George Hahn

By one estimate, every dollar spent on the moon race returned $7 in economic growth over the following decade.

When we think about the Apollo story, we jump cut from Kennedy's speech, Act I, to Aldrin and Armstrong planting a flag on the moon, the climax.

The Artemis program, named for Apollo's sister in Greek mythology, is the beginning of the next chapter in human space exploration.

At first glance, sending four astronauts on a 252,757-mile round-trip journey to the Moon, breaking the distance record for manned spaceflight previously held by Apollo 13, seems like a sequel nobody asked for.

Three years ago, when NASA announced Artemis II, the first manned mission in the program, Stephen Colbert asked an obvious question.

Why are we going back to the Moon?

In response, mission commander Reid Wiseman said, because we want to see humans on Mars.

Bold.

Artemis II was a shakedown flight to test the Orion spacecraft, similar in purpose to Apollo 8, the first manned mission to orbit the moon and return.

Success sets the stage for a moon landing in 2028 and, more important, the establishment by 2030 of a permanent lunar base.

In the short term, a permanent lunar base can be a proving ground for operating in deep space.

Long term, this is about water, i.e.

space oil.

Sending one kilogram of material to the moon currently costs an estimated $1.2 million.

But if NASA can return ice at the moon's poles into hydrogen, fuel, and oxygen, life support, it'll transform space economics.

A moon base could become a staging point for further space exploration without having to rely on expensive resupply missions from Earth.

Philip Metzger, an expert on spaceflight engineering at the Florida Space Institute, told National Geographic that a permanent lunar base puts us on a path within a few years for monthly moon missions.

Read that sentence again.

We choose to go to the moon every month.

Apollo was the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk.