THE ECONOMIST: The crew of Artemis II is returning to a planet they have cheered up

On Christmas Day 1968 Michael Collins, who would later be the pilot of Apollo 11’s command module, Columbia, relayed a question his young son had asked about Apollo 8 to Bill Anders, then on board that spacecraft: “Who’s driving?”

Anders paused, then replied: “I think Isaac Newton is doing most of the driving right now.” Apollo 8 had left lunar orbit earlier that day; from then until it splashed down on December 27, about 1600km outh-south-west of Honolulu, its path was almost entirely set, like that of a falling rock, by Newton’s law of universal gravitation.

Sir Isaac has been driving Integrity, the capsule that houses the crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission, for almost all of its journey. Integrity used its main engine for the final time on April 3, lighting it up for just under six minutes to leave Earth orbit 25 hours after launch. From then on, save for a few minor course corrections, its path has been shaped only by the gravity of the Earth and Moon following an elegant figure of eight that takes it across the Moon’s orbit, around its far side and back down to the Pacific (this time to a spot off the coast near San Diego).

Apollo 8’s crew had to rely on their engine to get themselves into lunar orbit without hitting the surface (“Longest four minutes I ever spent”, said Jim Lovell, the command-module pilot) and then to leave that orbit and return to Earth. Integrity’s crew just cruised on by before reaching the point, past the Moon and farther from Earth than any astronauts have gone before, where it started to fall back down to its planet of origin.

Which is not to say they have not been busy, particularly when they travelled past portions of the lunar far side, the part that cannot be seen from Earth. The most impressive feature thus revealed was Mare Orientale, a plain of dark lava ringed like a bullseye by circular ridges.

The structure is the youngest of the Moon’s major “impact basins”, its rings revealing the scale of the shock unleashed when an asteroid hit the surface a bit less than four billion years ago. The “targeting plans” put together to guide the astronauts’ observations helpfully notes that its diameter is roughly the distance between Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, where they trained, and Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, from which they blasted off.

One of the most fascinating sights was a small crater — about 9km across — north of Orientale, which seems to be one of the newest craters of that size that the Moon has to offer. Pierazzo is named after Elisabetta Pierazzo, who specialised in the study of impact craters. The way that lava splashed out of it has been extensively studied using spacecraft in orbit around the Moon. It seems unlikely that the astronauts’ brief inspection will have added much to that knowledge.

“It’s a spectacular crater and it’s nice to remember Betty,” says one scientist who has studied it. “But I don’t expect any new science results from Artemis II.”

Remembrance also informed the most moving aspect of the observations, which followed the discovery of a small, fresh and previously unrecorded crater on the border between the far side and the near side. The crew has decided to recommend to the International Astronomical Union that it be officially named Carroll, after Carroll Taylor Wiseman, wife of the mission commander, Reid Wiseman, who died six years ago. How tears behave in the absence of gravity is not thought to be part of the crew’s research agenda, but when they communicated this decision it seemed clear they had found out.

Emotion, in the capsule and among millions watching from the ground, has been a significant part of the whole affair.

Seeing spectacular things, and expressing powerful thoughts about them, and how they relate to life on Earth, has made the mission less of a discovery and more of a reminder (though one which seems, at times, a touch too scripted). It can offer nothing to compare with Bill Anders’ epoch-making photograph of the Earth rising above the limb of the Moon — a sight no one had seen before, and a picture no one at NASA had thought of taking before the astronauts looked outside and saw it.

But the enthusiastic response of much of the audience on Earth has shown that that feeling can be brought back, at least a bit. The importance of that 1968 picture, now known as “Earthrise”, was never just what the camera saw. It was also the fact that there was someone behind the camera to take such a picture in the first place.

Many of the people following the mission from Earth have lived their lives without any people ever being far enough away to provide that sort of perspective. Now that has changed. The fact that the feelings Artemis II is evoking have been felt before does not make them less real to those feeling them now.

Whether the enthusiasm with which the flight is being met will persist, though, is hard to say. If, having been brought back to the edge of the atmosphere by Sir Isaac’s precise ministrations, the capsule’s heatshield and parachutes bring it safely down to the sea, there will certainly be celebrations and enthusiasm.

Similar enthusiasm seems likely to greet Artemis III, which is notionally set to test lunar landing systems in Earth orbit next year, and Artemis IV, which will try to put them to use for real the year after.

But the sequence of missions that NASA plans to follow on with, building up to a Moon base that will allow a continued presence at the Moon’s south pole, will be long and, by their nature, increasingly routine.

The rapture that greeted Apollo 8’s first journey to the Moon and Apollo 11’s first landing soon slipped away, eclipsed by Vietnam, by oil crises and by the other darknesses of the 1970s. To see it return is striking. To see it endure would be unprecedented.