Many interesting reasons...
So Why Go to the Moon Again?
NASA’s Amit Kshatriya, the man behind Artemis, on the race with China to reach Mars, the asteroid belt and Jupiter’s moons.
Everyone knows Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon in 1969. But unless you’re a space buff, you probably haven’t heard of Samuel C. Phillips, the Air Force lieutenant general who directed the Apollo program for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration starting in 1964. Meet Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s associate administrator and the man behind the Artemis missions.
Last month’s Artemis II was the first manned mission to the moon—or anywhere beyond low-Earth orbit—since Apollo 17 in 1972. Mr. Kshatriya, 48, oversaw Artemis from 2023 until mid-2025, when he was promoted to his current job and passed operational charge of the audacious moon-to-Mars mission to a fellow Texan, Lori Glaze. No one hogs the limelight at NASA: When I ask Mr. Kshatriya if he laid the operational groundwork for Ms. Glaze, he says: “Me and 1,000 other people.”
Mr. Kshatriya is the American-born son of Indian immigrant scientists, and he has fully absorbed the patriotic values that drove the original space race against the Soviet Union. “When we won the race,” he says, “they stopped the Apollo program. Because the objective was to demonstrate that our way of life was superior, in a way that could produce technology that enabled this achievement.” That objective was achieved. By beating the Soviets to the moon, the U.S. vindicated its “norms and standards, our values as a society.”
The U.S. again finds itself in a race with a communist power. China has declared a goal of putting humans on the moon by 2030, hot on the heels of NASA’s Artemis IV, a manned surface landing projected for early 2028. “Are we in a race just to put the 13th person on the moon?” Mr. Kshatriya asks, then answers: “No. And even if we are, we’re going to win that. The race with China is about our technological competitiveness and our way of life.”
Beijing has set up its own regulatory framework for outer space that directly challenges American norms. Specifically, it has rejected the Artemis Accords, a set of extraterrestrial governance principles drawn up by the U.S. in 2020. Those accords have 66 signatories, China and Russia not among them. That’s one reason NASA is hustling to make footfall on the moon—and set up a lunar base—before China does. “Space law is immature,” Mr. Kshatriya says. There’s a fear that if the Chinese establish the first moon base, they will assert the advantages of a first comer to exclude later arrivals from areas with valuable resources, particularly water. Is the fear justified? “I think that’s a reasonable conclusion to draw based on their activities on the surface of the Earth,” Mr. Kshatriya says.
Yet as competitive as the Chinese are, Mr. Kshatriya insists they aren’t giving him and his NASA colleagues sleepless nights. “I think we’re giving that to them right now.” He can’t say whether the Chinese will meet their self-imposed deadline of putting an astronaut on the moon by 2030. “They have a closed program,” he says. “They don’t allow the transparency that we provide. Every failure we have, everything we do, we talk about.”
NASA’s transparency also offers protection against overreach. Mr. Kshatriya says the agency made a “conscious decision” to delay Artemis II in December 2024. “The system wasn’t totally ready. We had more work to do. There was a withering amount of pressure to continue—and there should be, because the people demand outcomes. But we had more tests to do.”
Another key difference with China is that “we have a civilian program. It’s the people’s program, paid for by the people’s treasure. We’re doing it for peaceful reasons, for exploration.” The Chinese space effort, by contrast, is “all balled up—security, military, all together, all in one.” NASA worries about Chinese espionage—but it also enjoys “a ‘first mover’ competitive advantage,” he says. “We’re innovating, and they’re looking and trying to figure out what we’re doing and what our designs are.”
The Wolf Amendment, a 2011 statute, prohibits direct collaboration between NASA and China. There are no Chinese components in the Artemis program. Foreign sourcing for the project, even from allies, is permitted only when there isn’t a viable domestic source. The service module on the Orion spacecraft was provided by the European Space Agency, and Mr. Kshatriya notes that “a lot of the component-level aspects of even that machine are made in America.”
