Want to live on the moon? NASA opens recruitment for Artemis programme
By Saghir Hussain ·
NASA's open call for astronauts landed with a thud in my inbox this morning — and my first thought wasn't "how exciting," it was "who's paying."
Beyond the obvious romance of it, the story everyone's running with is that the US space agency is hiring astronauts for the first time in two years, expanding its corps as the Artemis programme cranks up. New class, new explorers, boots on the lunar surface eventually. Lovely. But while we're all looking up at the moon, nobody's asking whether the rest of us get to come along for the ride.
Upstairs, down here
Here's the bit that sticks in my throat as a British tech founder sitting on a rainy island in November. NASA is recruiting humans at the exact moment the rest of the economy is quietly automating them out of work. The skills gap isn't coming — it's here, and retraining schemes can't run fast enough to catch it.
And look at what actually moved on the markets this morning. Nvidia's value has tumbled by $430bn after spy allegations, with a major US law firm hired to investigate — that's the Guardian's business live coverage today. Hundreds of billions wiped off a single chipmaker in days. That's the real mood music in AI and tech right now: volatile, paranoid, and running hot. Meanwhile Artemis gets a nice recruitment poster. The gap between the two is where ordinary people live.
What it means for a UK small business
Let me bring this down to the street. If you run a small firm in the North West — say, a logistics outfit near the M56, where a crash is holding traffic for an hour this morning — your problems aren't lunar. They're the 50-minute queues on the M5 and M6 after a collision, the fuel bill, the staff rota, the payroll. Every pound of productivity matters. That's the economy I'm writing for.
So when I see a recruitment drive for astronauts while nobody is seriously, honestly dealing with the fact that automation is displacing jobs faster than we can retrain people for the new ones, I get a little cynical. It's not utopia, and it's not the apocalypse. It's just an awkward, messy transition — and we keep dressing it up as either a sci-fi dream or a doom scroll.
The honest pitch is this: robots and software will take over chunks of the routine. Some of that's good — dangerous, dull work should be automated. But the people affected need real, funded, local routes into the jobs that remain, and they need them now, not in a five-year white paper. A Ministry of Spacemen is sexy. A proper national reskilling effort that treats adults in their forties with a mortgage as seriously as a 26-year-old engineering graduate? That's the programme nobody's opening recruitment for.
And if you genuinely fancy the moon, fair play — apply. But ask yourself: what happens to the country that spends its ambition on orbit while its roads jam up and its workforce gets left behind?
Want to live on the moon? Be my guest. But who's going to fix the traffic while you're gone?