Was Artemis II worth the cost? — The Global Story

[0:00] Should we be paying billions of dollars on a lunar program? [0:04] As the dust settles on Artemis II, we're asking, was it all worth it? [0:09] You've made history and made all America really proud. [0:13] Four astronauts have travelled further from the Earth than any other human has ever done before. [0:20] But humour me here, have they really achieved anything new? [0:25] What have we actually learned from this mission round the moon? [0:28] It's possible, not that much. [0:31] From the BBC, I'm Tristan Redmond in London, and this is The Global Story on YouTube. [0:43] My name is Georgina Ranard. I'm a science and climate correspondent reporter at the BBC. [0:49] Today I'm focusing on science. [0:52] But before I joined the BBC, I actually did a PhD. [0:55] But then my PhD was about how the British Empire used science to advance its interests. [1:00] So basically how science can be used in big geopolitical projects. [1:08] And, you know, what we discovered is that you can never separate science from the political. [1:13] And that is one of the reasons I think I'm so interested in the story that we're going to talk about today, which is Artemis II. [1:19] Well, I mean, we were very keen to hear your take on Artemis, given your academic background, because arguably space exploration has been part of American empire building over the decades. [1:34] Empire with a small e. [1:36] So we're fascinated to hear your take. [1:38] Yeah, I mean, it is a brilliant story, like amazing engineering, physics, mathematics, you know, it's really an amazing achievement for the human mind. [1:49] But as I said, you can't separate that from the bigger geopolitics, especially on a really expensive project like this. [1:55] It's cost, I think it's $93 billion. [1:57] So the whole time I've been covering Artemis, I've always wanted to ask, OK, how's this linked to American interest, global interest? [2:06] How's it linked to the new global space race? [2:09] And then what is the purpose of all this science that they're doing, all this fantastic engineering? [2:13] What does it do for America? [2:15] From the point of view of an academic, but also a science journalist, what has it been like for you watching the Artemis II mission? [2:26] So, OK, I think I have to put my cards on the table, right? [2:28] So I am a science journalist. [2:30] A space story is like, it's my bread and butter. [2:33] And I don't want to talk myself out of a job because, you know, we don't always get on air. [2:37] You've got to put that against the context of all the other news, right? [2:41] We're only in April and there's been a lot of talk of World War Three this year. [2:45] And then along comes this dramatic, joyful space story. [2:49] And I feel like at times the coverage has been, it's like the royal wedding of science. [2:54] And what I mean is there's a sort of feeling of irreverence, respect or around the occasion, the space flight, the mission. [3:02] Sometimes some outlets have done this very gushing emotional coverage that I don't always feel has lent itself to asking deeper, more critical questions about NASA. [3:12] You know, the story is a big set piece planned story. [3:15] Journalists love a planned story there to entertain us, inform us a bit. [3:19] We learn a bit of science. [3:20] And then it's like, well, why sully that with maybe negative, cynical questions? [3:26] But I also think that as journalists, that's what people ask us to do. [3:31] They ask us to look at everything around a story, think of all the different angles and try and answer them. [3:35] And so that's what I've been trying to do to greater and lesser success. [3:40] You're absolutely right. [3:41] It does have a lot of the hallmarks of a sort of major royal wedding or big hundredth anniversary of something. [3:48] But do you feel that that enthusiasm is reflected by audiences? [3:54] I mean, in some ways, absolutely. [3:56] I think it's a story that's gripped so many people. [3:59] I think there is a bit of generational divide. [4:01] Some older people who remember Apollo directly or were born not long after those missions of the 1960s and 70s. [4:09] Their view is a bit, OK, been there, done that. [4:11] These guys didn't even land on the moon. [4:13] And then younger generations, we're a bit more like, oh, OK, this is cool. [4:19] We haven't seen this. [4:19] The drama of it has really pulled a lot of people along. [4:22] And I have to say this, and my mum will probably be quite angry, but she did text me last week [4:26] and she asked me how much thrust was required for the rocket to go off, for the space launch systems rocket. [4:33] My mum is not interested. [4:34] That's a very precise question from your mum. [4:35] It is. [4:36] My mum is not interested in science. [4:38] She would admit that. [4:39] So I was