One time I was taking a shower and I started thinking about Apollo 11. I thought about how the Moon had watched over humans for millennia and how we finally gathered up the technology to pay it a visit and what a triumph that was for humanity as a species and I started crying. I’m not the sort of person who thinks about human history as a series of triumphs and I’m definitely not the sort of person who cries easily. I’m still not really sure why it happened.

My best guess is that it’s kind of hard to visualize the Moon as an actual physical location when you’re looking at it in the sky, particularly when it’s visible in the daytime. The form it takes — an ethereal white sphere, almost the same hue as the clouds that pass under it — reminds me of the painted studio backdrop of the Emerald City that Dorothy and her friends follow the yellow brick road towards in The Wizard of Oz. But just as the painting becomes a genuine city when Dorothy arrives at its gates, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin confirmed that Earth’s only natural satellite was not a cosmic matte painting when they set foot on it in 1969. The unreachable body that had loomed over hundreds of thousands of years of human history had suddenly, in an instant, become very reachable. It feels so strange to me when I see the Moon in the sky that I can almost understand why a significant number of people think that the whole thing was faked by NASA to get one up on the Soviets during the Space Race. Ultimately, though, I mostly just feel bad for the conspiracy theorists, who are unable to share in the wonder that comes with the knowledge that our species has harnessed technology to such an extent that even feats that seem impossible to the naked eye are now within our grasp. If humans can escape the confines of the planet that allows us to exist in the first place, what can’t we do?

Strangely, one of the most obvious answers to that question seems to be “go back to the Moon.” The Apollo program sent twelve humans to the lunar surface across six missions, but no other space program has resulted in any human Moon landings since it wrapped up in 1972.

This might be changing soon. By 2027, in fact. Just two years from now, NASA hopes to return humanity to the Moon as part of their Artemis program. Despite the general public’s obliviousness to the project, Artemis has been in the works for a very, very long time. The program was originally called Constellation, and launched in 2004 with the prospect of returning to the Moon by 2020, using the experience gained from the venture to begin preparations to send humans all the way to Mars. Constellation got the can in 2010 when Congress decided that it was too ambitious and a waste of funding, before being resurrected as Artemis in 2017, with the focus of the program now shifted to “establishing the first long-term presence on the Moon” by 2024.

This did not happen. After several pushbacks of the estimated arrival date, NASA’s current timetable for lunar return now stands at 2027, but it remains unclear whether this benchmark will be the one that sticks. According to Pew Research, 60% of Americans in 1999 considered the Apollo program an integral, if not the most important, part of the United States’ legacy in the 20th century. So why is almost nobody excited for its successor, an nearly-completed effort over twenty years in the making that promises the ambitious goal of making human presence on the Moon permanent? Why is the United States government considering gutting the program just before its moment of triumph? Why is NASA spending years between Artemis launches when Apollo frequently flew missions only two months apart?

The answers to all of these questions lie in the answer to a different one: what is NASA actually trying to accomplish by expanding the realm of human habitation to the Moon?