Last Updated on April 10, 2026 by Daily News Staff

Emily A. Margolis, Smithsonian Institution

While I was leading a tour of the National Air and Space Museum in January 2026, a visitor posed this insightful question: “Why has it taken so long to return to the Moon?”

After all, NASA had the know-how and technology to send humans to the lunar surface more than 50 years ago as part of the Apollo program. And, as another tour guest reminded us, computers today can do so much more than they could back then, as evidenced by the smartphones most of us carry in our pockets. Shouldn’t it be easier to get to the Moon than ever before?

The truth is that sending humans into space safely continues to be difficult, especially as missions increase in complexity.

New technologies require years of study, development and testing before they can be certified for flight. And even then, systems and materials can behave in ways that surprise and worry engineers and mission planners; look no further than Boeing’s Starliner CFT mission or the performance of the Orion heat shield on Artemis I.

Issues with Starliner’s thrusters led NASA to return the spacecraft from the International Space Station without its crew. Unanticipated chipping of the Orion heat shield resulted in years of research, culminating in NASA altering the atmospheric reentry plans for the Artemis II mission.

NASA’s programs also require sustained political will and financial support across multiple presidential administrations, Congresses and fiscal years. As a historian of human spaceflight, I have studied the space agency’s efforts to engage the broader public to convince American taxpayers that their programs hold value for the nation.

NASA is now on the eve of the first crewed flight to the Moon since the Apollo era: Artemis II. A crew of four will conduct a lunar flyby, laying the groundwork, the agency hopes, for a landing on the Artemis IV mission.

The story of NASA’s effort to return humans to the Moon is long and winding, demonstrating the complexities of turning grand ambitions into real missions.

Post-Apollo

In early 1970, with two successful Moon landings on the books, President Richard Nixon sought to reduce NASA’s budget to better align with his administration’s priorities. This decision put the space agency in a difficult position, which ultimately led to the cancellation of three planned Apollo missions to conserve funding for its plans for long-term human activity in low Earth orbit.

NASA repurposed the third stage of a Saturn V rocket to create the first U.S. space station, Skylab, which operated from 1973 to 1974. The space agency used leftover Saturn IB rockets and Apollo command and service modules to send crews to the station.

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Over the next three decades, NASA developed and operated the space shuttle. The fleet of space shuttle orbiters supported satellite deployment and microgravity research on orbital missions of up to 17 days. This work was meant to enable future long-duration human missions and provide benefits to people on Earth. For example, data from protein crystal growth experiments have informed the development of medicines.

The space shuttle program facilitated the construction, maintenance and staffing of a continuously inhabited research platform in orbit, the International Space Station. The first modules launched in late 1998.

Where to next?

As the new millennium approached, the Clinton administration tasked NASA to think beyond the space station. What could robots and humans do next in space? And where could they do it? Notably, the White House expressed an interest in locations beyond low Earth orbit.

NASA, it turned out, was well positioned to meet the administration’s request. NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin was already thinking about preparing proposals for the next presidential administration and had recently sponsored a human lunar return study. In 1999, he established a team to investigate new technologies, missions and destinations for the 21st century.

This work took on new significance following the tragic loss of the space shuttle Columbia crew in February 2003. Many people, including those in the new George W. Bush White House, wondered whether the human spaceflight program should continue – and, if so, how.

Administration discussions culminated in Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration in 2004, which directed NASA to retire the space shuttle after the completion of the space station. It called for returning humans to the Moon on a crew exploration vehicle designed for destinations beyond low Earth orbit.

It also called for continuing robotic exploration of Mars and engaging companies and international partners in space. Fifteen years earlier, President George H. W. Bush had also announced a Moon and Mars exploration program, but congressional concerns about cost kept space travelers close to home.

The Constellation program’s legacy

In December 2004, NASA began the process of finding a manufacturer for the crew exploration vehicle. By August 2006, the space agency awarded Lockheed Martin the contract to build the capsule, which it had named Orion – the same Orion planned to carry Artemis astronauts to the Moon.

Years of research, development and testing followed for Orion as well as the Ares I crew and Ares V cargo launch vehicles. Together, these technologies made up the Constellation program.

Constellation had two primary objectives: in the near term, to help transport crew to and from the space station after the space shuttle program ended; in the long term, to enable human lunar exploration.