like, OK, well. [4:41] Were you able to provide her precise figures without referring to the internet? [4:46] I had to Google it. [4:48] But yeah, you know, I was like, if my mum, Margaret Ranard, was interested, then I think a lot of people are. [4:53] Well, I'm very pleased that Margaret Ranard has made it onto this edition of The Global Story. [4:59] I mean, it is objectively an extraordinary story. [5:03] And look, Georgina, I was always told or I was told a long time ago that there are two types of journalism. [5:09] There's all shucks journalism and gee whiz journalism or sharks journalists have seen it all before and nothing impresses them. [5:16] And gee whiz journalists just think everything is very exciting. [5:19] So you are in for the purpose of this conversation. [5:21] You are in the all shucks role and I am in the gee whiz role. [5:26] So let's carry on on that basis and see how it goes. [5:28] Let's recap for a second. Four astronauts strapped themselves to a rocket with all that thrust that you just described. [5:36] They left Earth. They spent four days travelling to the moon. [5:41] They swung around it and then they came back again. [5:44] So even though you are all sharks, tell us about the bits that did impress you. [5:50] I think the photos are amazing. I don't think there's very much science in the photos, but they are beautiful. [5:56] They're stunning. There's one by Christina Cook, who's the first woman to travel around the moon, to travel this far into space. [6:03] It's a lovely picture. We can see Earth in the background. [6:07] You can see this lovely profile of her face and then her braids are kind of floating there. [6:13] Obviously they're in zero gravity. [6:15] And, you know, it really struck me. It is an achievement and it's a milestone for a woman to travel that far. [6:21] And, you know, she will have, I assume, spent a lot of time in rooms where she was the only woman and sort of fought her way through. [6:28] So that was a good moment. There's this moment that's now been called the Carol Crater moment. [6:34] I don't know if you were watching, but it happened just after the crew travelled the furthest into space they've ever been. [6:39] And they gave some remarks and we heard the voice of Jeremy Hansen, the Canadian astronaut on board, saying that they've named a crater after a lost loved one. [6:58] The person that they had named that crater for was the wife of Commander Reid Wiseman. [7:03] He's the commander of the of the flight and he lost his wife Carol in 2020. [7:08] She had cancer. [7:09] And since then he's been a single parent. [7:11] He's got two teenage daughters and he's raised them on his own. [7:15] And obviously he had to talk to them before going into space about the dangers involved in that. [7:20] But you could really hear in Jeremy Hansen's voice that the emotion, it sounded very thick. [7:38] And Reid Wiseman, the widower, you know, who was weeping in the capsule and the crew hugged. [7:47] And I was watching it live. [7:49] I had a sort of lump in my throat and it was quite an intimate moment, I think, for the crew and the world watching. [7:54] I have to ask you about the the moment where the capsule passed behind the moon and out of radio contact. [8:03] There was this 40 minute period, wasn't there? [8:05] What did you make of it? [8:06] And this is a slightly leading question for me because I I felt like it seemed a little bit staged. [8:12] The drama that was kind of drummed up around it. [8:15] Yeah, a lot of a lot was made of that moment in advance. [8:19] We talked about how alone they would feel. [8:21] They'd be the furthest from home anyone had ever traveled. [8:25] They would lose contact. [8:26] The moon was going to get between their capsule and Earth blocking radio signals. [8:31] And I don't know if you noticed, but they kind of were coming and going in and out. [8:35] So you had this feeling that maybe they weren't quite totally out of contact. [8:39] Of course, it's dangerous. [8:41] But I think it did lend itself a little bit to this feeling of NASA really know what they're doing. [8:47] They know how to communicate this mission to the world and amping up all of these moments of drama. [8:52] And then you have to ask what else wasn't happening that they needed to focus on on those characters in these moments. [8:58] What do you mean by that? [9:01] What else was was not happening? [9:03] What I mean is in the absence of a breakthrough in terms of science, because they couldn't say, oh, we've discovered the moon or we've discovered an asteroid or a planet. [9:15] To some extent, they they focused on these these these moments as a sort of vehicle to generate and drum up public interest and public support for the mission, I think. [9:27] So essentially you're saying that there was a deficit of scientific discovery, but there were PR moments. Is that