2026-04-04
39 分钟The Economist.
You may know Artemis as the Greek goddess of hunting, Zeus's daughter, Apollo's twin sister.
But Artemis had another domain, less celebrated, but no less significant.
She was worshiped as one of the primary goddesses of childbirth and midwifery.
It seems fitting then that at 6:35 on Wednesday evening,
Artemis delivered humanity's latest lunar mission into the world.
Four astronauts are now arcing through the darkness towards a rendezvous with lunar gravity
aboard an Orion spacecraft that will take them further from the Earth
than any human being has ever travelled.
It's been a long labour.
53 years since an astronaut last left boot prints in the lunar soil
and promised that humanity would return.
In retrospect, Apollo 17 in 1972 was an ending,
the final act of a program driven primarily by Cold War competition.
Once the US had won the space race, the political will evaporated.
The goal had been to get there first, not to stay.
But Artemis 2 isn't trying to land anyone or plant a flag.
It's a test flight, checking that the Orion spacecraft and its systems
work with humans on board before committing to more.
The stated aim of this program is fundamentally different from Apollo's.