Building systems that could work in both Earth orbit and around the Moon was supposed to save the time and cost of developing two vehicles. Similarly, adapting space shuttle program hardware could supposedly cut costs.

During the first months of Barack Obama’s presidency in 2009, the administration initiated an independent review of NASA’s human spaceflight plans. The Augustine Committee, chaired by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine, found that the agency’s ambitions outstripped its limited budget, leading to significant delays. The first Orion spacecraft was likely to arrive after the space station ceased operations.

The committee proposed several paths forward at the current funding level, which prioritized space shuttle and space station programs. An additional annual investment of US$3 billion would allow for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit.

Ultimately, the Obama administration canceled Constellation, but two of its technologies lived on, thanks to U.S. senators from states that would have been affected by cuts.

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The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 funded Orion’s continued development, shifting responsibility for space station crew transportation to commercial vehicles. It also directed NASA to develop the space launch system, a redesigned Ares V heavy booster, to send Orion to the Moon. The technical strategy had political benefits, too, preserving jobs in numerous congressional districts by providing continuity for aerospace contractors.

In December 2014, a Delta IV heavy rocket launched the first Orion capsule on a test flight, providing engineers with data on spacecraft systems and the heat shield. By October 2015, the space launch system had completed a critical design review, the last step before manufacturing could begin.

Introducing Artemis

In December 2017, the new Trump administration issued a policy directive shifting the focus of NASA’s human spaceflight program back to the Moon. The space agency would use Orion and the space launch system in a race to meet an ambitious 2024 landing date. NASA officially named the program Artemis in May 2019.

The 25-day Artemis I mission, launched in November 2022, was a major milestone for the program. This uncrewed flight was the first flight of the space launch system and the first to integrate SLS and Orion. It laid the groundwork for Artemis II, which will be the first crewed flight of the SLS.

Over more than 50 years, each new presidential administration has reassessed the place of spaceflight among its priorities, either encouraging or curtailing NASA’s efforts to return humans to the lunar surface.

Each crewed flight requires the alignment of technical expertise, political will and financial support over years if not decades. For the space fans who plan to watch the Artemis II launch, the wait for countdown may feel long. But it’s just a blink in NASA’s long journey back to the Moon.

Emily A. Margolis, Curator of Contemporary Spaceflight, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Darrell Evans, Purdue University

Why U.S. Universities Still Avoid UAP Research Despite Growing Government Disclosure

President Donald Trump directed the Pentagon and other federal agencies to begin releasing government files related to UFOs and unidentified anomalous phenomena – called UAP – in February 2026, following years of pressure from Congress, military whistleblowers and the public.

Congress formally mandated UAP investigations through the National Defense Authorization Act in December 2022. The Pentagon’s official UAP investigative body, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, AARO, now carries a caseload exceeding 2,000 reports dating back to 1945. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed this figure earlier this year.

The cases were submitted by military personnel, pilots and government employees describing aerial objects that could not be explained as known aircraft, drones or weather phenomena. Governments in Japan, France, Brazil and Canada also have their own formal UAP investigation programs.

Yet modern research universities remain almost entirely absent from this conversation. No major university has established a dedicated UAP research center. No federal science agency offers competitive grants for UAP inquiry. No doctoral programs train researchers in UAP methodology. The gap between what governments openly acknowledge and what universities are willing to study is, at this point, difficult to explain on purely intellectual grounds.

I have navigated this gap while conducting my own UAP research. My work developing the temporal aerospace correlation tool, a standardized framework for correlating civilian UAP sighting reports with documented rocket launch activity from Cape Canaveral, is currently under peer review at Limina: The Journal of UAP Studies.

Designing that framework meant making methodological decisions without community standards, without institutional funding and without the professional infrastructure many researchers in established fields take for granted. What is missing is not interest or data – it is the shared scaffolding that turns isolated curiosity into cumulative science.

Stigma is measurable

The most rigorous evidence for the gap between faculty interest in UAP and faculty willingness to study it comes from peer-reviewed studies by Marissa Yingling, Charlton Yingling and Bethany Bell, published in the scholarly journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

Across 14 disciplines at 144 major U.S. research universities, 1,460 faculty responded to their 2023 national survey. Most surveyed believed UAP research was important. Curiosity outweighed skepticism in every discipline that was part of the study. Nearly one-fifth had personally observed something aerial they could not identify. Yet fewer than 1% had ever conducted UAP-related research.

