Americans Are Going Where No Man Has Gone Before

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, January 15, 2026

 

Only weeks from today, three Americans (and one Canadian) could be on their way to the moon.

 

As early as the first week of February, if everything goes according to plan, NASA astronauts will embark on the Artemis II mission — a ten-day sojourn that will send humans into lunar orbit for the first time in more than half a century. Not only is the forthcoming mission to the moon the first crewed journey into deep space the first of its kind since 1972, but Artemis II will follow an orbital trajectory around the moon that, at its farthest point, will be mankind’s deepest ever journey into space.

 

Like Apollo 8 and 10, Artemis II will not send human explorers back to the lunar surface. The mission is designed to test the massive Space Launch System rocket, the Orion capsule housing the crew, and NASA’s deep-space capabilities (life support, power, propulsion, navigation systems, etc.) ahead of America’s anticipated return to the moon’s surface.

 

NASA does not expect to be able to land astronauts on the moon before 2027, at the earliest. Realistically, it’s unlikely that such an undertaking would occur before 2028. But the Artemis II mission is no perfunctory exercise. This will be a difficult and dangerous mission, and it’s a precursor to America’s eventual return to our nightly neighbor — this time, to stay.

 

Artemis II’s successors will build on this mission’s successes. As envisioned, Artemis III will send astronauts to the moon’s south pole — an area where parts of the moon’s cratered surfaces exist in permanent darkness, sheltering frozen water from the sun. Artemis IV and V will construct “Gateway,” a small space station in permanent lunar orbit. Subsequent missions will contribute additional structures to the Gateway platform, conduct more experiments on the lunar surface, and install robotic rovers on the moon that will pave the way for livable structures.

 

Meanwhile, NASA and the Department of Energy are forging ahead with the Trump administration’s plan to deploy a small nuclear fission reactor to the lunar surface. That would be no small achievement. A variety of engineering challenges stand in the way. Keeping the reactor cool, solving for performance variations in low gravity, and safeguarding it against the ravages of solar radiation and the vicious lunar regolith (the thick surface layer of dust and rubble) won’t be easy. But these are surmountable hurdles.

 

When he first revealed America’s intention to put a 100-kilowatt nuclear reactor on the moon, NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said the goal was to successfully deploy it by 2030. That was an ambitious timeline — too ambitious. Now, just six months later, it seems downright fanciful. “The initial design phase has been completed. However, the translation of that design into flight-ready hardware is, by necessity, a slow process, shaped as much by funding and regulation as it is by engineering,” Science Alert reporter Michelle Starr said today. Now, NASA and the DOE hope only to have completed the reactor’s development and testing phase by the end of this decade. It’s deployment “remains a long-term ambition rather than an imminent reality,” Starr said.

 

The technology will take time to develop, but Duffy’s urgency is understandable. “Since March 2024, China and Russia have announced on at least three occasions a joint effort to place a reactor on the Moon by the mid-2030s,” he said last year. He added that the first nation to achieve this feat could “potentially declare a keep-out zone,” limiting America’s ability to establish a “planned Artemis presence” near the lunar poles. In other words, it’s a matter of when, not if, earthly geopolitics extend into space. And the race to be the first to claim lunar soil is on.

 

NASA is still on track to meet its goal of sending astronauts back to the lunar surface by 2030. But China, too, shares that objective. It’s racing to build its own lunar landing craft that would put Chinese astronauts, or “taikonauts” (based on the Chinese word for “space”), on the moon’s south pole before the decade’s end. The stakes are high from Beijing’s perspective, too. If China wins that race, Wired’s Noah Shachtman recently wrote, “it’ll be a declaration that the American Century is officially over.”

 

Russia, too, talks a big game about sending cosmonauts to the moon and building a small permanent base sometime in the early 2030s. India’s nascent but ambitious space program hopes to join the competition for lunar real estate in the late 2030s or early 2040s.

 

America’s efforts to even challenge our adversaries and competing partners for primacy in space surely confounds the progressive left, as it always has. To Bernie Sanders and his ilk, opening the final frontier is a waste of perfectly good tax dollars that could otherwise be shoveled into the insatiable maw of America’s ever-expanding and fiscally unsustainable entitlement programs. Space exploration, in the sophisticates’ view, is a muscular waste of money — the fixation of bored billionaires, inertia-driven bureaucracies, and chauvinists who long for the bygone age of colonialist imperialism. But America’s return to space is no flight of fancy.

 

Establishing a self-sustaining presence on the moon — one that could support the conversion of lunar ice into water, hydrogen, and oxygen for life support and fuel — is the first step on America’s journey into the solar system. Such a habitat would support ventures to Mars and, eventually, a permanent presence there. From the inner solar system, mankind can begin to explore and exploit the resources in the asteroid belt and, eventually, the outer solar system.

 

All this sounds science-fictional and, therefore, foolish to some. And yet, given the resources they are dedicating to the pursuit of these far-off goals, every nation on earth with the requisite wealth and engineering capabilities disagrees. Becoming a spacefaring civilization is a stunning achievement with profound and measurably salutary psychological effects on that civilization’s allies as well as its adversaries. Next month, if conditions allow, we will get an awe-inspiring reminder of what an achievement it is to send humans to another world.