CASEY DREIER: Thank you for joining me, Dr. Pace. To start with, what do you think the Artemis program has provided to the U.S. in terms of its national interests that was lacking when the Moon wasn’t the central focus of human space exploration?
SCOTT PACE: I think the central change is that Space Policy Directive One, which led to the Artemis program, includes commercial and international partnerships. The world today is a much more globalized one, a much more democratized one in terms of space. We have companies doing amazing things in space. We have countries doing amazing things in space. And I think prior efforts did not really take into account how different the global environment is today versus what it was a few decades ago or certainly at the beginning of the Space Age.
One of the reasons that I was so very critical of the Obama administration’s Journey to Mars program was not Mars per se. Mars is great, and I think it’s important to have that as a stretch goal. But the problem was that the Journey to Mars concept didn’t really provide on-ramps for other countries.
The Journey to Mars was a program designed to meet internal domestic policy needs. In contrast, the Apollo-Soyuz program was geopolitical. The International Space Station was geopolitical. And I think Artemis has done better as a geopolitical program. And because of that, I think it’s more sustainable and will survive longer. This is not something that just NASA is responsible for, but it’s part of our diplomatic engagement with the world.
In 2010, I had a head of a foreign space agency ask me if the United States government really supported international cooperation. And I said, carefully, “Well, I believe they do.” And the guy looks at me and very plainly says, “Well, we don’t think so. We don’t think you’re sincere.” And I go, “Really? Why would you say that?” And they said, “Well, because you picked a goal — Mars — that we can’t do. I can’t go to my finance ministry and ask for money to go to Mars with the Americans because it would just be too much. So we think you really only want to go to Mars with countries like Russia who are capable of this, and you’re not really sincere about involving smaller countries like my own.” And I said, “I have something really bad to tell you. We didn’t think about you at all.” And we want to change that.
CD: So, what does the Moon offer that Mars can’t? Is it purely just technology, or is there some symbolic aspect of the Moon that feels more achievable to other nations?
SP: I like to say that the Moon has many different price points, much more so than Mars does. Meaning you can have a very high-end activity, such as Japan building a pressurized rover for the surface or the Europeans providing a service module for Orion — major contributions that are essential to the overall project. But then you can have smaller countries looking at taking rides on commercial lunar rovers, putting small payloads on the Moon, or putting payloads in orbit around the Moon. Countries of many different levels of capability can find ways to meaningfully participate.
There is international participation on the Mars rovers and landers today; Perseverance, Curiosity, and Opportunity all have international participation. But that tends to be fairly specialized scientific participation. And not to diminish that at all but it’s not as politically visible as some other activities, like human spaceflight, which also tend to be more expensive overall.
So, it’s not just the psychology of the Moon being closer; the technical reality of exploring the Moon has an affordability level to it that allows for greater adjustments for countries to match their national interests to what’s available. It provides more on-ramps and ways for meaningful engagement.
CD: I would add that even frequency is an advantage; you can launch to the Moon on a monthly basis versus the 26-month cadence of launching to Mars. And by having high frequency, you can build up production lines.
SP: Absolutely. If you do everything in a bespoke, handcrafted way, it’s a different economy than if you’re making a production line.
CD: On top of all that, the Artemis Accords basically grant free entry for participation in some capacity. It doesn’t cost anything to sign on to the Artemis Accords. You can functionally raise your hand as a nation and just say “we share these values” and start there.
SP: Signing the Artemis Accord doesn’t mean you’re in the Artemis program because that still takes decisions as to what you want to contribute. But the Artemis Accords are helpful for starting the conversation about what our common values are going to be. And they’re fairly conservative. They represent only existing international law. They don’t really represent any large breakthrough. That’s why countries find it fairly easy to sign up because it represents where they are now.
But I think that in the course of engagement in and on and around the Moon, there will be further elaborations of these norms of behavior and further creation of mechanisms for coordination with each other, not just among Artemis Accord countries but I would hope all countries. We’ll need coordination with each other as we develop new understandings about what safe and responsible space operations look like.