right? [9:38] Absolutely. I've been thinking about this a lot. [9:42] When we got those lovely images back, I thought, OK, are we learning anything new from this? [9:47] And NASA was making it was making a lot of statements about during the lunar flyby saying that it would be the first time that human eyes had seen some parts of the far side of the moon. [10:01] And I was like, OK, what does that mean? Human eyes is this kind of example of that's the most they can say about this. [10:08] And they were saying, well, human eyes have a greater dynamic range than a camera. It can spot things that because cameras had seen this far side of the moon before as part of probes. [10:20] Is that right? [10:21] Yeah. So there are satellites that have flowed around there. [10:23] There are probes and India has landed has sent probes around there. [10:28] China has landed a probe on the far side of the moon and actually brought back rock samples. [10:33] Around 98 percent of the moon surface is already mapped. [10:37] So we know quite a lot about it. [10:39] And so I was thinking about these questions and I asked a professor of astrophysics at Chris Lintock at Oxford University for his view. [10:47] And he said the value of the images is artistic and not scientific. [10:54] He said they're lovely images, but this is not a voyage of science discovery. [10:59] And he said, that's fine. It generates a lot of interest. But as a lunar scientist, he is not going to learn anything really as a result of this Artemis 2 mission. [11:09] Wearing my gee whiz hat, I put it to you, Georgina, that inspiring people and exciting people isn't that baked into NASA's DNA, its mission. [11:22] I mean, if you go all the way back to to the John F Kennedy speech in the in the early 60s about, you know, choosing to go to the moon, not because it's easy, but because it's hard. [11:33] That spoke to an ambition to do things that were inspiring. [11:39] And if that exists today, that's because it's it's always been part of it, the NASA's mission, isn't it? [11:46] I am completely for inspiring children, adults, anyone to be engaged in science. [11:53] But it also we shouldn't give people or agencies a free ride and claim that their work is going to revolutionise science when it isn't. [12:02] And I think the risk is if you only understand it in a sort of scientific term, you ignore the other aspects, the geopolitical aspects, the economic aspects, the fact that perhaps this will lead to mining on the moon. [12:15] You mentioned the economic aspects of the of the mission, and you've already touched on the vast cost, more than 80 million dollars, you said. [12:27] How significant is money in in all of this in terms of NASA's future and also the fact that NASA doesn't have a monopoly on space travel anymore? [12:37] It has competition. There are private companies that that do space exploration as well. [12:42] Now, how significant is all of that in this? [12:44] I think in the build up to this, there was there's been numerous hearings in the US about the proposed cuts to NASA that have been floated since President Donald Trump started his second term. [12:57] In one of those hearings in the Senate, Ted Cruz said something like we are he said, we're in a new space race with China. [13:05] And if this goes badly, if NASA fails with Artemis, he said there will be a bad moon on the rise. [13:12] That speaks to the the pressure the agency is under, even just before or while the astronauts were in space on Artemis to President Trump announced new budget cuts for NASA's science budget by up to half. [13:30] Artemis is quite well protected from that, but it's linked to other elements of space science. [13:35] There's also questions about the International Space Station, which needs to be renewed by 2030. [13:40] And I think at this time, as you said, we have NASA used to have basically a monopoly, but now we have SpaceX and we have Jeff Bezos's space company. [13:51] These are kind of creeping around the margins of NASA's work and saying that they can do it cheaper, faster, better than NASA, which many people argue has the burden of being a very expensive tax funded organization. [14:08] So all of that is hanging over NASA at this moment, and they're clearly under pressure to prove relevance. [14:16] And, you know, Artemis 2 was a success. [14:19] But if if the story had been different, if it had gone the other way, I think NASA would be in serious trouble and people would be asking, OK, well, we would be cancelling the next stages of the Artemis program. [14:29] OK, well, I mean, from what you're saying, it sounds like there is a fair bit of politics involved, but I would also say then that that's not new, is it? [14:39] But politics have always been part of space exploration. [14:42] If you look back at the Apollo days, it was about great power, superpower competition with the Soviet