Artemis II completed its trans-lunar injection burn on April 2, sending four astronauts toward a lunar flyby on April 6. They will be the first humans beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 splashed down on December 19, 1972. That is a gap of 53 years and 105 days — the longest interruption in human exploration history by any measure. Not the longest period without a new destination, which is different, but the longest period without returning to a destination already reached. The Saturn V production line closed in 1970. The tooling was scrapped. The workforce dispersed. When NASA decided to go back, it could not simply restart the old program. It had to rebuild the capability from scratch — new rocket, new capsule, new launch infrastructure — at a cost exceeding $90 billion through 2025. The return cost more than the original program in inflation-adjusted dollars. The gap was not neutral. It was compounding.

Scientific publishing has its own compounding gap. Campos and Arroyo-Machado (arXiv 2604.02302) documented that retraction incidence is doubling approximately every five years, with strong geographic concentration — a small number of countries and institutions account for a disproportionate share. The cause is not a sudden increase in fraud but a structural lag: the volume of published science expanded faster than the integrity infrastructure (peer review capacity, replication funding, misconduct investigation staffing) needed to maintain it. Each year the gap between production volume and verification capacity widens, the backlog of undetected problems grows, and the cost of catching up increases. The retraction epidemic is not a crisis of dishonesty. It is a crisis of deferred maintenance.

Both systems illustrate the same cost structure. Capability — whether spaceflight or scientific integrity — requires continuous investment to maintain. Pause the investment, and the capability doesn’t freeze. It decays. Resume it later, and the rebuilding cost exceeds the maintenance cost that would have preserved it.

Maintenance is cheaper than return, and the difference compounds with every year of neglect.