The gap was not explained by intellectual dismissal, but it was in part explained by fear. Researchers were not primarily deterred by intellectual skepticism because they doubted the topic’s merits. Instead, they feared they might lose funding, face ridicule from colleagues or find their careers quietly derailed. Faculty reported being told to “be careful.”

A 2024 follow-up study found that roughly 28% said they might vote against a colleague’s tenure case for conducting UAP research, even when they personally believed the topic warranted study.

Historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific communities suppress anomalous questions not because those questions are unanswerable, but because they fall outside the boundaries the community has collectively decided are worth investigating.

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Sociologist Thomas Gieryn called this suppression “boundary work,” referring to the active process by which scientists police what counts as legitimate science.

For UAP researchers, the data and tools to study the phenomenon exist. What may not exist is social permission to use them without professional consequence.

Creating an academic discipline

Academic disciplines do not emerge spontaneously. They require dedicated journals, agreed-upon methods, graduate programs and professional societies.

The history of cognitive neuroscience demonstrates how disciplines emerge. Before the 1980s, researchers at the intersection of neuroscience and cognitive psychology faced resistance from both parent disciplines.

These fields achieved mainstream acceptance only after targeted funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, new brain-imaging tools and the gradual formation of academic programs that created career pathways for researchers. Researchers at the nexus of these fields did not wait for central questions to be resolved. They built infrastructure, and the infrastructure made progress possible.

UAP studies as a discipline is developing some of these elements, but largely outside universities. The Society for UAP Studies, a nonprofit of scholars and researchers, operates Limina as a double-blind, peer-reviewed journal and has convened international symposia drawing researchers from physics, philosophy of science and the social sciences. But a nonprofit scholarly society without tenured faculty does not constitute a discipline.

To turn UAP studies into a recognized academic field would require three things.

First, funding. The Yingling studies found that competitive research grants would do more to unlock faculty participation than any other single factor. Without grants, researchers cannot hire students to assist them, maintain instruments or sustain the multiyear projects that produce meaningful results.

Second, shared methodological standards – these would entail agreed-upon procedures for collecting, recording and evaluating UAP reports – would mean findings from one research group can be compared and built upon by others.

Third, institutions could publicly affirm that they will evaluate appropriately rigorous UAP scholarship on its scientific merits during tenure reviews. Several universities have already done this for gun violence research and psychedelic-assisted therapy studies.

These are not isolated examples. Research into near-death experiences and adverse childhood experiences followed similar trajectories, moving from being a professional liability to mainstream legitimacy after the removal of institutional barriers.

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The international comparison

This gap in UAP scholarship is unique to the United States. France’s GEIPAN, a dedicated investigation unit within its national space agency, has operated since 1977. It has publicly archived approximately 5,300 French UAP cases, of which about 2% to 3% remain unexplained after rigorous analysis.

In 2020, Japan formalized UAP reporting protocols for its Self-Defense Forces, the branch of the Japanese military responsible for national defense. By June 2024, more than 80 lawmakers had formed a parliamentary UAP investigation group that by May 2025 had formally proposed a dedicated UAP research office to the defense minister. Canada launched its own multiagency UAP investigation survey in 2023.

None of these actions has produced a corresponding response from American research universities. Universities provide independent, peer-reviewed analyses that government programs structurally cannot.

The University of Würzburg in Germany became the first Western university to officially recognize UAP as a legitimate object of academic research in 2022, when it formally added UAP investigation to its research canon. Researchers at Stockholm University and the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Sweden have been actively publishing peer-reviewed UAP research since 2017, most recently in Scientific Reports in October 2025.

Congress has passed legislation, the Pentagon is reporting on its investigations, and the president has directed federal agencies to begin releasing records. So the question no longer is whether governments take UAP seriously – it is whether universities will follow, and which ones will get there first.

