PBS News Hour - Full Show - How the Artemis moon missions are shaping the next era of exploration

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

Nearly 60 years after NASA sent the first humans to ever land on our moon, the U.S. is going back with a series of increasingly difficult missions. Horizons moderator William Brangham explores the Artemis program and what new discoveries NASA is hoping to find with PBS News science correspondent Miles O'Brien, Casey Dreier of The Planetary Society and retired astronaut and engineer Leroy Chiao. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

I'm William Brangham, and this is Horizons. The race to the moon was one of the greatest displays of American innovation. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Now, there is a new race to the moon underway. But could technical delays put NASA's latest mission in jeopardy? And what new discoveries is NASA hoping to find? A look at the Artemis missions coming up next.

Welcome to Horizons from PBS News. The U.S. is going back to the moon. Nearly 60 years since NASA sent the first humans to ever land on our moon, the U.S. is launching a series of increasingly difficult return missions. They're known collectively as Artemis. The second of these, Artemis 2, is hoping to launch in just a few weeks. Traveling in NASA's newest craft, Orion, four astronauts will embark on a 10-day journey out and around the moon. If successful, they will have traveled the farthest that human beings

have ever been into deep space. Subsequent Artemis missions, like Artemis 4, planned to land on the moon in 2028. Others will test different commercial vehicles, and then, in time, another hopes to build the first habitable base, where NASA wants to learn critical lessons for building a manned base on Mars. So joining us now to talk about this historic undertaking are Miles O'Brien. He is the NewsHour's science correspondent and has covered aerospace and space missions for decades. Casey Dreyer is the chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, which seeks to promote science-driven space exploration. And retired NASA astronaut and engineer Leroy Chow, he was a commander on the International Space Station and is the veteran of four different space.

space missions. Gentlemen, thank you all so much for being here. Miles, I want to start with you first. So we are going back now, 60 years later, and some viewers might be wondering, why are we doing this? What is NASA hoping to learn with this out-and-back mission? Because it's there, William, I suppose. It would be the flip answer. But, you know, NASA has had a rough and long road to this moment. When the shuttle retired, there was talk of going to the moon. Then a program which began under George W. Bush got sidetracked. Obama was more focused on Mars. Now we're back toward the moon.

A lot of this is just realigning the exploration mission to the realities of where the technology is. It would be nice to go to Mars, but we are not ready to do that. The trip to the moon is a few days. The trip to Mars is eight months, and if you're on that voyage, you are really on your own if something goes wrong. So this idea of going and staying, setting up camp is what makes this different this time. And this is a way to learn about running an operation on the surface of another body for an extended period of time, which could inform a Mars mission at a later date. But there's a lot to be done before we get there. Leroy Chow, let's talk a little bit about what it does take between here and Mars.

What is, Artemis 2 is going to be this looping out and back. What does NASA want to learn from that particular mission? The main thing on Artemis 2 is to check out the spacecraft, make sure everything's going to be working. Of course, Artemis 1 launched a few years ago with no humans on board, and it came back, the Orion spacecraft came back with unexpected heat shield damage, much worse than anyone had predicted. And so the last three years have been spent taking care of that problem,

technically analyzing everything, running tests, tests and this is going to be the first time we're going to carry humans on Artemis and they're going to loop around the moon on what's called a free return trajectory, which is what Apollo 13 had to do when they had their issue, basically loop around the moon, let the moon's gravitation pull the spacecraft back around to Earth without needing another burn. So, you know, in a way, you could say it's kind of like a redo of Apollo 8, but, you know, Apollo 8 at least circularized and orbited the moon a few times. So this is just going to make a big swing around. But as you pointed out, it's going to take humans the farthest they've ever been from the Earth.

We're going to do a big checkout of all the life support systems, thermal systems, communications, everything on Orion. And then most importantly, we'll test that heat shield and make sure that the fixes that were put in place worked out. Casey Dreyer, there are some people who argue these missions are not cheap. and there are private sector actors, SpaceX and Blue Origin, that are getting into this game. So why are taxpayers still putting money towards efforts like that?

What would you argue in response? Well, I mean, if it's a national priority, then we want to make sure that what we do in space serves the public. And you do that by running the show, setting the priorities, setting the goals, and then managing a coalition of not just a private industry,

but international partners. And that's a huge portion of what Artemis is. which makes it also very distinct from Apollo that we're trying to bring a number of other countries along with us. Japan, the Europeans, Canada, and others. In fact, we have the first Canadian astronaut who will be leaving Earth orbit, launching on Artemis II.

You can't do that with a private actor. Additionally, we are actually paying these private companies to do these services for us. Space is so hard, and sending humans into spaces so hard and so risky, there's no obvious economic benefit right away. right away, that this is a perfect area where the public sector leads and brings a host of kind of this coalition of individuals, private actors, international partners, along with it.

