America is going back to the moon and I marvel, anew, at what our nation can accomplish when it sets for itself immensely difficult but straightforward goals.

As I watched the Space Launch System rocket rise above the launchpad at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on Nov. 15 I felt something like the emotion I do when I stand, just before the opening notes or words of “The Star-Spangled Banner” ring out, and place my right palm on my chest.

I don’t suppose any endeavor is immune to the political discord that so often afflicts our national conversations.

But a task such as NASA’s Artemis lunar program, although daunting in its mechanical complexity, is in another way blessedly simple.

It either works or it does not.

When the countdown reaches zero the details that dominate so many other topics and so often lead us astray — how we feel, in particular — are meaningless.

The rocket either fires or it does not.

As with all machines it knows nothing of political affiliations or personal beliefs about things for which there is no absolute answer, but only opinions.

The only relevant question, when it comes to the rocket, is whether the people who designed and built the thing did their work properly.

That alone determines whether the rocket flies true.

And the same holds true for the later Artemis missions, including the one that will, as early as 2024, bring astronauts to an orbit around the moon for the first time since the final Apollo mission in 1972.

Perhaps only a year later, in 2025, Americans will also land on the lunar surface and plunge their boots into the dust that Neil Armstrong and the 11 who followed him made so famous more than half a century ago.

Artemis is not universally praised, to be sure.

But then neither was Apollo, despite the widespread notion that America’s race to the moon against the Soviet Union was an anomalous example of national unity during the 1960s, a decade marked by strife over the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war.

One of the chief disagreements regarding our space program — albeit one largely confined to scientists and academics, and not shared by the general public — is whether or not we ought to have astronauts at all.

Some NASA critics argued then — and not without logic — that unmanned spacecraft can accomplish the scientific goals of exploration for considerably less money. Sending humans into space, and keeping them alive in a place utterly inimical to life, is inevitably more complicated, and expensive, than flinging machines out of Earth’s atmosphere.

This complaint persists.

Alex Roland, an historian from Duke University, recently told the Associated Press, following the Nov. 15 launch, that “in all these years, no evidence has emerged to justify the investment we have made in human spaceflight — save the prestige involved in this conspicuous consumption.”

Roland’s implication — that NASA is in effect letting vanity influence what should be a purely scientific endeavor — ignores the reality that Artemis, like Apollo and Gemini and Mercury before it, are the product of human curiosity and ingenuity.

I believe the value of those earlier programs — and in particular the six Apollo missions that put 12 astronauts on the moon — would be nothing like as great as it was had the rockets carried only machines.

Sensors can measure all sorts of variables with a precision people can never match.

Machines can collect samples of lunar dust and rocks, can take fine photographs, can tell us how hot and cold it gets, how strong the pull of gravity is.

But no device can describe to us, back on Earth, what it is like to see our planet rise above the lunar horizon.

Or what it’s like to walk on the moon.

These observations might have little scientific value, being inherently subjective.

But to the Americans whose tax dollars pay for these missions, the words of an astronauts resonate more powerfully than a column of data ever could.

Machines can gather that data.

But only humans can, in effect, represent the tens of millions of us who will never leave our planet — only astronauts can return from their voyage and tell us how it was, in ways we can understand.

We recognized the irreplaceable role of the astronaut in the 1960s.

And I’m gratified that, despite the nearly inconceivable advances in technology that have happened since the final Apollo mission, we continue not only to acknowledge the human role but to celebrate it.

For me — and I believe for most of us — America won’t truly return to the moon until one of us actually steps onto the lunar surface.

I hope the astronauts are already working out what they’ll say in that most monumental of moments.