Why Doesn’t Anybody Realize We’re Going Back to the Moon?

The most momentous launch since the Apollo era was about to begin, and along Florida’s space coast, a secondhand exhilaration was working its way through the assembled crowd, as though all of us, and not just the astronauts, would soon ride out of Earth’s gravity well on a pillar of fire. The space faithful had started arriving at the A. Max Brewer Bridge in Titusville before dawn, under the light of a full, yellow moon. They had set up their folding chairs and tripods at the high point of the bridge, to get the best line of sight, and stayed fixed in place during a brief rain, and again later, when a concerning wind blew across the lagoon.

On the launchpad, the rocket stood more than 30 stories high, illuminated by banks of stadium lights. As the day wore on, a tailgate atmosphere took hold in the park at the foot of the bridge. For miles, cars had pulled onto nearly every available stretch of grass. Families spread out on picnic blankets, and college-aged kids wheeled out coolers. They threw footballs and baseballs back and forth and drank beer.

Two hours before sunset, thousands of us massed on the bridge. Again and again, people told me that they’d come to see history. If Artemis II is successful, the astronauts will be the first humans to reach the moon’s orbit in more than 50 years, and their path around its far side will take them farther into the universe than any human being has previously traveled. The man next to me was streaming the NASA telecast on his phone. He told me that we were one minute from liftoff.

The Artemis II mission has seemingly come out of nowhere. In January, a few weeks before an earlier launch attempt, I’d started asking friends if they were looking forward to it. Few of them had any idea it was happening. “We’re going back to the moon?” they would ask, with the sort of mild surprise that one might experience upon being told that the Super Bowl is only a week away. They didn’t linger on the subject. Anyway, how are the kids?

The original moon missions of the 1960s could be sold as history’s grandest adventure. The Apollo program was the triple-back-handspring exclamation mark on a century of American technological transformations, during which Americans had electrified their cities, filled their streets with cars and their skies with airplanes, split atoms, and invented digital computers. To complete this phase shift into the future, the country banded together to build a spaceship that carried humans to another world, and performed a flag planting for the ages, a peaceful Iwo Jima. Wernher von Braun, the (ex-Nazi and) intellectual architect of Apollo had compared the moon landing to the epochal moment when aquatic life had first crawled onto land.

In the decades since, the Apollo program has lost some of its aura, in part because it did not lead to a glorious space future in the way that its architects, including von Braun himself, had hoped. Six decades have passed, during which time we’ve had the invention of the internet, the smartphone, and powerful artificial intelligence, and yet this year’s launch is not to Mars or the outer planets or the stars. We’re just returning to the moon. Even though three-fourths of the world’s population is young enough to have never experienced a crewed lunar mission like this one, it has the feel of a rerun. Again we’re rushing to arrive before another nation does, this time China instead of the Soviet Union. We’re told that if we don’t get there first, the Chinese might claim the craters with the best water ice.

Jared Isaacman, NASA’s administrator, often says that the Artemis program will be different from Apollo because this time we’re going to the moon to stay. But are we really? The Artemis II astronauts won’t even leave their ship. They won’t even be stopping at the moon. After they swing around its far side, they’ll come right home. NASA has plans for future Artemis moon landings, in which astronauts will supposedly lay the foundations for a nuclear-powered moon base. But although these plans are more than mere renderings on a PowerPoint slide, they will likely need to weather several NASA budget fights in Congress and at least one presidential transition. The Apollo program’s architects had grand plans for a moon base, too, but without sustained political support, those came to nothing. On the bridge, Carl Ulzheimer, a self-described “old dog from the Bronx,” told me that he’d made sure to come to this moon launch, because 50 years might pass before there was another one, and he didn’t have that kind of time.

That this Artemis launch is happening in the lead-up to America’s 250th birthday has heightened the sense that it’s a nostalgia act for the Baby Boomer gerontocracy. All the more so because Donald Trump, the oldest person ever to be elected to the White House, is presiding over the whole affair. His administration has sought to sabotage NASA’s scientific missions, but the president seems delighted to have the agency gin up a national spectacle on his behalf, just as he was happy to have a military parade on his birthday.

To me, it was a small mercy that he hadn’t embossed his own face on the rocket, or otherwise put himself at the center of the launch. Brad Kowalski, who lives nearby, told me that Trump should have at least come down to see it. “It’s significant that the son of a bitch isn’t here,” he said. Just as a matter of statistics, surely many of the president’s fans were on the bridge, but I was surprised not to see a single red MAGA cap.

[Read: How Donald Trump tried to ground NASA’s science missions]

The world has cheered on America’s previous moments of cosmic glory. After one Apollo mission, a Soviet space scientist congratulated the United States for marking a new “stage in the development of the universal culture of Earthmen.” But with Trump having started a war and a global energy crisis in the 30-day run-up to launch, the idea of a universal culture of Earthmen suddenly felt quaint and distant.