Darrell Evans, Professor of Environmental Science and Sustainability, Purdue University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Dive into “The Knowledge,” where curiosity meets clarity. This playlist, in collaboration with STMDailyNews.com, is designed for viewers who value historical accuracy and insightful learning. Our short videos, ranging from 30 seconds to a minute and a half, make complex subjects easy to grasp in no time. Covering everything from historical events to contemporary processes and entertainment, “The Knowledge” bridges the past with the present. In a world where information is abundant yet often misused, our series aims to guide you through the noise, preserving vital knowledge and truths that shape our lives today. Perfect for curious minds eager to discover the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of everything around us. Subscribe and join in as we explore the facts that matter.  https://stmdailynews.com/the-knowledge/

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Artemis II Astronauts Capture First Moon Flyby Images from Lunar Far Side

April 7, 2026 — NASA has released the first breathtaking images from the historic Artemis II mission, offering humanity a rare look at the Moon’s far side—including views never before seen by human eyes.

Captured during a seven-hour lunar flyby on April 6, the images were taken by astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft as part of NASA’s first crewed mission to the Moon in more than 50 years.

🌕 A Historic View of the Moon

The newly released images reveal stunning details of the lunar surface, including impact craters, ancient lava flows, and fractured terrain that scientists will use to better understand the Moon’s geologic history.

Among the most remarkable visuals is a rare solar eclipse seen from space, where the Moon passes in front of the Sun, revealing the Sun’s outer corona. The images also captured an “earthset” and “earthrise”—moments where Earth appears to set and rise over the Moon’s horizon.

In one striking image, the Moon is backlit by the Sun, with Earth glowing at its edge, while distant planets like Saturn and Mars appear as bright points in the background.

📸 Thousands of Images, New Discoveries

The Artemis II crew—Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen—used a range of cameras to capture thousands of high-resolution images during the flyby.

In addition to photography, the astronauts reported observing six meteoroid impact flashes on the Moon’s surface, offering scientists a rare opportunity to study active lunar events in real time.

Researchers are now analyzing the images, audio, and telemetry data to refine their understanding of the Moon’s surface and compare findings with observations from Earth-based astronomers.

🔬 Science That Shapes the Future

According to NASA officials, the data collected during Artemis II will play a critical role in shaping future missions, including plans to establish a long-term human presence on the Moon.

“These images are not only visually stunning, but they are brimming with scientific value that will inspire generations to come,” said Dr. Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

The mission also provides astronauts with a unique advantage—human observation. With four trained sets of eyes, the crew is able to analyze subtle differences in color, brightness, and texture across the lunar surface in ways robotic systems cannot.

🚀 More Than Halfway Home

Now more than halfway through its 10-day journey, Artemis II is heading back toward Earth. NASA is targeting a splashdown at 8:07 p.m. EDT on April 10 off the coast of San Diego.

Live coverage of the return will begin at 6:30 p.m. EDT on NASA+, with recovery teams ready to retrieve the crew and spacecraft following reentry.

🌍 A New Era of Exploration

The Artemis II mission marks a major step forward in NASA’s long-term vision of returning humans to the Moon and eventually sending astronauts to Mars.

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With each image and data point sent back to Earth, the mission is not only rewriting the record books—but also expanding humanity’s understanding of our closest celestial neighbor.

Official Artemis II images are available through NASA’s digital platforms, including the Artemis Image Gallery and NASA Image and Video Library.

🔗 Related External Links

Explore official NASA resources and view the latest Artemis II Moon flyby images:

• NASA: Artemis II Mission Overview
• NASA Artemis Program (Return to the Moon)
• NASA Image and Video Library (Artemis II Photos)
• Artemis Image Gallery
• Orion Spacecraft Details
• Apollo 13 Mission History (Previous Distance Record)

Source: NASA Official Release – Artemis II Moon Flyby Images

Dive into “The Knowledge,” where curiosity meets clarity. This playlist, in collaboration with STMDailyNews.com, is designed for viewers who value historical accuracy and insightful learning. Our short videos, ranging from 30 seconds to a minute and a half, make complex subjects easy to grasp in no time. Covering everything from historical events to contemporary processes and entertainment, “The Knowledge” bridges the past with the present. In a world where information is abundant yet often misused, our series aims to guide you through the noise, preserving vital knowledge and truths that shape our lives today. Perfect for curious minds eager to discover the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of everything around us. Subscribe and join in as we explore the facts that matter.  https://stmdailynews.com/the-knowledge/