Why Did It Take So Long To Return To The Moon?

On December 19, 1972, the Apollo 17 command module split through the atmosphere and crashed into the Pacific. When leaving the lunar gray, Eugene Cernan certainly had no idea that he was going to be the last human being to set foot on lunar soil for the next half century. Today, Artemis II has just taken off brilliantly last night, carrying with it four astronauts for a flyby around our natural satellite. NASA proved to us that it had not forgotten everything about its golden age: the Moon will have visitors again, or at least, she is preparing to see them pass very closely.

However, this feat should not obscure the annoying question: through what geopolitical and financial shipwreck could the United States have gone through 54 years? without ever sending a single human beyond Earth’s orbitwhen the hardest part had been done? This should not be seen as any failure of American genius, but as a symptom of state disengagement in favor of a short-term vision, where the prestige of the nation was no longer enough to balance NASA’s financial balance sheets, constantly burdened by increasing costs and unfinished programs.

The Apollo mirage or the art of the sprint without tomorrow

If we have not returned to the Moon, it is firstly because Apollo was planned as a coup. It was first developed to establish an ideological victory over the USSRnever as a fundamental research mission and even less to establish the bases of a lasting human occupation.

From 1966, even before Neil Armstrong’s first step, NASA’s budget was already plummeting. The Vietnam War, domestic social reforms, racial tensions, energy crises and the slowing down of the arms race have got the better of America’s space appetite.

The program ended in 1972 because the Americans got what they wanted: humiliate the Soviet Union. Once the flag was planted and national pride restored, the Moon once again became too costly a rock for the White House, harassed by more pressing domestic bills.

Richard Nixon then sealed the fate of distant exploration in January 1972 by ordering NASA to build the Space Shuttle (Space Transportation System). At the time, Washington sold this machine as a kind of “ space truck » to make frequent and cheap return trips to low orbit. In reality, this choice was a monumental trap that paralyzed America for three decades.

This ship was insanely complex, but suffered from a fatal flaw: it was incapable of exceeding 400 kilometers in altitude. To return to the Moon, you must aim A little further: 384,400 kilometers. By betting everything on this vehicle, the United States voluntarily locked itself in a small bubble around the Earth. While the engineers exhausted themselves repairing it, managing exploding budgets and mourning the crews of the tragedies of Challenger in 1986 then Columbia in 2003, plans to leave Earth orbit were languishing in drawers.

The Ghost Project Cycle and the Artemis Rebirth

For three decades, the White House treated the conquest of space as a vulgar political toy, engaging in counterproductive budgetary yo-yoing. The ball of missed opportunities began in July 1989, when George HW Bush tried to rekindle the flame with the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI). The bill was too steep for the American Congress, which preferred to say stop before dropping several hundred billion dollars in a program that relied only on prestige, without a real strategy of economic sovereignty.

In January 2004, repeat. George W. Bush launches the program with great fanfare Constellationpromising a return to the Moon by 2020. Six years later, in February 2010, Barack Obama put an end to it, judging the project “ without financial realism, showing abysmal delays and cruelly lacking innovation ».

Space does not forgive error, and even less so political indecision. These budgetary back and forths between Republican and Democratic administrations cost America more than any successful missionwasting colossal resources on stillborn projects to please the voters of the moment. Budgets for defense, education, social protection or ecology have always served as excuses in Washington to stifle NASA.

Every president wanted “ on » Moon, refusing that of his predecessor as one refuses a cumbersome inheritance, thus sabotaging all the collective efforts of the nation.

If Artemis II managed to escape Earth’s gravity last night, it’s because NASA understood that we do not conquer space with disposable electoral promises. The program is no longer based solely on the pride of the star-spangled banner, but on an armored ecosystem where the capital of SpaceX, the industrial expertise of Europe, the ambitions of Japan and the vital need not to let China alone dictate the laws of space conquest. The success of this mission marks the end of institutional vandalism which has reigned for too long in Washington. By linking the fate of its program to private contracts impossible to break without pharaonic coststhe American space agency has passed the leash around the necks of politicians obsessed with their four-year mandates. The Moon has never been this close, but it has never been this far away budgetary axes from the White House. The revenge of engineering on bureaucracy, like all revenge, is best eaten cold, even if the plate has cooled for half a century.