PSW 2488 Back to the Moon to Stay? | Michael Neufeld

Lecture Starts at 17:22
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January 12, 2024
Back to the Moon to Stay?
The Artemis Program and the Past and Future of Human Lunar Exploration
Michael J. Neufeld
Senior Curator (Retired)
National Air and Space Museum
Smithsonian Institution
NASA’s April 2023 announcement of the Artemis II crew, the first humans scheduled to go to the Moon in over half a century, is a sign that the United States and its international partners are serious about conducting a program of human lunar exploration. This is new. Two Presidents, both named Bush, gave major speeches announcing that astronauts would be going back to the Moon and on to Mars. But no lasting program emerged from either announcement. And humans have never been more than 400 miles from the Earth since the Apollo 17 astronauts splashed down in December 1972.
Why did the two Bush announcements fail and why is Artemis likely to succeed in landing humans on the Moon again, even establish a permanent base? And why is Artemis not like Apollo, which ended only four years after the first human lunar expedition? To answer these questions this lecture will discuss the evolution of US human spaceflight policy since the first Bush Administration and why the current NASA program has escaped the fate of the 1989 and 2004 initiatives.
The lecture will discuss the speaker’s conclusion that NASA’s Artemis Program is sustainable, despite a lack of public enthusiasm, because human spaceflight has strong congressional support and signals great power status. The end of the Shuttle program and the completion of the International Space Station opened room in the NASA budget for a new program. Moreover, conflicts over how to sustain the ISS have led to a program that combines government and commercial approaches to human spaceflight. These factors are reinforced by the international cooperative dimensions of Artemis and by Chinese claims that it too will establish a lunar base. Artemis seems likely to continue until at least the 2030s, if for no other reason than that the United States needs a major human spaceflight program to look like a superpower and to compete with China.
Michael J. Neufeld was a Senior Curator in the Space History Department of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, until he retired in 2023. He is an historian and has written widely on the development of rocketry, the German and American Space programs, and various aspects of the history and holdings of the National Air and Space Museum.
Michael is an author of more than a hundred scholarly and popular articles, and he is the author of four books: The Skilled Metalworkers of Nuremberg (1989), The Rocket and the Reich (1995), Von Braun (2007) and Spaceflight (2018). He is also an editor of five additional books: Planet Dora, The Bombing of Auschwitz, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Spacefarers, and Milestones of Space.
Among other honors and awards, Smithsonian Secretary David Skorton gave him the Smithsonian Distinguished Scholar Award, the highest research award of the Institution. And Asteroid 329018 Neufeld is named for him.
Michael earned a BA in History at the University of Calgary, an MA in History at the University of British Columbia, and an MA and PhD in History at Johns Hopkins University.
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