So, again, if we wanted to serve the public interest, the public needs to take ownership of it. Well, picking up on Casey's point there, you have talked to so many NASA scientists and researchers over the years. What do they argue is the point here, that the essential mission is what? Well, I mean, we can talk a lot about just the technological spin-offs that we enjoy in our daily lives, which were derived out of Apollo. The idea of pushing the envelope, as it were, in space, does yield all kinds of innovations that we wouldn't get otherwise. There's also an entire generation of people, ourselves included in this group, who were inspired by those missions, sort of sprinkled by moon dust as we grew up.

And that doesn't accrue directly to the bottom line. It's hard to quantify it. but it does have real meaning for young people who get inspired to take up the STEM subjects. And ultimately, you know, it gets into a question of what do great nations do? We should explore. What is the next horizon, if you will? And in this case, it is space. And as Casey points out, this is an appropriate place for the federal government to put some money down on basic research.

And this is part of a larger subject in this country right now on what is the, appropriate amount that the federal government should be investing on research that isn't marketable. And these missions are not unlike funding the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health. There are things that business won't do. And this is one of them. And it leads to things we cannot predict. It sometimes takes a long time, but it's really time and again worth the investment.

Leroy, as the only one among us here who's actually been to space, I wonder, help us understand something. As I was mentioning, subsequent Artemis missions would like to land on the moon and start constructing a manned base there. With the idea of learning something about how to build the same on Mars, what is it that we need to learn about doing that

and why are we doing it on the moon first? Sure, as Miles pointed out, the moon is close by. It's only three or four days of flight away If you're going to go to Mars, even when the planets are lying, you're talking about six to eight months one way. And so if something happens, you can get your crew back much more easily and quickly, you know, if you have some kind of an incident. Now, the reason we're going to the moon to learn how to do all these things is because we want to apply these lessons to a Mars mission. Yes, we could fly directly to Mars first.

We have the technology to do that. We just take, you know, money, of course. But you are also taking more risk. And so what we're doing is buying down risk by starting on the moon. going back, there are a lot of scientific reasons to go back to the moon. And, you know, while we're doing that kind of research work, we're also learning how to operate a base on another planetary body, how to, you know, try to use, live off the land, if you will, you know, some kind of in-situ resource utilization that's been talked about for a very

long time and, you know, try to get the water, get some water out of the ground there, some ice water. a lot of reasons to go back to the moon, but this is a stepping stone as it was in the original exploration program that was started a long time ago. You know, the plan was to first go to the moon, figure things out, and then move on to Mars. And, Leroy, we can't do that here on Earth. There's not a similar environment

that you could do a lot of that testing and planning? Well, sure. We have, of course, vacuum chambers not only at NASA, but in other facilities as well. You could simulate, you know, we do simulate both the, the lunar regolith or dirt as well as the Martian dirt, right? So we could do all those things without going to the moon, but there's no substitute for actually being there.

You know, you have a lot of issues cropped up all the time, the best planning, the best anticipation, you have issues cropped up that nobody expected, right? And it happens again and again in different areas of exploration and research. And so there's no substitute for being there and doing a rehearsal on Mars and figuring out our operations.

I mean, even training astronauts who wouldn't necessarily want the first astronauts to step on Mars to have never operated in that kind of an environment before. Very low pressure, low gravity, dusty, you know, a lot of challenges. So there's a lot of reasoning for going to the moon first. Casey, to this point. I want to build on that if I can. Yes, please, go right ahead. Because there's, I think it's worth dwelling on, it's literally an alien environment, right? And our analogies and our simulations, They're only as good as the knowledge that we have about that environment. And, you know, we've only sent humans to the surface of the moon six times.

We've never been any further than that. And, you know, we've sent robots and we know a lot about it, but it's about the things that we don't know. And so you could simulate things on Earth, but it's still, you still have gravity. You cannot, you know, maybe you could do it in a free fall. You start getting as expensive and complicated as just going into space in the first place. But there's also an aspect of on Earth you can always bail out. You know, there's air. Air is free, right?

There's a Walmart theoretically down the road somewhere. Right, right. You have the ability to drink the water. You are protected by our magnetic field from radiation. There's all these things that we take for granted, that we often forget about, that the environment of space is just the harshest and most unforgiving, and it does not want us to be alive there.

So in a lot of ways, just to build on what Miles said, just going into space and pushing our capabilities, It's the ultimate assertion of our agency and ability to, you know, kind of drag this bubble of Earth with us into this alien environment and still survive. But we have to do it, and I think in a humbling way, because there's so much we don't know. We better be dang sure that we understand what we're sending our astronauts to risk their lives for and that we're doing it safely. But also in so doing, we all become better. We learn more. We get better at this, the whole, the entire time.