Union, wasn't it? [14:49] So, I mean, is this nothing new? [14:52] Yeah. So I think you can directly compare some some elements of it to the Apollo missions in the 60s and 70s. [14:58] So if you think about 1969, so that's when Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, that amazing moment that we all know about. [15:08] But at the same time, the Soviets had developed their Sputnik satellite intercontinental ballistic missiles had been developed in the previous decade. [15:17] So they were locked in this race. [15:20] But back then, I would say the moon was much more mysterious, unexplored. [15:24] It really was a frontier. [15:26] So you can draw a direct line basically from then, from that political context to today. [15:32] But the difference is the science. [15:34] So to claim that this mission is to leverage new scientific knowledge would be to ignore what I think is the primary purpose of Artemis, which is to expand the American presence on the moon. [15:46] So I think claiming that this mission is only for science would be like sending men into the Wild West during the oil rush or the gold rush and claiming it was for geology and not for anything else. [16:01] OK, so sending oil men into the Wild West and claiming it was for geology and scientific purposes. [16:08] Explain that analogy to us. [16:10] So when the oil men went into the Wild West, what were they there for? [16:16] It was to extract resources, to extract gold or oil, to make a lot of money. [16:20] But to do that, they had to mine. [16:23] They had to map. [16:25] They had to survey. [16:26] You know, a whole body of science was created because of it. [16:29] But it was in the name of economics, finance, mining. [16:33] And I think they are the parallels with the global space race today. [16:36] This contest, the US and China are leading, but there are other countries that are interested. [16:41] India has a very big space program. [16:44] The contest is happening because of valuable resources on the moon's surface. [16:49] It's really geopolitical. [16:51] And there's rare earth metals on the moon. [16:52] There's titanium, helium. [16:54] They can be used in superconductors, which could be useful because they're very high efficiency. [17:00] Some science here. [17:00] Very high efficiency transmission of electricity. [17:04] Useful for the energy transition. [17:06] And the US is desperate to not lose out on that. [17:11] And there's also private companies involved in mining. [17:14] In fact, I was reading that in 2015, under President Obama, a law was passed in the US [17:21] giving private companies the right to extract, to use, to mine asteroids and other planetary bodies. [17:28] So I think that's what's going on. [17:31] All of this science and this exploration is in the name of this question. [17:36] Can we use the moon? [17:37] Can we mine it? [17:38] Can we exploit it? [17:39] Okay. [17:40] All right. [17:40] So what I'm hearing you say then is that there is a commercial reason to be doing this. [17:45] But viewed through that prism is something like Artemis 2, an investment which is preparing the ground. [17:56] It's almost like a capital expenditure to make sure that NASA and the United States have the technology [18:02] to be able to then plow further money into industrial expansion on the moon. [18:09] Is that right? [18:10] I think that is one of the main reasons. [18:14] Yes. [18:14] Artemis 2 is about, it's building up to the next mission, to Artemis 3, to Artemis 4. [18:21] Artemis 4 is when they want to land humans there again. [18:23] And it's partly, it's about establishing a presence and saying, if we can dominate, if [18:33] we can put down infrastructure, if we can build a nuclear reactor on the moon, then we own [18:37] that piece of the moon and that is for us to use. [18:40] You know, we're moving into the kind of interplanetary, extraplanetary age. [18:44] People, a lot of people think, you know, you see this in the sort of the billionaire groups, [18:49] people like Elon Musk, they are talking very openly about our future beyond Earth and on [18:54] other planets. [18:56] And naturally within that, their question is, well, how can I use this? [18:59] How can I make money from it? [19:00] And the US doesn't want to fall behind, just as it doesn't want to fall behind in the technology [19:06] race that's happening back on Earth. [19:10] Well, I have to ask then, because how many of us, maybe five or 10 years ago, had not heard [19:15] the expression, rare earths, and how many since Donald Trump returned to the White House [19:22] in 2025 have not heard that expression on a weekly, if not a daily basis? [19:31] Is this part of Donald Trump's rare earths interests around the world? [19:37] And I mean, actually, it's interesting, we've barely, we barely mentioned Donald Trump in [19:42] this, in this episode so far, what is his