For over half a century the moon has been a graveyard of 1970s hardware, but as of April 2026 four humans have looped around it again. This episode unpacks NASA's Artemis program as a multi-national, multi-generational effort to build a permanent lunar presence rather than repeat Apollo's camping trip, and how it survived from the cancelled Constellation program through three presidential administrations and a roughly 93 billion dollar price tag.

We break down the hardware: the Space Launch System with its shuttle-heritage boosters and reused RS-25 engines, the Orion capsule with a Lockheed Martin crew module and an Airbus-built European service module, and the commercial Human Landing System contracts for SpaceX's lunar Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon. The episode covers Artemis I's heat shield erosion, Artemis II's free-return flyby  ...