Than that Moon mission Artemis II launched on Wednesday evening at 6:35 p.m. Eastern time, it was humanity’s first foray to the moon in over 50 years. “We fly for our families,” said spacecraft pilot Victor Glover, a California native. “We fly for our teammates,” said Christina Koch, a mission specialist from Michigan.
A new beginning for humanity
“We fly for all of humanity,” said Jeremy Hansen, the first Canadian astronaut aboard a lunar mission. “Alright Charlie, your Artemis II crew is ready to launch. Full send,” said mission commander Reid Wiseman, originally from Baltimore.
Two minutes later, NASA ground control observed the mission’s two solid rocket boosters separating. Six minutes later, the rocket stage finished burning and also separated. All phases of space travel are dangerous; But this first step – accelerating Artemis II to escape velocities of up to 40,000 kilometers per hour – is particularly critical.
Technology from the Second World War
To put a spacecraft into orbit, you need a multi-stage rocket – in this case the SLS heavy-lift launch system. It has been in development since 2011, but of course builds on rocket engine and guidance technology that dates back to the beginning of the space age. The American space program has its roots in the German V-2 rockets that bombed London during World War II. Since then, rocket and missile technology from NASA’s civilian space program has been inextricably intertwined with its military applications.
At 9 p.m., Artemis II completed another crucial phase on the way to the Moon: the apogee burn, during which the vehicle is raised to the highest point of its orbit to break free of Earth’s gravity and begin its multi-day flight to the Moon.
Trump and the Stone Age theorem
At about the same time – in the White House, down here on our confused and bloody earth – the President of the United States began to talk about the war he had launched against Iran. “In the next two to three weeks we are going to bomb them back into the Stone Age where they belong,” President Donald Trump said.
Just a few weeks before Artemis soared into the sky, another team of specialists would have monitored a similar rocket launch. They were sailors on a ship plowing the seas somewhere near Iran – most likely aboard one of the more than a dozen U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class destroyers stationed in the region.
Tomahawks on the way
This ship was armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles. As with the SLS launch sequence that initiated the Artemis II mission, the Tomahawks’ first flight begins with solid rocket boosters that carry the device aloft. At around 450 meters above sea level, the Tomahawk separates from its booster, which falls into the sea – and that is where any resemblance to civilian space travel ends.
How a cruise missile kills
Wings fold out, an air intake opens and feeds oxygen into an F107 turbo engine, which starts and produces thrust. The rocket descends earthward, descending to about 150 meters to avoid radar, before beginning its flight to a waypoint that marks the true start of its journey. Once it reaches this point, the missile follows a programmed course and cruises towards a predetermined target at up to 920 kilometers per hour – similar to a civilian passenger aircraft.
That target is selected not by the sailors who carry out the launch, but by analysis teams far away in a Combined Air Operations Center, or CAOC, whose personnel are busy compiling attack lists – that is, deciding what will be blown up. The attack lists are forwarded to a Cruise Missile Support Activity, which uses them to create encrypted data packages called Target Data Packages. Some of them are handed over to a ship before it sets sail, others are transmitted via satellite when the ship is already underway.
When the decision is made to attack, the ship receives an order called the Indigo Message. This tells the crew which target data package should be loaded into which rocket and where the ship must be within a certain time window to begin firing.
The first day of the war
On February 28, the first day of the war, some American ship received its Indigo Message, loaded the designated target data package into its computer, and sent tomahawks toward a military installation in a city called Minab in southern Iran. The facility was a sprawling complex of buildings used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Navy – the maritime arm of the paramilitary force whose primary mission is to ensure the survival of the Iranian regime.
But not all buildings were used by the military.
Schoolchildren under the rubble
One building had previously been part of the IRGCN complex. However, it had been converted into a school up to ten years ago and at some point walled in separately. The exact sequence of events is unclear. A formal investigation is ongoing. According to eyewitness reports, the school was hit at least once, possibly twice, as were other buildings in the complex.
The attacks killed more than 170 people – the majority of them schoolgirls.
Video evidence and responsibility
Video evidence shows that at least one of the impacts in the area was almost certainly a tomahawk. This is a weapon used exclusively by the United States in this conflict.
The CAOC that compiled the target list for the first day of the war in Iran was most likely the one at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. It would have used images and intelligence material from numerous authorities. Maybe some of it was out of date.
Meanwhile, CAOC personnel on Al Udeid have likely been scattered as the base has come under attack from Iranian long-range attack drones and ballistic missiles.
Rockets from Nazi heritage
The Islamic Republic regime began building missiles like the ones it now fires against its Gulf neighbors and Israel during the 1984 Iran-Iraq War. The ballistic missile program is based on replica Scud-B missiles supplied by Libya. The Scud series was developed and built by the Soviet Union and, like America’s early ballistic missiles, was based largely on the German V-2.
The death technologies developed in war never disappear. They spread from one conflict to the next, becoming more and more refined and improved – and more and more efficient at killing.
America kills like no other country. It invests billions upon billions every year to ensure that no nation on earth is better at carrying explosives to distant lands and sowing death and destruction with fire and steel.
Greatness through destruction?
“Make America Great Again,” it says. This administration wants to spend $1.5 trillion on the military next year. Never in history will America have been so great at sowing devastation.
When man first set foot on the moon on Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969, the Vietnam War was at its height. More than 549,000 American soldiers were fighting on the ground in what Washington had already recognized as a disaster. Some 33,000 Americans and their South Vietnamese allies would die in combat that year, despite President Richard Nixon’s election and his promise to begin peace talks with North Vietnam and achieve “peace with honor.”
Vietnam and the flight to the moon
The process of withdrawal and “Vietnamization” (as if Vietnamese from the north and south weren’t already fighting and dying in their thousands!) had begun. What it really meant: America saw no path to victory and retreated. It would take years.
The Apollo program, which put Neil Armstrong and other astronauts on the moon, ended before America’s official involvement in Vietnam ended on March 29, 1973.
More than half a century later, NASA has brought together the wealth, knowledge and support of 61 nations to send humans to the moon once again. As the Artemis II mission moves forward, one cannot help but think of the schizophrenia that shapes our American psyche.
Schizophrenia of a nation
The same country that produces pioneers who make “a great leap for humanity” also produces leaders who want to bomb their fellow human beings “back to the Stone Age.”
To men like these leaders, the Iranians under the bombs are not people. They are just targets. The America they represent is small. It’s mean and ugly. A country of ignorance and xenophobia, of people drowning in pettiness and corruption. Indifferent to the violence they sow and numb to the poverty and suffering around them. It is a country consumed by hubris and hatred.
War may sometimes be a necessity. The little men who lead us now have never trusted the American people or their allies enough – and certainly never cared enough about innocent Iranian lives – to make the case that this war is necessary.
Same origin, different goals
It’s the same starting point. Same research, technology and investment. A starting point that takes us to the moon or to dead school children killed by our hands. Let our leaders make the final decision about war or peace. But ultimately the responsibility lies with us. It is our vision of the future that will define what America is as a country.
The Apollo 11 mission patch did not carry an American flag. It depicted an eagle holding an olive branch. America can be great; we have witnessed his greatness. On Wednesday, that greatness was expressed most purely – not by the American president, but by a Canadian astronaut: “For all of humanity.”
