On the day when the Artemis II crew reached the greatest distance any humans have traveled from Earth, the headline story was President Donald Trump’s announcement of the dramatic rescue of a downed U.S. airman in Iran.
The spacecraft’s 40-minute passage over the dark side of the Moon produced some spectacular pictures, but they competed on the news cycle with the conclusion of the women’s NCAA basketball tournament, the rising price of gas and other big stories.
The coverage was much different, obviously, when Neil Armstrong first walked on the Moon on July 21, 1969. We can learn a few things from noting just how and why it was different.
What would become one of the most controversial stories of the decade, the Chappaquiddick incident in which Mary Joe Kopechne died inside a car driven by Sen. Ted Kennedy, occurred only a couple of days before the Moon landing. But for a day or so, even as hot a story as that one, and the raging war in Vietnam, were overshadowed by the collective celebration of a first for mankind.
This was because of the enormity of the United States achievement, and also because the primary medium of the day, broadcast television, had made the Space Race its premier story, tracking each new liftoff in the nation’s years-long effort to catch up to and surpass the Soviets. The triumphant Moon landing, with a live video connection to Earth, was the ultimate payoff.
We remember the Moon landing as a high water mark for television news, but nobody at the time, broadcast or print, reported on what a close call the landing was, or that the Soviets were landing an unmanned spacecraft at the same time as Apollo 11. In retrospect, this historic event was covered not unlike a royal wedding.
Fast forward to today, and the space program has changed a lot, but the media that covers it has changed even more. Even if there were the collective will to bring off another global event like the Moon landing, the news of it would be splintered into many small pieces. We no longer look into the vast expanse of space for guidance, but downward into small screens.
The Soviet Union, our great rival in the Space Race, has dissolved. The Chinese are said to be our future rivals in the development of the Moon, but that race is yet to come. For the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the real race today could be to reclaim NASA’s fabled legacy.
The president praised the crew of Artemis II as “modern day pioneers,” but his administration has proposed cutting some 23 percent of NASA’s budget, eliminating a number of climate and space science missions and concentrating on the Moon.
Artemis III is planned to make a return to the Moon’s surface in mid-2027, using a lander being developed by SpaceX. In 2028, Artemis IV is scheduled to begin putting the infrastructure in place for a permanent base to be established sometime in the 2030s. To fund that ambitious agenda, NASA will need to maintain public support for lunar development, without Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley to cheer it along.
For that reason, perhaps, the four-person Artemis II crew spoke to a broad demographic, with the first woman, the first African-American and the first Canadian to go on a lunar mission. The makeup of the crew may also be an unintentional indicator of future friction with Trump.
In any case, the crew performed admirably and reminded us once again of the things that are possible when we shoot for the Moon and not at each other.
