Disclaimer: This text reflects only the opinion of its author and does not in any way commit the official word of the French Air and Space Academy.
By Eric DAUTRIAT, Former Director of Launchers at CNES and former Vice-President of AAE
As might be expected, Artemis 2 has once again stirred up the age-old debate about manned spaceflight. Added to this, in France, is Sophie Adenot’s mission aboard the ISS.
Once again, those who extol the benefits that human presence ‘in person’ brings to research – and would bring to exploitation – are pitted against the ‘realists’ who argue that the cost of this human presence is disproportionate to its modest scientific and technical benefits.
As for the Artemis ‘programme’ itself – insofar as one can even call it a programme – it is so erratic and its objectives so poorly defined that it would be difficult to regard it as a worthy successor to Apollo. The astronomical cost of the SLS despite the decades that have passed since Saturn V, a scenario based on a lunar orbital station that has since been scrapped, the implausible role of the Starship—whose energy expenditure, due to its size, to land on and take off from the lunar surface will be disproportionate to the objective (ah, that’s right: there is no objective!), plans B, C… Z, mounting delays – none of this inspires confidence, and one is almost tempted to see it as a parable of the Trump administration’s political missteps on the international stage…
To be honest, even if Artemis were a genuine programme, it’s hard to argue with the critics of manned spaceflight if one follows their ‘economic’ reasoning. The ISS, if one dares say so, is going round in circles, and lunar geology or other fields could certainly benefit far more from innovative robotics, which is much more affordable. As for resource exploitation, the ‘in-situ’ approach is acceptable, but using it to supply the Earth is a joke.
Nevertheless, Artemis 2 is, in itself, a technical success, and it was a moving experience, on the night of 6 April, to hear, for the first time in over fifty years, the voices of humans orbiting the Moon. It is worth noting, however, that unlike Apollo 8, the spacecraft did not enter orbit around the Moon.
Media coverage of the mission was moderate. It made the headlines, but did not take precedence over domestic news. It must be said that the latter is, alas, particularly abundant and provides all the spectacular footage that 24-hour news channels crave—being more drawn to the flames of bombings than to those of a space launch. However, four hundred thousand people gathered at Cape Canaveral to watch the launch of the Artemis 2 mission, far more than for that of Apollo 8 in 1968. Who can say that the lunar adventure no longer interests anyone? Ah yes, perhaps they were only there for the raw spectacle of the rocket, the sensation of the vibrations. One can always bring everything back down to earth.
Frankly, the real debate is not – nor should it be – about the respective “economic” interest of automatic and manned flight, nor about the intensity of the propaganda needed to win over the supposed suckers. We must dare to move away from a “utilitarian” approach that gives no place to the essential: the human desire to go into space, physically, truly, our “desire for space”, not unanimous, admittedly, but widely shared throughout the world. The generally (and condescendingly) evoked quest for “prestige” is secondary to this desire, and stems from it, as it is much older than it. It’s not an “irrational” desire, even if it’s not based on a cost-benefit calculation; it’s an existential desire.
Let’s also concede that the anthropological depth of this desire for physical exploration is not reason enough to pursue it at any cost. One might regard it as… an old chestnut, a relic of the 20th century, a worn-out dream, OK boomer. We might decide that excellent robots produced by our intelligence will provide ‘almost’ the same presence in the solar system. Why not? But to do so, we would need to raise this debate.
First of all, Europe needs to get out of this in-between position based on jump seats that satisfies no one, this inability to have a clear vision of manned flight. Letting ourselves be drawn into Artemis to supply a service module and part of the now-defunct Gateway may be of industrial interest, but nothing more. Signing the Artemis agreements means endorsing a commercial operating perspective that is not our own (or maybe it is? how do we know?). Following the tight curves of American “strategy” as a subcontractor requires a very flexible backbone, which is fine, but what does it lead to? To beg, in return, for a very hypothetical flight to the Moon by Thomas Pesquet or Samanta Cristoforetti, just like that, once, on the shoulders of others, for the optics? Europe has never collectively thought through what is at stake for it in manned flight – or the lack of it.
It must be said that Europe loves to ‘deconstruct’. This verb is currently one of the stars of the media lexicon. In France, we are exceptionally adept at deconstructing ‘stories’ and ‘narratives’. And to provide more material for deconstruction, everything (space exploration, but also air travel, sport, progress, the Enlightenment) is regarded as narrative; in other words, everything is merely stories, in the sense of ‘telling tales’ or spinning yarns. Thus, deconstructing the American myth of Manifest Destiny, which has been so heavily exploited, was obviously necessary. But this has long been understood; there is no need to keep coming back to it.
The problem is that deconstructing takes so much time and energy that we no longer think about ‘building’ anything.
Space exploration needs not so much a narrative as a vision, not so much a story as a determination. A determination rooted not in mining fantasies but in what truly matters: discovery, human adventure, the desire for space, how to achieve it, and the values to be upheld in the process.