Who Opposes Artemis?
Where is anti-space sentiment really coming from?
At a time of substantial political division in the United States, the return of astronauts to the Moon has proven universally popular. According to a survey by consumer insight company Ideally, 81% of Americans described their feelings about the mission positively. Likewise an Ipsos poll conducted for Reuters during the mission found 69% of Americans thought it was important to return humans to the Moon and 80% approved of NASA.
And yet, I heard a substantial amount of negative commentary on the matter. Was this just all noise and clickbait? Who actually opposes space exploration and colonisation, and is it really a popular position? One place to look was in my own home country of Great Britain, where polling had ostensibly not been as positive. Aside from a small contribution to ESA, this was a British mission and British taxpayers were not on the hook for its costs, but that doesn’t usually stop us having opinions on things, and I thought it might be useful to understand why we aren’t as positive about it as Americans in order to understand more general opposition.
As Artemis II blasted off, the polling company YouGov published a survey of Britons asking if they would consider visiting the Moon. The response, as reported, were fairly negative. One part that got much attention was respondents reasons for not wanting to visit the Moon, even if safety was assured.
I have, however, looked at the tables for this survey and the picture is more complex than first appears. But it does raise the issue of if there is enough popular support to sustain current programs - or to start new ones in countries like the UK, which lag behind in space capabilities.
I’m going to be discussing opposition to the mission itself here - some opposed Artemis II on valid technical and programmatic grounds whilst generally being in favour of human spaceflight to the Moon and beyond. Nor am I going to address the crazy people who think its fake. Here we are strictly talking about those who think we should not go to the Moon for moral, political or economic reasons.
Snark
To get something out of the way, some people are against spaceflight for bad reasons - they have got “Musk Derangement Syndrome”, or they just like dunking on something others enjoy, or because they know hostility and snark get clicks. Vice offers a prime example here:
This writer has simply jumped on the word “colonialism” without considering how it’s negatives do not apply to an uninhabited solar system. This lets him just regurgitate rehearsed talking points about this in order to pass something off as criticism, and get online engagement.
This wasn’t the worst example though. On Sky News, a Guardian columnist just dismissed the entire thing out of hand, whilst utterly failing to understand what the mission was about - nobody expects to find life on the Moon:
Zoe Williams is generally an unpleasant and not very bright commentator; her previous contributions include the assertion that democracies don’t use nuclear weapons, which may come as a shock to the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a lazy three paragraph opinion piece on Katy Perry going to space, in which two of the paragraphs were criticism of her appearance. I’ll not waste any more time and energy on her, and move on to some actual substantive criticisms
Criticism
In terms of genuine intellectual criticism, there is the old trope that humans are pointless in space and it is better to send robots. In this case, it is the Astronomer Royal Martin Rees making this argument in The Guardian.
This argument has been made consistently since the dawn of the space age - but it was especially intense in the aftermath of the Moon landing. The Soviet answer to the Saturn V, the N-1, failed before first stage separation on every attempt to launch it. They use the smaller Proton rocket to launch some advanced (for the time) robotic probes, including two nuclear powered rovers and three automated sample return missions. In their propaganda they denied ever having been attempting to send humans to the Moon, and insisted their robotic program was better.
The argument is flawed in two ways; first, it assumes that science is the only reason to send humans to other planets. It is not - colonisation and economic development are the main aims, and this encompasses all aspects of human activity, including science. Secondly, the notion that robots are better at science than humans is only ever argued in a situation where humans are not present at all to compete - e.g. on the surface of Mars. It is notable that science on Earth still involves humans in fieldwork, and will do for the foreseeable future.
In a separate editorial, as well as reiterating the above, the paper made this argument:
Rather than serving to remind us of Earth’s preciousness, there is a risk that the £100bn Artemis programme is a dangerous distraction from the urgency of finding ways to live within the ecological limits of the world we already have
First lets flag the cost figure used here - this is the total programme cost since its inception. The cost of this particular mission on its own is around $4 billion. Aggregating the entire cost since 2012 is done purely to make it sound as expensive as possible. If we were to, for instance, aggregate the spending of the NHS over that period and convert it to dollars, the figure would be around $2,700 billion.
Part of this intentional inflation of costs is to justify the use of the word “distraction” - as if there is a huge opportunity cost to Artemis. There is not - the flight of Artemis II cost each American taxpayer about $12. The cost to the UK readers of the Guardian is basically zero. What this editorial is worried about distracting from is an apparently Malthusian crisis they are convinced is real - but that they provide no evidence or argument for, let alone justify as “urgent”. This whole paragraph is written with a set of very dubious assumptions about the world that the authors are not used to being challenged. Define ecological limits? How close are we actually to them, to make it urgent? And why is this not in fact an argument for space colonisation, so we can move population and industry off Earth and reduce the trade-off between human needs and our desires to maintain ecosystems? This lazy sort of argument exemplifies why people must familiarise themselves with disagreement before staking out their position in this manner.
The coverage from the Guardian isn’t all negative of course; there is this piece which contrasts the touching tributes of the mission to dead friends and colleagues with the violence currently going on on Earth, and describes Artemis as “the best of humanity”.
The Artemis Generation
Looking at the tables for the YouGov poll, it’s clear that the younger generations are consistently more supportive of space in all questions than older ones. Part of this might be timeline realism - many questions ask if some milestone will happen “in your lifetime” which obviously means something quite different to a 70 year old than a 20 year old. The largest gap in opinion is between men and women though. The first question about interest in space is perfectly reversed; for men 62% interested versus 37% uninterested, and for women 37% interested versus 62% uninterested. The pattern repeats throughout the survey. This is something that the space colonisation movement has to address - a colony without women is by definition not able to sustain itself.
In terms of socioeconomic class, the survey divides respondents into “Higher”, “Intermediate” and “Routine”. What is interesting here is that when asked about the importance of various activities in space, the most negative responses came from the “Intermediate” class in the majority of the questions, especially pronounced where the overall opinion was most negative:
Breaking down by question, there was a positive responses came across almost all groups on the importance of maintaining a physical presence of space of some kind (the question gives the example of the ISS), with majority support across all social classes and both sexes. This may indicate a status quo bias; if someone is neither strong pro- nor anti- space, they might think there is no need to do more or less than we currently do.
Two very categories with very positive responses were “Maintains the system of communications satellites orbiting the Earth” at 82-10 important vs not important, and “Explores space for scientific purposes” at 73-21. They both maintained positive ratios across all groups asked.
What this suggests, to me, is that ordinary people are happy to see money spend on space activities that are purposeful. It hasn’t been widely explained to them what exactly the point of going to the Moon or Mars is - except perhaps in the most abstract terms.
I think that YouGov presented their results with a needlessly negative spin; looking at this alongside some of the articles mentioned above it seems to me that the anti-space movement is very much top down; some loud voices purporting to speak for the ordinary, common sense person but in fact not being especially representative. It should also be noted that journalists as a profession tend to draw from the “Intermediate” group above, so are likely to some extent to report the bias of that group.
I assume those reading this far are mostly in agreement with me; and so what we should all be doing is bypassing the Malthusians, blowhards and the haters, speaking directly to as many people as possible, and letting them know your reasons for going to the Moon and beyond. The surveys mentioned here indicate to me this is an easily winnable debate.