Apollo Was About Risk Taking, Excitement, Exploration. Artemis Is About … What?

Keith’s note: On the left is a full page ad in Monday’s issue of the Washington Post by AXA – a French multinational insurance company headquartered in Paris. Note the footprint is in gray soil by a strangely shaped boot. On the right is an actual photo of an Apollo 11 crew footprint on the lunar surface in 1969. Advertising copy is an art style. I get that. What were they trying to evoke with this image? After half a century one would assume that this is a lunar footprint – but how many people not alive at the time get the same impressionas that those of us who lived through it? Given its ubiquity its probably become iconic. Like the God/Adam finger touching image from the Sistine Chapel. But instead of using readily available (and often higher quality royalty free) images from NASA they re-create the footprint in a studio. Funny how they fake a moon footprint when so many people think that all of Apollo was faked, right? Anyway … A French company takes out an expensive full page ad in a prominent American news paper (and probably others) at a cost of millions using the human exploration of the Moon as a symbol of the risk taking they are citing as being important to progress. They never mention space. Nor do they mention Artemis or even exploration. They do not care about space in terms of their product line – but they certainly embrace the core risky notion that the whole Apollo thing embodied. They just throw the paradigm shaking/shifting trips to the Moon in your face as the penultimate risk/benefit exercise. It works. In reality it is a false lesson. You see, we got afraid of going back to the Moon after we went there. Half a century later were are less tolerant of risks involved, stumble when it comes to designs and budgets, and are taking far longer to even begin to match what we did half a century ago. NASA has a vast branding reach. The whole world was exited when Apollo was gearing up. I was there. I saw it. Now, NASA just goes through the motions with occasional flashy Artemis media things that are soon forgotten. Yet in China and India and elsewhere where Moon programs are all the rage, their citizens are in the streets cheering. What have these nations discovered that we have forgotten – and why is NASA so clueless as to how to bring back the excitement that going to the Moon once inspired my generation? Just sayin’