. Apollo 11 seemed to be carrying forward for them.
But I had no idea how much the space program cost in monetary terms, and if I did, I don’t think it would have made that much of an impression on me. The Apollo program cost about $25 billion, or a quarter of a trillion dollars in today’s money. I remember the extraordinary affluence of that time – from the perspective of a five-year-old – when everything was new and shiny, and bright. Expo 67 had come and gone, but the Fuller dome was still there. The Ville-Marie expressway was bright, clean, shining concrete, and the Chateau Champlain was an architectural wonder with its crescent-shaped windows. The Montreal Metro was a blue spaceship that whispered on underground rails from one place to the next.
There seemed to be money for everything, and anything was possible, so landing astronauts, those most heroic of men, on the moon was, to my mind, the best possible thing to do. And, as I watched the launch, and then the landing, I was enthralled.
Even today, I feel a little bit of a thrill when I watch The Expanse or For All Mankind on television. The one asks “what could be,” and the other “what might have been,” and they satisfy that longing of imagination, sparked, for me, all those years ago as I watched my parents’ black-and-white Sylvania TV in the Laurentians. And they open our minds to possibilities, if things might have been, or could somehow be different. That is what the best fiction can do.
But things are not different, and we do not live in the enchanted realms of imagination. More than a half-century later, after the jury-rigged tent on Skylab, Challenger, Columbia, Soyuz 11, the noxious oligarchic space competition, almost $100 billion spent on the Artemis project which, we are told, is already obsolete, after the revelations of our environmental peril, and the collapse of the American, Canadian, British, and everyone else’s dreams, “space exploration” now appears to be nothing if not crassly insulting.
The great skyscrapers, expressways, and engineering marvels of 1969 are crumbling to ruin, held together with chicken-wire and slapped with just enough paint to hide the cracks and seeping water. Far from being sleek and whisper-quiet, the light rail train that I ride today in Boston is rusting through its metal doors and liable to spontaneously burst into flames on the bridge across the Mystic River.
We can return to the moon, and the would-be gods among us can publicly salivate over the prospect of ruling Mars, yet we fight over relieving college graduates of unbearable debt, and cannot ensure accessible healthcare, let alone safe drinking water, for so many of our fellow human beings. The bright, primary-colored, optimistic times of the summer of 1969 were a fantasy that veiled poverty, war, and racism, and probably had no material reality outside of five-year-olds’ daydreams, but it was a fantasy that most of us believed – a fantasy of hope and possibilities, and of a connection to a global community that stood together outside television dealers’ windows watching Aldrin’s reflection in the fun-house mirror of Armstrong’s space visor.
The Artemis launch is an offense to our humanity, a slap in our collective faces. Apart from lining oligarchs’ pockets, burnishing America’s rightfully-stained national pride, what can the “return to the moon” possibly mean in this moment of war, genocide, and earthbound environmental catastrophe? Maybe we are being asked to direct our eyes skyward so we will not notice the poverty, the death, the forest fires, and the rising sea levels here on earth. This is not an expression of hope, but a bait-and-switch scam.
Perhaps this pause in the countdown is the opportunity we need to look away from Launch Complex 39B and, like this namesake of the goddess of the hunt and the moon, reconsider the mission.