The news arrives with all the grace of a falling anvil: a NASA rocket explodes on the launchpad, and suddenly our £4bn lunar partnership looks less like a moon-shot and more like a money-pit. For those of us who have watched the decline of British ambition with a mixture of despair and grim amusement, this is a moment of clarity. We have hitched our wagon to a star, but the star is a dying ember. The Artemis programme, which once symbolised mankind’s return to the Moon, now stands as a monument to bureaucratic bloat and technological hubris. And where is Britain? Right in the middle of the wreckage, paying the bill.
Let us not pretend this is a shock. The signs have been there since the 1960s, when we abandoned our own rocketry dreams for the comforting embrace of American co-dependency. We sold our aerospace crown jewels to survive and now we beg for orbital scraps. The recent explosion is not an accident; it is a symptom. A symptom of a civilisation that has lost its nerve, its vision, and its basic competence. The Victorians would be appalled. They built an empire with steam and iron. We cannot even build a rocket that stays intact.
The partnership itself is a farce. We have contributed £4bn, a sum that could have rebuilt our decaying infrastructure or funded a generation of engineers, but we have done so for the privilege of being a junior partner in a programme run by an agency that now cannot even secure its own launch vehicles. This is not a partnership. This is a tributary arrangement. We are Rome paying the Goths for protection. Except the Goths have just burned their own fortress.
And what of the Moon? The goal of lunar exploration is noble, of course. But it has become a distraction, a shiny object that keeps us from asking harder questions. Why are we so desperate to go to the Moon when we cannot maintain our own roads, our own hospitals, our own education system? It is the same impulse that drove the Roman elite to build ever more extravagant baths while the barbarians massed at the gates. The explosion of a rocket is a metaphor. It is the sound of a society that has overreached, that has lost its sense of proportion.
The intellectual decadence of our era is on full display here. We have convinced ourselves that pouring billions into a vanity project is progress, when in reality it is a salve for our wounded national ego. We no longer believe we can do great things on Earth, so we look to the stars. But the stars are indifferent to our insecurities. And they are expensive.
What should we do? Perhaps it is time to admit that our lunar ambitions are a folly of a bygone age. We should cut our losses, redirect our resources into tangible innovations, and rebuild our industrial base. Let the Americans have their Moon. We need to find our own ground. The explosion was a gift. It is a wake-up call. Let us answer it with wisdom rather than more debt.
In the end, this is not about NASA or the Moon. It is about us. It is about whether we have the courage to face our own decline and the imagination to chart a new course. Or whether we will continue to dance on the deck of the Titanic, convinced that the band is playing our tune. The explosion was loud. I hope someone heard it.
