Alabama plays part in travels to moon
Four astronauts on NASA’s Artemis II mission are on the seventh day of a 10-day test flight around the Moon and back.
That’s something that hasn’t been true in more than 50 years — not since NASA’s last lunar mission, Apollo 17, in December 1972.
At that time, shrinking budgets, declining public support and a lack of a realistic “what next?” led NASA under the Nixon administration to scrap the remaining Apollo missions and move on to the next thing — the space shuttle.
The shuttle program had its triumphs, such as construction of the International Space Station and launching (then repairing) the Hubble Space Telescope, giving humanity a clearer view than ever before of our expanding universe.
But it also had its tragedies. Challenger was lost during liftoff in 1986, and the ensuing investigation revealed a culture of complacency in the space agency. The first shuttle, Columbia, broke up on re-entry in the skies above Texas in 2003. Fourteen astronauts died between the two disasters, joining the three Apollo 1 astronauts killed when a fire engulfed their capsule during a ground test in 1967.
The human toll and, more frequently, budget concerns have long motivated skepticism of America’s space program.
“People can’t afford groceries, yet we are spending billions on space. Read the room,” quipped one person last week on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, even as the Artemis II mission roared from the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
It’s not surprising. Most Americans have a wildly inaccurate view of where federal spending goes. For example, foreign aid makes up just 1.2% of the federal budget. Polls historically have shown Americans think the number is 25%.
NASA’s proposed fiscal 2026 budget is $24.4 billion, slightly less than the previous year. That compares to $107 billion for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program alone for fiscal 2026, which comes even after the Trump administration’s restructuring of the program.
In north Alabama, we know better. The road to the moon goes through the Tennessee Valley. Just as Marshall Space Flight Center oversaw development of the Saturn V rockets that propelled Americans to the moon during Apollo, so now it oversees the Space Launch System (SLS) atop which sits the Orion capsule of the Artemis Program.
United Launch Alliance’s Decatur rocket plant provides a key component for the Orion capsule’s main engine.
The SLS is a Frankenstein space vehicle, its parts and technology a mix of new and old, some of it dating from the 1970s and the shuttle program. Because it is managed out of Huntsville, former Sen. Richard Shelby and his successor, Sen. Katie Britt, have championed SLS. Britt made her support for current NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman contingent on his backing SLS.
While SLS is set to return humans to the surface of the moon, it is not the future of lunar travel. The goal of the Artemis program is a permanent human presence on the moon, at a permanent moon base, and that will require less expensive rockets with faster turnaround than the SLS, which was chronically late and over budget.
North Alabama, however, will still have a role in space, even if there are challenges. Marshall’s place in NASA is central and is likely to remain so. ULA is building its next generation of rockets in Decatur, although the Vulcan remains a work in progress. Blue Origin has a facility building engines in Huntsville.
All face stiff competition from the current space launch leader, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, but north Alabama has never backed down from a challenge.
“Artemis II is a test flight, and the test has just begun,” said NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya. “Over the next 10 days, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen will put Orion through its paces so the crews who follow them can go to the Moon’s surface with confidence. We are one mission into a long campaign, and the work ahead of us is greater than the work behind us.”
