NASA's Artemis II breaks Apollo 13's distance record — but why send humans at all?

NASA’s Artemis II crew swung around the moon earlier this year, pushing the human spaceflight distance record roughly 4,000 miles past the mark Apollo 13 set in 1972. Tens of millions of viewers tuned in, and the mission even spawned a viral catchphrase — “moon joy” — coined spontaneously as the crew made their lunar flyby. It’s a genuinely impressive milestone, and it arrives as the opening act for a much bigger push: NASA wants a permanent base on the lunar south pole in the 2030s, China and Russia are collaborating on their own crewed station in the same region, and Blue Origin and SpaceX are angling to turn orbital tourism into a real business.

But the record-breaking flight has also revived an old, uncomfortable question. What’s the actual point of putting humans in space? The danger and cost are enormous, and robots can do a lot of the science and commercial prep work without risking lives. A wave of new books published in the wake of Artemis II suggests we’ve been overcomplicating the answer. Space anthropologist Deana L. Weibel’s “The Ultraview Effect” frames spaceflight as a modern pilgrimage — an ancient human compulsion to journey through danger toward revelation. Former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao, writing in “Dinner with an Astronaut,” puts it even more plainly: people “need to know what’s on the other side.”

That instinct is easy to romanticize. But as the moon and Mars shift from aspirational dreamscapes to actual workspaces — complete with commerce, military posturing, tourism, and heritage disputes — the romance gets complicated. The Apollo era had a simpler justification: Cold War brinkmanship. The US and USSR needed to flex technological muscle, and human spaceflight was the most visible way to do it. Today’s motivations are murkier, which is exactly what makes the current moment precarious.

Here’s the part that should concern anyone paying attention: a very small group of people — with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk as the most visible — currently holds outsized influence over how this unfolds. The books arriving after Artemis II are right that humans are wired to wander. But wandering toward what, and under whose rules? That question is still wide open, and the window for a broader public to weigh in won’t stay open forever.