NASA’s critics, muted of late by Artemis’ success, have often asked why the U.S. spends tax money on space. NASA claims an economic “multiplier” effect, whereby its annual budget of $24.4 billion generates total economic output of $75.6 billion. Investment in American businesses that create these machines “helps to recapitalize them in different ways,” Mr. Kshatriya says, including by developing human capital. “It requires a specialization that has been offshored in the last 30 or 40 years, and programs like ours provide the incentive for these towns to reindustrialize. Missions like these provide the impetus for a lost capacity to come back. Jobs come back.”
Part of the benefit is “intangible,” he says: “How many kids, how many parents, how many people were inspired by what happened, and how many are going to go into STEM fields and want to contribute to society in the same way those astronauts did?”
Americans have been to the moon’s surface before—six times, all during Richard Nixon’s first term as president. Artemis has farther-reaching ambitions. Mr. Kshatriya describes the moon as a pit stop on “the great odyssey to Mars”—and then “to the asteroid belt and to the Jovian moons.”
That’s why extraterrestrial water is so vital. It can be broken into hydrogen and oxygen to produce rocket fuel, sparing tomorrow’s explorers the need to carry enough for the trip home. “Exploration is all about logistics,” Mr. Kshatriya says. “The more you have to take with you, the harder it is. The more gas and water you have to take with you, the less machines, the less robots, the less instruments, the less science. . . . If we can figure out a way to live off the land in a sustainable way, that enables even deeper exploration.” The moon will serve as a practice ground for producing fuel on Mars, which is so far away that carrying a double load would be prohibitive.
“We know that we can do it,” Mr. Kshatriya says. “We have demonstrated that we can extract volatiles from the regolith”—the loose material on the lunar surface—“and produce hydrogen and oxygen.” What we don’t know is “the scalability of that, how easy it is to access which components, and which regions have it in the highest densities” to enable fuel production at scale.
“There is water in the regolith somewhere,” Mr. Kshatriya continues. “We don’t know what composition it’s in. Is it large chunks of ice? Is it infused throughout the lunar regolith as small crystals?” NASA has its eye on the satellite’s south pole, a “different environment from the equatorial landings that we did on the moon. We’ve sent robots down there that have allowed us to understand the rough topography and geography.”
Still, “we don’t know what’s down there,” Mr. Kshatriya says. “We have overhead assets that have been surveilling the area, so there’s some idea what the surface looks like.”
It will be “incredibly hard” to send humans to Mars, he says, but it is “absolutely the right kind of goal we should set ourselves. Once you can explore Mars regularly, the solar system is open.” A determination to get to the Red Planet “provides the impetus to really create next-level technologies, which is why we’re contemplating nuclear propulsion, because you need that to close those distances.”
A mission to Mars would likely take an astronaut three years—nine months to get there, 16 months waiting for the planets to align for the flight back and nine months for the return. Will NASA have trouble finding volunteers for a mission so onerous? “If I went into the Johnson Space Center and walked into the astronaut office, every single one of them would go.”
Do humans belong in space? This is a scientific, economic, and philosophical question. “It’s one we should constantly be addressing,” Mr. Kshatriya says. “There is no biological reason. The vacuum of space is the harshest environment you can possibly imagine to keep humans alive in.” He acknowledges that NASA would get “more science return with robotic machines.” He cites the 2024 finding on Mars by the Perseverance rover of “a biosignature of heavy-metal reduction by alien microbes, possibly the most incredible discovery of the century.”
Mr. Kshatriya had wanted to study philosophy in college, but his STEM-obsessed parents would have none of it. He opted for high-energy physics and theoretical math instead. But he sounds like a philosopher when he describes Artemis II as “a great example of what it means to send humans to space. All of the people around the world shared an inspiration.” The astronauts “learned how precious life is and shared with the world how we collaborate and build these systems together, how we do it for the right reasons. They taught us the humility of exploring the universe.”
“Sometimes, you have to send humans to bear that witness.”
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at NYU Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.
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