Another Moon mission? Why?

After a few false starts as NATO erred on the side of caution and dealt with various technical challenges, the Artemis II manned mission to the Moon is due to blast off on April 1st (foolish? I don't think astronauts are superstitious).

It doesn't plan on landing on the Moon - the last time that happened was 1972. Artemis II will just fly around it and back home. But this is still a big step in the reboot of American lunar ambitions, and is seen as an important testing run for future missions. Ultimately, the plan is to establish a permanent human base in the Moon, theoretically by as early as 2030.

The Artemis program is the successor to the Apollo program of the 1960s and 1970s. (In Greek mythology, Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo, so the name was pertinently chosen.) Artemis I was an unmanned flight 3½ years ago to test out the Space Launch System (SLS). Artemis II will be the first manned mission to go past the International Space Station (in near Earth orbit) since 1972, and the first to include a Black astronaut (Lt. Cmdr. Victor Glover), the first to include a woman astronaut (Christina Koch), and the first to include a Canadian astronaut (Col. Jeremy Hansen).

How did a Canadian wangle his way on there? Negotiations over several years (pre-Trump, back in the days when the USA and Canada actually got along) yielded an agreement whereby a Canadian astronaut got to tag along in return for about $2 billion in Canadian investment in the lunar program, and the provision of an AI-enabled robotic arm designed to operate on a lunar orbital space station called the Lunar Gateway. (Robotic arms are something of a Canadian specialty - the original Canadarm paved the way for Canadian astonauts Marc Garneau and Roberta Bondar to fly into orbit; Canadarm2 was Chris Hadfield and David Saint-Jacques' ticket to the ISS; and Canadarm3 was part of the Artemis deal for Jeremy Hansen.) 

As it turns out, the Gateway project has since been abandoned in favour of a push for a lunar land base (at least partly to get ahead of Chinese lunar ambitions), so the future of Canadarm3 is unclear, but Hansen still gets to fly. The deal also includes a second lunar mission for a Canadian, and a Canada-based control centre for the robotics (maybe?) The European and Japanese space agencies are also partners in the Artemis program, and they are also expecting to have astronauts included on future missions.

Incidentally, the current American push for the Moon is not Donald Trump's doing, whatever he might try to convince us of later. It was George W. Bush that first announced a new initative for NASA after the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster sent US space ambitions into an existential tailspin. Barack Obama repurposed Bush's lunar project into an asteroid mission, but that too foundered, and space exploration gradually became the province of private space companies like SpaceX for a while. It was only when space missions by Japan, India, Europe and particularly China started to eclipse American efforts that NASA announced its new lunar direction. A new space race had begun.

When Col. Hansen orbits the Moon in the Orion crew module, he will get to see, first-hand, parts of the Moon's far side that have never been seen by human eyes (although the flight's trajectory will actually keep it at quite a distance away). Depending on the precise trajectory taken, he will probably be further from the Earth than any human ever before at one point.

Do we need to go to the Moon? No. Is it exciting? Sure!