A video from NASA showing the countdown and launch of Artemis II

The Artemis II spacecraft launched from the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida yesterday, April 1. Artemis II will send four astronauts on a ten-day mission around the Moon and back: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch with NASA, and Jeremy Hansen with the Canadian Space Agency.

Artemis II will not by landing on the Moon, but is instead a flyby, similar to the Apollo 8 mission in 1968. Artemis II is the first Moon mission with a human crew since Apollo 17 in 1972. According to NASA, Artemis II “will demonstrate a broad range of capabilities needed on deep space missions”. The mission will also bring the first woman (Koch) and first non-American (Hansen) around the Moon.

While the launch of the mission was a momentous occassion for space enthusiasts, it seems like the general public isn’t really paying that much attention to Artemis. I was aboard an Alaska Airlines flight yesterday when a flight attendant made an announcement about the Artemis launch schedule and said this would be the first Moon mission “in over 50 years!”.

Most folks on the flight were not paying attention. I saw those around me react slightly confused. “What is this?”, “There’s a Moon mission?”, and so on.

I checked the website home-pages of major mainstream news sources yesterday and today and found that Artemis is generally a side-story (literally on the website side-bar for some sites) if mentioned in the headlines at all. On some sites, I had to use the search-function to find coverage of Artemis. Most of the headlines this week are on global affairs or the economy, which, admittedly, are more important to folks’ everyday lives.

There’s a thread on Reddit’s r/ArtemisProgram titled Why does it seem like nobody cares about this?.

The original post on the thread from Redditor trevsneedw says “I’m excited about this! It seems like no one else is even talking about it, like it’s no big deal.”. A number of users in the comments added their explanations for the lack of iterest

“I think people have become normalised to regular launches to [low Earth orbit] and don’t realise how different this is,” commented SecureVillage.

“Because ‘it’s not a landing’ and people don’t truly understand what is actually happening,” added Redditor theboyfromphil.

Is a crewed lunar landing specifically needed to captivate the public interest, or are we living in an era where the general public is truly no longer wowed by the space program?

Another Redditor, DuncanGilbert stated “I told my coworker about it and he thought it was a phenomenal waste of resources.” At a time when cost-of-living seems to be rising ever higher amidst an affordability crisis and the headlines this week are covering surging oil prices, maybe, for everyday folks trying to make ends meet, the space program really does sound like lunacy.