With 30 seconds to go, I stared across the lagoon, mesmerized by the rocket. The Space Launch System is a techno-boondoggle for the ages. On a cost-per-launch basis, it’s likely the most expensive rocket ever built. The initial version took 11 years to develop—the Saturn V took just six—and its launch cadence has been dreadfully slow. Worst of all, as a single-use rocket in the age of new, relaunchable technology, SLS is already obsolete, and the design may well be discontinued before the Artemis missions actually start landing on the moon.

And yet, what a handsome rocket! On the launchpad, it had a retro-futuristic charisma, not least because old space-shuttle parts were used in its construction. The large core stage is insulated in the same distinctive orange foam as the big one that fired the space shuttle into orbit. On its sides, two slim, white boosters have NASA written on them in that old “worm” font that rounds off every letter’s sharp angles, and simplifies the As into upside-down Vs. Once the monstrous explosives in these boosters begin to burn, they can’t be stopped. No human has ever caught a ride on this system, and yet in the small, conical capsule at its top, the four astronauts were tilted back in seats, staring straight up, awaiting ignition.

The crowd on the bridge had just finished counting down when the arms of the rocket’s adjoining tower pulled away. NASA calls this process umbilical separation. At first, the launch itself was like a little silent movie. Smoke billowed out from the rocket’s base, followed by the first flames. And then, a churning river of the brightest orange light you have ever seen shot straight down at the pad. For a moment, much of the surrounding marsh looked to be engulfed. A second sun seemed to have risen, and the whole hulking rocket was ascending out of it, miraculously. Children stood around me, slack-jawed, and when the sound finally hit, they flinched. It was a holy rolling thunder. It shook the bridge and enveloped our entire bodies as we watched the spaceship rise and rise in the sky.

How joined we felt to the astronauts, just then. NASA doesn’t so much choose its crews as cast them, and in this dark moment, they’d done their best to embody a wholesome sense of America. The mission’s commander, Reid Wiseman, is a single dad of two daughters who lost his wife, a pediatric nurse, to cancer. Victor Glover, its pilot, grew up in Southern California’s Inland Empire. Before he became an astronaut, he went to the Navy to fly fighter jets. Now he’s the first Black man ever to journey to the moon. Sitting alongside him is Christina Koch, a veteran of several Antarctic expeditions, who also once spent nearly a year at the International Space Station, during which she participated in the first all-female space walks. On this mission, she’ll make history again, as will the crew’s lone Canadian, Jeremy Hansen, when he becomes the first non-American to venture beyond low Earth orbit.

The four of them were now streaking toward the stratosphere. After only two minutes, the boosters fell away, exhausted, but we could still see the spaceship trailed by a flame longer than itself. The astronauts had not even gone halfway up into the dome of the sky, and control of the flight had already shifted to NASA’s nerve center for human spaceflight, in Houston. In ground control, the rows of technicians would guide them as they twice circled the Earth, and then fired one last burn to intercept the moon, which is itself moving at more than 2,200 miles an hour.

What will the astronauts be thinking, as they watch our blue planet receding through their windows of acrylic aquarium glass? The world’s affairs may take on a different cast from up there. Before humanity’s first visit to the moon, the lunar-flyby mission of Apollo 8, Americans had also found the culture of their country riven. The Tet Offensive suggested that the Vietnam War could spiral into something longer and bloodier. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had just been assassinated, and the Democratic National Convention had descended into riots.

Apollo 8 is said to have provided some measure of national healing, but these things are difficult to measure. On Christmas Eve, as the astronauts came around the moon’s far side, they took turns reading from the book of Genesis: In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. With cameras, they tried to capture the glory of our home planet. A snapshot that the crew took of Earth rising from the ashen lunar plain has been credited with giving us a new cosmic orientation, and galvanizing the environmental movement. But again, these things are hard to measure.

Do we even dare to hope that Artemis II might deliver a similar moment of historical gravitas? The astronauts will surely send back some extraordinary images. The mission has been timed so that the sun will be at their backs. Geologists have coached them to look out from their ship at certain features of the far side, including the Mare Orientale, an impact crater with concentric rings of mountains inside it, which terminate in a dark lava basin, a bullseye. No human has ever laid eyes on it, in situ. For 30 to 50 minutes, the astronauts will lose communication with NASA, and they’ll be alone with these fresh vistas. When they see the Earth again, it will be dwarfed by the moon. Perhaps the astronauts will be moved to say something new and beautiful about its fragility; perhaps all such things have already been said. Either way, they’ll already be homebound. On the seventh day, their official schedule calls for rest.

But all that is in the future. For just another few moments, the Artemis spaceship still belonged to the Earth. After it faded from view, I looked around and saw people hugging, speaking in secular tongues, making great whooping noises, laughing with glee. A few college boys started chanting “USA! USA!” They looked like they might storm a football field and knock down some uprights. The awesome sound of the rocket finally tapered to a faint rumble. We could once again hear waves lapping below. To the east, somewhere on the horizon, the full moon was about to rise.