Lauren Grush

Well, I think it just depends on who you ask.

Recently, there has been a lot of concern brought up about the fact that China is also sending astronauts to the moon.

And so you'll hear lawmakers and even NASA executives talk about the need to beat China to the moon.

There's been concern that maybe they will get there first and kind of stake a claim to that area, preventing our exploration of it.

But for more peaceful reasons, you know, there's a lot that NASA hopes to gain from the moon.

For instance, there's this idea of jump-starting a lunar economy, so finding ways to make money off the moon, possibly for an economy around the moon.

And then, of course, it's learning how to live off of another planetary body.

That's no small feat.

And eventually, the goal is to get to Mars.

And so learning to live off of the surface of the moon, those lessons can then be applied to Mars living someday.

The unique thing about Artemis is that it is kind of an amalgam of the old and the new, right?

So they are using a lot of their long-term contractors like Boeing and Lockheed, which will be on display with this mission.

And when it comes to landing on the moon, NASA has contracted and outsourced the lander development to newer players like SpaceX and Blue Origin.

So it's actually kind of a mashup of the old and new way of doing business.

And so it'll be a test to see if those companies can work together in this and these different contracting mechanisms can actually work together to put people back on the surface of the moon.

Yes, there's plenty of cross-pollination that already happens between SpaceX and Tesla and all of Elon Musk's empire.

And if you've noticed, he's talked a lot lately about ways in which that cross-pollination could become more intense.

He's spoken about Starship taking Optimus to the moon and Mars and things of that nature.

There's also the option of using energy storage capabilities.

for these data centers in space that SpaceX or that Elon's been talking about.