Given the state of the world right now, it's no great surprise that President Trump's goal to send humans back to the moon by 2024 is in jeopardy. Many space policy experts questioned the feasibility of that deadline even when it was originally announced in March of last year. Now that we're in middle of a global pandemic, with the U.S. economy in freefall, a 2024 lunar landing looks not just hugely ambitious, it also wildly out of touch with the immediate needs to protect public health and welfare.
And yet, the scramble to contain COVID-19 and the efforts to go back to the moon are not really at odds with each other. Government officials regularly draw on the managerial structure and focused urgency of the 1960s Apollo program in defining the current effort to develop a coronavirus vaccine. That effort is frequently described as a "moonshot"; even its semi-official ...
