Artemis II Ended a 50-Year Betrayal

A culture that punished ambition cost us decades of space exploration.

On April 11, four astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen had just spent ten days circling the Moon—the first humans to venture beyond Earth orbit in more than half a century. The mission tested life support systems, validated the worthiness of the Orion spacecraft, and (above all else) proved we can still do hard things.

Artemis II was a triumph, but probably not for the reasons you’ve been reading about.

The Supply Chain That Circled the Moon

The headlines celebrated NASA, and that’s fair enough. America’s government-funded space agency deserves considerable credit for managing a complex mission. But the truth is that NASA didn’t build Artemis II. Twenty-seven hundred different companies, the vast majority of them American, did.

Lockheed Martin designed and built the Orion spacecraft that carried the crew. Boeing constructed the massive core stage of the Space Launch System rocket. Northrop Grumman produced the twin solid rocket boosters and the launch abort system that would have saved the crew if anything went wrong during ascent. Aerojet Rocketdyne provided the engines and thrusters. Airbus built the European Service Module that powered Orion and supplied the crew with air and water.

That’s just the prime contractors. Beneath them sat a supply chain of extraordinary depth. Precision Aerospace chemically milled ultra-thin rocket engine components. Precision Tube Bending manufactured custom tubing for the core stage, while Tecma created precision parts for the engine and ignition systems. More than five hundred companies (and 16,000 workers) in California alone contributed work to the Artemis mission. Businesses in forty-six other states also took part.

Artemis II circled the moon because of government contracting with private enterprise under fixed-price agreements. That’s a technical way of saying these private companies bore the risk and had every incentive to get it right.Under fixed price contracts, if a company finds a way to build more cheaply, they keep the profit. That creates pressure to sharpen the proverbial (and literal)pencil, improve the process, and innovate relentlessly. Cost-plus contracts (NASA’s traditional financing model) was the opposite: the more something cost, the more the contractor made, with taxpayers footing the bill. Fixed price agreements mimic market forces and create price transparency in a market where that transparency has never existed before.

As the Artemis program continues towards the eventual goal of a permanent moon base, subsequent missions will rely even more heavily on private companies. t. Blue Origin is building the Blue Moon lander. Axiom Space is creating the spacesuits that will walk on the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.

The leader in all this is SpaceX. SpaceX is developing the Starship lunar lander under a $2.9 billion contract, but they are more broadly transforming how America explores space. In 2024, SpaceX launched more rockets than any other nation on Earth. NASA proposes, but it is private enterprise that will deliver.

More Than Markets

There’s more at stake here than a defense of the free market system. (Though that system does always deserve a vigorous and enthusiastic defense!) What made the success of Artemis II so thrilling was that the mission tapped into something fundamentally and uniquely human. We are creatures driven to explore and build. We crossed oceans without knowing what lay on the other side. We built cities in deserts. We connected continents with railroads and cables. We reached for the stars because reaching is what humans do. That drive to explore, to build, to push beyond known boundaries is part and parcel of what we are.

That insatiable curiosity may be innate to human beings, but it is not innate to governments. For far too long, the state has told us to think smaller. We can’t afford it. It’s too risky. It expands our carbon footprint. We are told not only to consume less, but to dream less. The message has different melodies but always the same chorus: lower your expectations. Stop reaching.

That tune has been playing for half a century. SpaceX, and now Artemis II, interrupts it at last.

What Happened After Apollo

I was just a boy when I watched Neil Armstrong step onto the Moon in 1969. It was unimaginably thrilling. Given that our space program had accomplished so much so quickly, I assumed that the pace would continue. We’d soon have astronauts on Mars, then Venus, then… who knew? All we knew was the future was limitless.

What followed was five decades of disappointment. After the last Apollo mission in 1972, human spaceflight stalled. The Space Shuttle circled Earth for three decades at an average cost of $1.55 billion per flight.. After the program ended in 2011, America couldn’t launch its own astronauts for nine years. We paid Russia $86 million per seat to ride their rockets. We got a few unmanned spacecraft out into the far reaches of the solar system, but that was no substitute for human achievement.

The disappointment wasn’t a result of irrational expectations. The disappointment is what happens when government monopolizes (and squelches) ambition.

Here We Go

Artemis was possible because private enterprise reminded us how to reach for the stars again. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launches for $67 million, lands its boosters, and flies again within weeks. That’s a nearly twenty-five-fold cost reduction through competition and innovation. When companies bear the risk, they solve problems creatively. When taxpayers bear the risk, you get decades of stagnation.

The engineers at Lockheed Martin, the machinists at Precision Aerospace, and the technicians at Northrop Grumman who made Artemis possible? They weren’t just collecting government paychecks. They were fulfilling a long-delayed promise. They were making it possible for four astronauts to go further into space than humans had ever gone before. More importantly, they were restoring hope that those alive today will live to see humans go much, much further still. And soon.

For far too long, government held a monopoly on human spaceflight. Republicans cut NASA’s budget, while Democrats wanted the money to be spent on domestic programs. Both parties kept space exploration confined inside a bureaucracy incapable of reaching beyond low earth orbit. .. Most fundamentally, they want to constrain what comes naturally to humans—that insatiable curiosity, that drive to explore and build, that refusal to accept limits. They’ve controlled the commanding heights of American culture for too long, shaping how we think about what’s possible.

But the human hunger to explore cannot be suppressed by even the most sclerotic bureaucracy. Our need to explore and to build will always win out. Artemis II is a welcome (and overdue) reminder of who we are.

The return to the Moon is just beginning. Next year, Artemis III will test landers in Earth orbit, and in 2028 Artemis IV will put boots on lunar soil for the first time since 1972. Beyond that, Mars. Each mission will rely ever more heavily on the entrepreneurial innovation that built this nation. Based on past experience, we know that what we discover along the way will lead to countless additional innovations in engineering, medicine, and computing.

The future I imagined as a boy watching Armstrong was thwarted decades ago. There were times that I didn’t expect to live long enough to see us start again. But at last, we have remembered who we are. We are explorers. And here we go.