ADVANCES
16 Scientific American, March 2021
ROBERT MARKOWITZNASASPACE EXPLORATION
Going Back
Astronaut Jessica Watkins
could be among the first
to return to the moon
nasa plans to go back to the moon—but
unlike the Apollo missions of a half-century
ago, the agency’s Artemis program is de -
signed to send humans on longer-duration
journeys, to land at the lunar south pole, and
potentially even to build and populate a base
there. The first crewed landing could take
place as early as the mid-2020s. Last De -
cember the space agency announced the 18
astronauts who are working to make Arte-
mis a reality; Jessica Watkins, who joined the
astronaut corps in 2017, is among them. As
a planetary geologist and a former member
of the science team for nasa’s Mars Curios-
ity rover, Watkins is a leading candidate for
future lunar missions and could become the
first woman and first person of color to walk
on the moon. Scientific American spoke to
Watkins about Artemis, why the moon, and
why to send humans at all. An edited tran-
script of the interview follows.
— Lee Billings
Why is it important to send people
to the moon? What draws you
to it, personally?
There are a lot of different reasons to go
back—scientific, economic, you name it—
but one for me is this idea of having some-
thing we can all engage with that brings us
together. After the past year we’ve had—
as a country, as a world—to have some-
thing positive that we can all support is real-
ly important. And there’s still a lot to be
learned about and from the moon. Going to
a different landing site than we did in the
Apollo days, bringing upgraded technolo-
gies there—that will really increase our
knowledge and understanding of the moon,
Earth and the solar system as a whole.
You used to work on the Curiosity Mars
rover, so you know this all too well:
Some people want to skip the moon in
favor of going straight to Mars. What
might convince them otherwise?
Mars was my first love, for sure. And going
back to the moon serves as a stepping-
stone to help us get toward Mars. So it’s
not an either-or. One of the really interest-
ing things about going to the lunar south
pole is that because of the orbital dynam-
ics and geometry, you end up with these
permanently shadowed regions there.
And in these [areas], you have access to
craters with the potential to have pre-
served volatiles—things like water ice—
that are obviously very interesting from
a scientific standpoint but also can be used
as resources as we start to think about
building a lunar base.Why not just send robots?
This question of “robots versus humans”
is similar to the “moon versus Mars” con-
versation, in the sense that they build on
each other and it is not a mutually exclu-
sive situation at all. We need both. Send-
ing robots is cheaper and easier in the
sense that you don’t have a [human] in
the loop. In human interplanetary explo-
ration, we can send robots out before we
arrive, to help us decide on a landing site,
to give us preliminary data to drive our
scientific questions that we’ll then have
humans go out and try to answer. [But]
based on my experience with Curiosity, arover is just much slower. Whereas a
human being—as soon as we step onto a
surface, we can get to work almost instan-
taneously, making decisions about where
to go to find answers to questions.Every Apollo astronaut was a white
man in his 30s or 40s. Why is the diver-
sity of Artemis’s astronauts important?
It’s important that the Artemis team be
diverse, first of all, because a diverse team
is a strong team. The astronaut corps (as
well as all of nasa) is made up of people
with diverse skill sets, strengths, back-
grounds and experiences—and relying on
each of those individuals’ expertise will
enable the collective success of the Arte-
mis missions. The whole truly is greater
than the sum of its parts. It’s also impor-
tant because representation does matter.
It was absolutely beneficial to me as a
young girl to have role models to look up
to who looked like me and for them to go
before me and create a path for me to pur-
sue my dreams. I hope that the Artemis
team can do that for the next generation
of explorers and inspire them to follow
their dreams as well.