George Hahn

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.

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.