When the Artemis II lunar mission launched on Wednesday evening at 6:35 p.m. Eastern Time, it marked humanity’s first foray to the moon in over 50 years.
“We are going for our families,” said Victor Glover, the Californian who is the spacecraft’s pilot.
“We are going for our teammates,” said Christina Koch, a mission specialist from Michigan.
“We are going for all humanity,” said Jeremy Hansen, the first Canadian astronaut aboard a lunar mission.
“All right Charlie, your Artemis II crew is go for launch. Full send,” said Reid Wiseman, the mission commander, originally from Baltimore.
Two minutes later, NASA mission control monitored as the mission’s twin solid rocket fuel boosters separated. Six minutes after that, the rocket core finished its burn, and also separated. All aspects of space flight are dangerous; but this initial process of boosting the Artemis II into escape velocity at speeds of up to 25,000 miles per hour is especially critical.
To send a spacecraft into orbit requires a multi-stage rocket, in this case the SLS super heavy lift launch vehicle. The SLS has been in development since 2011, but of course it draws upon rocket propulsion and guidance technology dating back to the dawn of the space age.
The American space program has its origins in the Nazi V-2 rockets used to bombard London during the Second World War, and the history of rocket and missile technology used by NASA’s civilian space flight program has been intertwined with its military applications ever since.
At 9 p.m., Artemis II completed another critical stage in its voyage to the moon: the apogee burn, in which the vehicle is lifted into the highest point of its Earth orbit, positioning it to escape from Earth’s gravity and begin its multi-day flight to the moon.
At about the same time — in the White House, down here on our confused and bloody Earth — the president of the United States began speaking about the war he had initiated in Iran.
“Over the next two to three weeks, we’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong,” said President Donald Trump.
Only weeks before Artemis began climbing toward the stars, another team of specialists would have been monitoring a similar rocket launch. They were sailors on a vessel steaming somewhere in the vicinity of Iran, most likely aboard one of more than a dozen U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class destroyers deployed to the region.
That vessel was carrying Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles.
As with the SLS launch sequence that began the Artemis II mission, the initial flight of Tomahawks starts with solid-fuel rocket boosters lifting the vehicle toward the heavens.
At an altitude of about 1,500 feet the Tomahawk separates from its booster, which falls into the sea — and there any similarity with civilian space flight ends.
Wings unfold and an airscoop extends, channeling oxygen into an F107 turbofan engine that switches on and begins producing thrust. The missile dives earthward, falling to an altitude of about 500 feet to avoid radar, before beginning its flight to a waypoint that marks the real start of its journey. Once it reaches that point, the missile begins following a programmed course, cruising at speeds of up to 570 miles an hour — similar to a civilian airliner — toward a pre-determined target.
That target is not selected by the sailors who execute the missile’s launch, but by teams of analysts far away in a Combined Air Operations Center, or CAOC, whose staff is busily assembling strike lists — i.e., deciding what to blow up. The strike lists are sent to a Cruise Missile Support Activity, which uses them to create encrypted data files called target data packages. Some target data packages are hand-delivered to a ship prior to departure, others are transmitted by satellite when the vessel is underway.
When a decision is made to carry out a strike, the ship receives an order called an Indigo message, which tells the ship which target data package to upload to which missile, and where the ship needs to be during a specified window of time to begin firing its missiles.
On February 28, the first day of the war, some American ship received its Indigo message and punched the identified target data package into its computer, launching Tomahawks at a military facility in a city called Minab, in southern Iran.
The facility was a sprawling compound of buildings used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ navy — the maritime branch of the paramilitary whose primary job is to protect the survival of the Iranian regime.
But not all of the buildings were being used by the military.
One building had been part of the IRGCN complex previously, but had been turned into a school as long as 10 years ago, and at some point had been walled off separately.
The precise sequence of events is unclear, and a formal investigation is ongoing. Firsthand accounts suggest the school was struck at least once, possibly twice, as were other buildings in the compound.
The strikes killed more than 170 people, the majority of them schoolgirls.
Video evidence shows at least one of the strikes in the area at the time was almost certainly a Tomahawk, a weapon used exclusively by the United States in this conflict.
The CAOC that put together the list of targets for the first day of the war in Iran would most likely have been the one at Al Udeid Airbase in Qatar. They would have been using imagery and intelligence from many agencies. It is possible some of it was outdated.
By now, the personnel manning the CAOC at Al Udeid have likely been dispersed, as the base has come under attack by Iranian long-range attack drones and ballistic missiles.
The Islamic Republic’s regime started building missiles like the ones it is launching against its Gulf State neighbors — and Israel — amid the Iran-Iraq war in 1984. The ballistic missile program is based on reverse-engineered Scud-Bs provided by Libya. The Scud series of missiles were designed and built by the Soviet Union, and like America’s early ballistic missiles, were heavily based on Nazi Germany’s V-2 rockets.
The lethal technologies developed in war never go away. They spread far and wide from one conflict to the next; ever-refined and always improving, they grow ever better at killing.
America can kill like no one else. It invests billions and billions every year to ensure that no nation on Earth is better at bringing high explosives to distant lands, to wreak death and destruction with fire and steel.
“Make America Great Again,” they say. This administration wants to spend $1.5 trillion on the military next year. Never in history will America have been so great at sowing destruction.
When man first landed on the moon aboard Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969, it was the height of the Vietnam War. More than 549,000 American soldiers were on the ground, fighting in what Washington already knew was a disaster. Around 33,000 Americans and their South Vietnamese allies would die in combat that year, despite President Richard Nixon’s election and promise to open peace talks with North Vietnam and achieve “Peace with honor.”
The process of withdrawal and “Vietnamization” — a weasel word if ever there was one, as if Vietnamese from North and South weren’t already fighting and dying in scores — had begun. What it really meant was America saw no path to victory, and was walking away. It would take years to do it.
The Apollo program that had put Neil Armstrong and subsequent astronauts on the moon ended before America’s official involvement in Vietnam did, on March 29, 1973.
Over half a century later, NASA has assembled the wealth, knowledge, and support of 61 nations to send humans back to the moon. As we watch the Artemis II mission wing its way forward one can’t help but think about the schizophrenia that marks our American psyche.
The same country that produces pioneers who will carry out “one giant leap for mankind” produces leaders who want to bomb their fellow man “back to the Stone Age.”
To men like these leaders, the Iranians beneath the bombs are not people. They are just targets. The America they represent is small. It’s mean and it’s ugly. It is a land of ignorance and xenophobia, of people mired in pettiness and corruption, callous to the violence they sow and numb to the poverty and suffering they see around them. It is a land consumed with hubris and hatred.
War may sometimes be a necessity. The small men who lead us now never trusted the American people or their allies enough — and certainly have never cared about innocent Iranian lives enough — to make the case that this war is necessary.
It is the same origin point — the same research, technology, and investment — that leads us to the moon or to dead schoolchildren, slain at our hands. The final decision about war or peace may be made by our leaders, but ultimately it is our responsibility — and it is our vision of the future that will be what defines America as a country.
The Apollo 11 mission patch didn’t have an American flag on it. It had an eagle carrying an olive branch.
America can be great; we have seen its greatness. On Wednesday, that greatness was expressed most nobly — not by the American president, but by a Canadian astronaut:
“For all humanity.”
