George Hahn

Artemis is jet travel.

This is the moment where we should all start believing again, when ideas become missions and when hard work delivers world-changing accomplishments, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in March.

NASA once changed everything, and we're going to do it again.

The ambition is real.

The funding?

Less so.

NASA's story hasn't attracted the same flow of capital as the Apollo program, which peaked at four times the spending of Artemis, adjusted for inflation.

One of NASA's longest-running debates is the value of crude versus uncrude missions.

In 2008, Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg argued in Smithsonian Magazine that science takes a back seat to astronaut safety on a crewed mission.

Manned missions to space are incredibly expensive and don't serve any important purpose, he wrote.

It isn't a good way of doing science and funds are being drained from the real science that NASA does.

But according to John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University and founder of its Space Policy Institute, exploration is about testing the belief that humans can become a multi-planetary species.

We have to be able to live off the land and do something worthwhile, he wrote in response to Weinberg.

Exploration lets us find out whether both of these are possible.

I believe the question isn't whether or not to send humans, but which humans to send.

Stories deploy audience surrogates, i.e.

heroes.

As Will Storr, author of The Science of Storytelling, wrote, the human brain is a story processor designed to absorb the story world of the groups we identify with.

Gene Roddenberry created Star Trek to tell stories about the mostly human and Vulcan, i.e.

humanoid, Enterprise crew, not the ship.