role in all of this? [19:47] So this, this is, I think, hardly anyone knows this, I think to understand the origins of [19:52] Artemis, you go back to 2017, which in some ways feels like such a different time to now. [19:58] It was his first presidency. [20:00] And I think many people would, would agree that there was a different feeling to it. [20:04] They had a lot of goals, a lot of ideas, but not necessarily the people around him, or [20:09] the political setup to achieve it. [20:11] And so we've got to remember that kind of environment. [20:14] And within that, he announced that he wanted to take America back to the moon. [20:18] The moon is also considered a bit of a gateway to Mars. [20:22] Yes, we know a lot about the moon, but Mars is the real place that, that there's, that people, [20:27] that countries want to discover. [20:28] But to do that, it's actually easier to have a base on the moon, which sounds a bit sci-fi, [20:34] but essentially it's, you know, you've got better access to Mars if you're on the moon. [20:37] I think some of it is also just, he doesn't want, in his ideology, America needs to be [20:43] best at everything. [20:44] He doesn't want to fall behind China. [20:46] And we, we heard him talk about that in his call with the astronauts when they were in [20:51] space. [20:52] Special hello to Artemis II. [20:55] Today you've made history and made all America really proud, incredibly proud. [21:00] We have a lot of things to be proud of lately, but this is, there's nothing like what you're [21:04] doing circling around the moon for the first time in more than a half a century. [21:08] For most of the mission, I actually thought President Trump was quite quiet. [21:11] Yeah, he seemed to, he seemed to be quite discreet, especially because he commissioned this [21:15] mission in the first place. [21:16] Yeah, I was surprised and before I wasn't sure if he would make a really big deal of [21:20] it. [21:20] And then he actually called the astronauts, the four of them in their, in their capsule [21:25] and they had, I think it was about a 12 minute conversation. [21:29] But in that, he, you know, he was, he was, he congratulated them. [21:33] He, he knew all the facts on, on how far they'd traveled. [21:37] But then he also said, you know, it was evidence basically of how great America is. [21:42] But he, you know, he then issued them this invitation to come to the White House for an [21:47] Oval Office reception when they're, when they're back. [21:50] Georgina, I totally take on board your very measured and thoughtful skepticism about the [21:58] scientific goals of this mission. [22:02] One of the things that strikes me about Artemis II is that there are so many remakes and sequels [22:10] in the world we live in these days and, and so much less original content out there in [22:15] the world, you know, whether it's Spider-Man films or Superman films or Batman films, et [22:21] cetera. [22:22] And it does somehow feel of the age and appropriate that this, this major space mission is rehashing [22:33] a space mission from the, the seventies in that, in this way. [22:39] I wonder though, Georgina, is there something that you are inspired by and really excited [22:46] by at this moment in time, whether it's in space exploration or in the scientific world? [22:52] The deep sea that I am really interested in the deep sea. [22:55] And it's interesting because, I mean, I've said that we've mapped 98% of the moon surface. [23:01] We've mapped something like a quarter of the deep sea of, of the sea floor. [23:04] There's a guy on a guy, a very good scientist on Instagram, who's doing a mission now in [23:11] Antarctica, um, where he's looking at, it's called phytoplankton. [23:14] So it's the most abundant animal on earth. [23:17] And essentially they think that they take, they've been taking up so much carbon from earth's [23:21] atmosphere and sinking it deep into the ocean, that it, they play this huge role in protecting [23:26] the planet from, uh, increasing temperatures with climate change. [23:30] So all of that, I think is fascinating because it's about what, what on earth don't we already [23:36] know about? [23:37] What can we discover and what are all the kind of unseen processes that are happening that [23:41] we don't know? [23:42] And I mean, I also just love any weird deep sea creature. [23:45] You give me those, you know, those really weird looking squidgy things, um, I'm going [23:52] to do that. [23:52] Although I'd never go there. [23:54] You can't send me down there or into space. [23:56] That was Georgina Rannard, a science correspondent with BBC News. [24:01] And that's it for this episode. [24:02] The Global Story is also an audio podcast. [24:06] We're available every weekday on bbc.com or wherever you listen. [24:10] Thanks for tuning in. [24:11] We'll see you next time. [24:12] Cheerio.