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Science Weekly

Does going to the moon still matter?

Science Weekly

The Guardian

Science

4.21K Ratings

🗓️ 31 March 2026

⏱️ 20 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

If all goes to plan, Artemis II, Nasa’s mission to return humans to the moon, will launch this week. The mission will mark the farthest that humans have travelled from Earth, and the first return to the moon in more than 50 years. It will also pave the way for landing on the moon again as soon as 2028. But given the Apollo missions have already achieved that feat, does going back to the moon still matter today? To find out, Madeleine Finlay hears from the Guardian’s science editor, Ian Sample, the Atlantic journalist Ross Andersen, and Jan Wörner, a former director general of the European Space Agency. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is the Guardian.

0:12.2

Artemis, ancient Greek goddess of hunting and the wilderness, and twin sister to Apollo.

0:20.3

Today their siblingship has been brought back to life by NASA

0:23.6

as the Space Agency looks once again toward the moon.

0:28.3

And this time it's Artemis's turn.

0:34.1

If all goes to plan in the next few days,

0:37.4

Artemis 2 will take off from Kate Canaveral in Florida

0:41.3

and send the crew further from the Earth than anyone has ever been before.

0:47.3

Swinging by our rocky satellite, the mission will be testing systems that NASA hopes will eventually

0:55.0

put astronauts' boots back on the lunar surface.

1:02.0

But what does it mean to return to the moon more than five decades since Apollo first managed the feat?

1:09.0

And all these years later,

1:15.8

will his twin sister take humanity's dream of space exploration any further?

1:21.7

From The Guardian, I'm Madeleine Finley,

1:23.7

and this is Science Weekly. Ian, when we first started talking about weekly.

1:34.4

Ian, when we first started talking about the Artemis 2 launch, the whole Artemis program looked very different.

1:37.4

And then when we were waiting for the technical problems that were holding the launch back

1:41.8

to be sorted, NASA announced some pretty radical

1:45.2

changes in its mission to get humans back on the moon. So just outline for me where the whole

1:51.3

thing stands today. What's the plan? The Artemis program is all about testing NASA's space

1:57.2

launch system rocket, their SLS. And that's the rocket that they plan to use to go back

2:01.9

to the moon and who knows, perhaps even further afield. We've so far had one Artemis mission

...

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