I see Leroy here nodding his head. He's like, yeah, you can talk about the alien hostile environment. That's just another day at the office for me. Miles, there's some other science that wants to be done by NASA on the moon, and that is to help us understand something about the origins of our solar system. What does that explain? Well, it's important as we talk about sending humans to the moon to be there, to realize how closely linked the piloted and unpilited missions are for NASA.

And, you know, over the past year, NASA has had a terrible time. And thanks to a lot of good work by Casey and the Planetary Society, was able to claw back some money, which would have devastated the scientific program at NASA. NASA has had a terrible year, and what's happening now is truly a highlight. But when you look at the moon itself, we would not be here talking right now,

were it not for the moon? Four and a half billion years ago, two proto-planet, that's one of them ours, collided. The ejecta came out and formed the moon. The moon created tides. The tides created shifts in the ocean, which allowed the primordial soup to occur in the ocean, thus leading to life and leading to us.

We owe the moon everything. And on Apollo 11, we proved that it's made up basically of the minerals that are in the crust of the earth. So we know the moon is us. So it's important to understand it, and take a look at it. We don't, you know, Earth does a good job of hiding its evidence of impacts and so forth

because of the climate that we have and tectonic shifts. Look at the cratered face of the moon. We are in a rough neighborhood. And understanding more about that, which we can do on the moon, directly impacts, if you will, our lives here. That's a beautiful way to think about that orbit.

That structure we see up there in the sky. Leroy, there have been some technical challenges with Orion. You had mentioned some of this of the heat shield coming apart on the previous Artemis mission. Does any of that worry you, given that there is a somewhat sped-up pace for Artemis going forward? Do you have any concerns? As someone, again, who has literally put his life in the hands

of these technical problems not materializing, is that something people should worry about? There's risk in space flight just like there's risk in just about everything, right? So it's a risk-reward trade-off. In this case, with the heat shield, like I said, the damage was kind of astonishing for the engineers to see. And they quickly figured out what had gone wrong. They figured out how they could change the trajectory and, you know, minimize this kind of thing from happening again. We're on countless hours of simulations and analyses.

NASA, I think, has left no stone unturned. And basically, short of building a new spacecraft, you know, complete new Orion with a different heat shield structure, this is the best they could do. And I think they've really, you know, tried to uncover every stone. So I would have no problem personally getting on that spacecraft and flying around the moon.

You know, as Miles pointed out, so many of us, me included, were inspired by the Apollo 11 moon landing. And it's my one professional regret as timing-wise, I wasn't able to participate in any kind of intermissions. But, you know, it's good enough having done what I've done and get to watch these guys go out and do it. He's tanned. He's rested. He's ready. I think he's in, right? That's what it sounds like. Are you listening, NASA? He's available. You just have to fill out the simple job application, we'll pass it on for you. Yeah, they're going to have to bring back the space cowboys, right?

Exactly. We'll just cover up that little bit of gray hair that we all seem to have a little touch of. That's right. I think you need a reporter with you, though. Yeah, can I come to it? I would love that. Yeah, we're Dan. Casey, to this question about the seemingly sped-up metabolism that NASA is undergoing right now, the new chief of NASA, Jared Isaacman, is an entrepreneur a pilot? He's flown several spacecraft himself. What do you think about this accelerated, seemingly accelerated pace? Is that a cause for concern, or is that a cause for celebration? I lean towards celebration. I think it's good to have a bit of urgency about this because you can, as Leroy said, you could easily go down

these rabbit holes of endless testing, endless simulations, getting 0.9999% confidence, and really we just need to do it. And the more that we start to do it, the more we start to learn, you know, no test will replicate

an actual, you know, a mission going into space. It's also good to have goals. There is a slight downside, though, which we have to be careful about. Artemis, as conceived was not meant to be this retreat of Apollo. It's meant to be something bigger and longer lasting. You're trying to build not just the ability to go to the moon, but the ability for others to go to the moon. You're trying to explore the possibility of a lunar economy. You're trying to really do

real, long-lasting and impactful science, as Miles said. And you do that carefully, and you don't do that by rushing into it just to land first. There's a lot of talk about beating China back to the moon. Well, we want to make sure that even in this sense of urgency, we don't start sacrificing all of these things that actually makes Artemis worth it in a way that Apollo didn't have. Apollo was great, right? It happened really fast. We made the goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely by the end of the decade. But it ended and it was done, more than 50 years ago at this point. We don't want Artemis to end so quickly and to do that we need to have long-lasting value that it returns to the taxpayer.

and you do that by doing it carefully. So it really has to be this careful balance. We don't shed all these other more ambitious goals just to get boots on the ground sooner than later. I mean, Miles, this point that Casey's making is a reflection of what you were talking about before, that different presidents come in, they have different priorities.

