I vividly remember standing at the launch pad, a day before the launch, listening to Bolden and other officials offer encomiums about the spacecraft and where it would take NASA. These were the days of the “Journey to Mars,” when NASA was supposedly building the capabilities to land humans on Mars in the 2030s.
NASA’s timelines, even then, seemed slow. The first flight of Orion and the SLS rocket was to take place in 2017. That estimate was only off by five years, with each year of delay costing about $4 billion. As for the first crewed flight of Orion, we were told that it might happen in 2020 or 2021. Again, that estimate was off by half a decade.
In many ways, the Exploration Flight Test-1 mission was the perfect exemplar of NASA’s exploration program in the 2010s: costly hardware, going nowhere, and lacking a clear purpose, with lots of happy talk thrown in. It was bleak as hell for those of us who wanted to see the space agency on the move.
Artemis I
Eight years later—the same time that passed between Alan Shepard’s first suborbital flight to Apollo 11 landing on the Moon—Orion returned to the launch pad. This time, it was sitting atop the Space Launch System rocket. And Orion was actually going somewhere—into lunar orbit. It was a real spacecraft.
But in many ways, this was still the same old program, glossed with the usual talk of grand exploration goals.
The Artemis Program’s primary goal was to return humans to the Moon, “this time to stay.” But the plan was horribly convoluted. Instead of sending humans to the lunar surface, NASA was instead building a space station known as the Lunar Gateway. This station would fly in a weird orbit that would take it tens of thousands of miles away from the Moon and required a lot of energy for lunar landers to reach.