NASA’s goal by 2025 is that we will walk on the moon again. A whole new generation could see themselves as budding space travelers and make more discoveries in outer space.

In November of 2022, NASA’s Artemis 1 was launched as the first step towards sending humans back to the moon for the first time in half a century, since Eugene Cernan left the last footprints on the moon in 1972. NASA’s Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever launched, took the Orion spacecraft around the moon and back. After being in outer space for a month, the Orion capsule landed in the pacific off the coast of California last December bringing an end to that historic moon mission after a 1.4 million mile voyage.  

According to MIT Technology Review, “The scientific and cultural payoff for a lunar return could be huge. Scientists have many lingering questions about the moon’s formation, and Earth’s early history, that may be answerable with fresh samples from the lunar far side.” Many answers await in outer space.