Do you worry that the next president, the next two presidents, three presidents, might just have completely different ideas and want to scrap all this? This is the persistent worry of those of us who care about space exploration. Space exploration doesn't fit in well in two-year, four-year, even six-year political cycles. At least 10-year increments is what we're talking about and maybe more.

And if you keep moving the goalposts every four years or whatever, whether it's the moon or Mars, or whether we're going with a government rocket or a privately built version, if you keep changing it, you're going to go nowhere. And the concern from this year is that, frankly, there was a tremendous amount of chaos. at NASA. Four thousand civil servants are out the door. I think the average tenure of these civil servants is in excess of 20 years. So there's a huge brain drain already. And giving NASA this focus right now is essential. And I think Jared Isaacman is about the best thing that could come along for NASA in a very dark time for the agency. Can he turn this around is a tough question.

because, yes, he has kind of focused people on deadlines, but also what he's doing is making the missions more incremental in the amount of technology they attempt to test. The idea that the next mission after this one would be a landing, to anyone who isn't even good at rocket science, would look at that and go, that's insane. And he actually, you know, he recognized the elephant in the room and changed the way this is going to play out.

So hopefully that will continue, but politics always gets involved with NASA. And if it changes again in two or four or six years, we're going nowhere. Leroy, I'm going to give the last minute we have here to you, if you don't mind. In the midst of all of that, this concern that the next president might turn their eyes somewhere else, what would you say is the importance of this? Again, you're someone who has been there, has traveled into the heavens. How do you make the argument that this is something essential to what we do as Americans? If you look at the program as a logical progression, you know, the big goal is to get to Mars and the moon is the next step to get there to buy down risk, right?

And so hopefully we won't have a change such that, you know, the programs get jerked to the left or the right, as we've seen so many times, as Miles pointed out, you know, back when President Obama was elected in 2008, I was asked to be part of a, a, White House Committee, chaired by Norm Augustine, to look at NASA human space flight plans. And, you know, Norm told us, he was pointedly told by Rahm Emanuel, forget about the moon, because that was Bush's program. We're not doing that. Right. So hopefully something like that doesn't happen again, such that we're jerked away from this, told to change directions. And as Miles pointed out, if that happens, then, you know, we're going nowhere. So my hope is that Artemis will continue on through the next several years and get far enough to where, you know, it's not really practicable to change direction again,

even if the administration changes to, you know, the other side. But I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we're going to beat China back to the moon and continue on with our exploration plans. All right, that is Leroy Chow, Casey Dreyer, Miles O'Brien. Thank you all so much for being here. Really appreciate the conversation. Pleasure. Thank you.

Thank you. Before we go, with NASA's return to the moon, there will likely be a resurgence of the debaubrients of the debuts. that the original moon landing was a fake. Not long after the Apollo 11 mission captured the world's attention, a few voices began arguing that none of what we'd witnessed was real, that it had all been staged. One of the first was former aerospace employee Bill Kasing.

His mid-70s book, We Never Went to the Moon, America's $30 billion swindle, described Apollo 11 as a, quote, phony performance. Citing in part his time, his disillusionment over the Nixon administration's handling of Watergate, casing made a series of allegations, all since debunked or explained, to argue that the whole mission was a fraud. Why don't you swear on the Bible that you walked on the moon?

In 2002, another longtime conspiracist, Bart Sebrel, confronted Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who was then in his 70s, calling him a coward and a liar, and then got punched in the mouth. Despite the thousands of photographs and hours of film of the multiple Apollo missions, despite the hundreds of lunar samples which have been distributed and analyzed by scientists the world over, despite modern day Chinese, Japanese, and Indian space programs photographing the various Apollo modules still sitting there on the moon's surface, belief in this hoax continues.

Let me ask you, do you think we went to the moon, do you think we landed on the moon? I have a lot of thoughts on it. Former Fox News host and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson just recently suggested we never landed on the moon. But I did, you know, you never know who's telling you the truth about anything, right? But I talk to people, you know, I sort of do trust.

I like, no. So how widespread is this belief? At times, it's polled in just a single digits. The way you gov poll from 2023 suggested 18% of Americans believed the moon landing definitely or probably didn't occur and was actually staged in Arizona. Well, of course we landed on the moon.

What? It's the one conspiracy theory that famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson gets asked about all the time. Consider what it would take to actually hoax a landing on the moon. By the way, we went to the moon, nine. Nine times. Okay?

So we'd have to hoax not going to the moon nine times. Okay? Apollo 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 15, 16, 17. Nine times we went to the moon. Do you realize what that would take? It would be so hard to fake a moon landing. It's easier to just go. And go, we did.

And now we're going back in maybe just a few weeks. That is it for this episode of Horizons. You can find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you next week.