Artemis II: A Giant Leap for Engineering
Last Friday, at 8:07PM EDT, four astronauts landed in the Pacific Ocean and reminded America what it feels like to do something extraordinary. The Artemis II Orion spacecraft returned from its nearly 10-day voyage to space, bringing home four explorers who had done something no human beings had done in more than half a century: traveling to the Moon and coming home to talk about it.
But before Artemis II could go anywhere, one person had to say the word. The person who gave that final go was NASA launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson—the first woman ever to hold that position. She also happens to be an engineer, and the 2023 recipient of ACEC’s highest honor, the Distinguished Award of Merit. Blackwell-Thompson has said she remembers her second-grade teacher wheeling a TV cart into the classroom to watch one of the later Apollo moon landings. Years later, a high school physics teacher encouraged her to investigate engineering as a career. One teacher, one nudge, and decades later, that girl from Gaffney, South Carolina was overseeing the launch of the most complex crewed spacecraft ever built.
The photos of the Artemis II voyage are stunning. The scientific data gathered will fill volumes. But for our industry, the most consequential payload Artemis II carried back to Earth may be the recaptured imagination of an entire generation. The profound value of strapping humans to a rocket and pointing them at the Moon is what it does to an 11-year-old watching from a classroom in Phoenix or a family room in Philadelphia. It makes science feel less like drudgery and more like destiny. For an engineering industry that continues to face a workforce crunch, that’s a critical, potentially game-changing shift.
We all know the numbers surrounding our labor market—the chasm between the number of engineers we need and the number of engineers we’re developing. The talent gap is more than a headcount problem. It’s a motivation problem. That’s why I followed Artemis II with such a sense of awe but also a sense of excitement. For our industry, this voyage is a recruitment tool of unmatched potency. Inspiration isn’t a soft metric. It’s the first domino in a chain that ends with a 22-year-old walking into her first day at an engineering firm. A kid watches something extraordinary, a teacher pays attention, and the engineering profession gains someone who alters the course of history. That’s the pipeline. Anything that gins up interest in science, anything that makes a kid look up from a screen and think, “I want to do that!” is an unmitigated win for the engineering industry and for the country that depends on it.
“What a journey.” That’s what Commander Reid Wiseman said when the capsule landed Friday evening. Such a simple statement, yet so fitting. The Artemis II crew went farther from Earth than any human being has ever gone. In doing so, they set in motion other journeys in the imaginations of kids who now see themselves in that capsule. What a journey indeed. And this is only the beginning.
