America’s return to the moon in 2024 will usher in “a new era of firsts” in scientific discoveries and space exploration, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Tuesday during the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.

The mission, designed to establish an orbiting base and find ways to make oxygen and rocket fuel for a future trip to Mars, will be the first moon landing in more than 50 years. But it will be far different from the Apollo moon missions of the 1960s and 1970s, said Nelson, who while in Congress was a crew member on a 1986 space shuttle mission. A test flight without a crew is expected to launch late this year.

“We will send more astronauts to explore the moon than ever before” to study quakes on the moon, explore the lunar south pole, determine whether there is water below the moon’s surface and other goals, Nelson said. The ultimate goal of the Artemis mission is to establish the orbiting lunar gateway as a starting point for a future manned mission to Mars in the next decade; that is a goal set by former President Barack Obama and carried forward by former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden.

Echoing a theme that he sounded Monday during a media briefing , Nelson said “space is hard,” noting the supply chain challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and delays in producing components needed for the mission. Repeating former President John Kennedy’s famous quote, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” Nelson said “we are a can-do people.”

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To get to the moon, Nelson said, will take “all of us working together,” including private contractors, international partners and the American people. He recalled that during his shuttle mission, he looked out the spacecraft’s window and saw “an incredible creation suspended in the middle of nothing. I wanted to come back and be a better steward of the place. When I looked out, I didn’t see racial, religious or political divisions, just all of us together as citizens of this planet.”

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Nelson also promoted NASA’s upcoming launch of the James Webb space telescope, which will be the world’s largest and is designed to peer through a keyhole in space 1 million miles away to see light that was emitted during the earliest days of the universe more than 13 billion years ago. He also said NASA is developing technology to help firefighters suppress wildfires and to measure agricultural water use to gauge conservation efforts.

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Colorado is a major player in NASA’s missions with more than 500 vendors and suppliers employing 23,000 people, which Nelson said is “bound to increase as we prepare to go back to the moon and on to Mars.”