HOUSTON—After more than half a century of abandonment, humanity’s first pathway to another world has been rediscovered, and a traffic jam of dreams and ambitions has begun to pile up awaiting its full reopening.
From April 1 to April 10, NASA’s Artemis II mission took NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, as well as Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency, around the moon and back for the first time since December 1972.
They traveled farther from Earth than anyone else in human history, and they saw things no human eyes had seen. Aside from a few nuances, their flight plan arguably appeared less ambitious than the Apollo missions in many ways. The crew spent a couple of days in the lunar sphere of influence, but they did not park in lunar orbit or attempt to land….