I’m watching the Artemis II pre-launch coverage with a mix of excitement and melancholy. It’s a great scientific project leading to wonderful things, but there’s a part of me ruing the fact that it’s NASA’s Artemis project, rather than The Lunar Resources Company’s Artemis Project.

For those of you who hadn’t heard of it, I was involved in a hybrid commercial/non-profit project called the Artemis Project in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Our goal was to build a colony on the Moon. We had the technology, we had the drive. The only thing we didn’t have was a method of bring in enough money quickly enough to actually do it, and eventually, we had to admit defeat.

But today, NASA is sending people back to the Moon, finally! I’m watching the coverage on TV, and on NASA’s web site, and thinking “Bummer! I should have planned to go to Florida a bit earlier.” Well, maybe I’ll be able to make it for the first peopled landing on the Moon.