CAN AMERICA BE GREAT AGAIN WITHOUT A RETURN TO THE MOON?

July 20 marked 56 years since Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked across that “magnificent desolation,” to borrow the words Aldrin radioed back to millions of television viewers on Earth.

From the summer of 1969 to the end of 1972, through six Apollo Moon landing missions, the United States of America placed no less than a dozen human beings on the surface of the Moon.

The rest of the world could only watch in awe – or, in the Soviet Union’s case, envy.

With the lunar dust kicked up by those first explorers long since settled, Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” is at risk of reverting to merely “one small step.”

That will be the case if America retreats from its admirable legacy of lunar exploration.

Put simply, NASA’s “rebooting” of the Moon is in trouble: the Artemis program aims to return American astronauts to the Moon, this time to establish a sustainable presence. But projected budget cuts and layoffs, including senior leadership – and an enormous amount of difficult-to-replace human capital – have translated to delays, scaled-back missions, and an overall “brain drain” that place the administration and its mission on shaky footing.

America will eventually get back to the moon; but it could well be via the private efforts of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, rather than bloated post-Apollo version of NASA.