This makes me happy. The news-side of it less so but it’s exciting to watch Americans be headed to space. The single most consequential near-term data point isn’t the Artemis II launch itself — it’s whether China’s Chang’e 7, expected to launch in 2026, successfully explores the south pole for resources before any crewed American mission reaches the surface, which would structurally undermine the “reassert dominance” narrative driving Artemis’s political support. Watch also for congressional budget action: the GAO has warned that each new delay to mission dates can create a cascading effect of increased costs across multiple programs that function independently of each other, and any further Starship HLS slippage will force a public reckoning with whether the 2028 lunar landing target is real or political theater.
Artemis II is a genuine historic milestone wrapped around a program that costs $4.1 billion per flight, is eight years late, depends on technology its own watchdogs call unready, and is racing a competitor that will be operating robotic hardware at the very terrain America wants to claim — before a single American astronaut lands there.
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This makes me happy. The news-side of it less so but it’s exciting to watch Americans be headed to space. The single most consequential near-term data point isn’t the Artemis II launch itself — it’s whether China’s Chang’e 7, expected to launch in 2026, successfully explores the south pole for resources before any crewed American mission reaches the surface, which would structurally undermine the “reassert dominance” narrative driving Artemis’s political support. Watch also for congressional budget action: the GAO has warned that each new delay to mission dates can create a cascading effect of increased costs across multiple programs that function independently of each other, and any further Starship HLS slippage will force a public reckoning with whether the 2028 lunar landing target is real or political theater.
Artemis II is a genuine historic milestone wrapped around a program that costs $4.1 billion per flight, is eight years late, depends on technology its own watchdogs call unready, and is racing a competitor that will be operating robotic hardware at the very terrain America wants to claim — before a single American astronaut lands there.