For All Mankind: the Artemis Mission

We interrupt our normal programming.

For the next few minutes there will be no words about the Iran War, the Ukraine War, privation, inequity, injustice, natural disasters, social/racial, religious conflict, natural disasters, or any other source of division or stress.

Imagine for a moment the following.

On the evening of April Fools’ Day, while taking his daily walk, a citizen listened to the live Artemis II countdown on his phone and chatted with neighbors as they all strained to see the contrail of the huge rocket streaking up into the Florida twilight. It would be wrong to say that he had been eagerly awaiting the launch (among other things, he’s deeply skeptical about the long-term viability and usefulness of crewed space exploration). But, on the other hand, he grew up during the Space Shuttle era, celebrating successful missions and mourning when astronauts, in the words of a poem cited by Ronald Reagan after the Challenger disaster, “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” and “touched the face of God.” He was also addicted to ‘Star Trek: the Next Generation.’ At an impressionable age, like so many, he’d devoured Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and watched Philip Kaufman’s stirring film version of the book, which celebrates the scrappy, go-for-broke spirit of the early U.S. space program. And his grandfather was a technology enthusiast who taught him to love all flying things. For old time’s sake, and a momentary surfeit of nostalgia, he tuned in to the Artemis launch.

His emotional reaction to it took him by surprise. The sounds of NASA officials saying “Go” in almost too- calm voices one by one, followed a few minutes later by the thunderous roar of the rocket, triggered something he hadn’t experienced in many months and certainly wasn’t expecting to feel on this occasion: pride.

After all, here was a U.S. federal agency using American tax dollars to pull off nothing less than a truly astonishing feat of planning, training, and teamwork, not to mention the high-stakes science and engineering that went into the mission. Here was a crew that emblematized the diverse nation—and the continent, with Canada being represented by astronaut Jeremy Hansen—far better than the Apollo missions did. And, at the heart of the matter, setting aside all of NASA’s advanced degrees and expertise, here was a group of wild-eyed dreamers and nerds brazenly rebelling against the most fundamental laws of nature and somehow pulling it off—sending four humans safely into orbit around Earth, with every indication that the astronauts would eventually manage to fly further into space than anyone has gone before.

Where no one has gone before.

As he pondered the success of the mission, his sense of pride didn’t diminish, but he found himself starting to wonder if a gigantic April Fools’ prank had been played on all of us. How in the world could such a monumental display of valor and skill happen under the Trump administration?

True, many global armies has also carried out technologically and logistically impressive operations, but it’s hard to admire war machines that executes such precision in the service of science and unity one minute, then illegal orders, without hesitation or complaint, in the service of Napoleonic hubris in others. This is not an indictment of the fine men and women who make up the U.S. military, but rather a general observation of other nations who aspire to be one thing and then turn out to actually do something else.

Think about it. The success of any NASA mission depends not just on endless training and testing but on a leadership structure in which any member of the team, at any moment, must feel empowered to sound the alarm if they notice a glitch, however expensive, time-consuming, or embarrassing it might be to address the problem. Toadyism, corruption, nepotism, and an abusive workplace culture at NASA most likely would have resulted in fiery tragedy on April 1st. Instead, the world got a spectacular triumph. Somehow, the Artemis II mission succeeded under an imperfect government led by an imperfect man.

Somehow, the crew members rocketed into space in the Orion capsule on the Space Launch System from Kennedy Space Center … (and yes for those wags or cynics out there so far POTUS 47 has resisted naming the Trump capsule on the Trump Launch System from the Trump-Kennedy Space Center.

Somehow, crowds of people around the country greeted the launch not with protests and lawsuits and conspiracy theories but with full-throated cheers of unfeigned excitement.

Somehow, a crew mostly made up of “firsts”—the first woman (Christina Koch) and person of color (Victor Glover), along with the first non-American (Hansen), to leave low Earth orbit—made it on board the Orion in an era of almost unprecedented division both in the U.S. and many other nations.

Somehow, a program that Trump approved during his first term ended up being named after a proudly celibate pagan goddess who was worshipped at wild festivals by dancing women and young girls in bear costumes—a goddess who was so furious about being sexually harassed by Actaeon (to put myth in modern terms) that she turned him into a stag and had his own hunting dogs take him out.

Somehow, at least as far as we know, the billionaire potentates and oligarchs that Theodore Roosevelt would have railed against did not figure out how to use the Artemis program to steer billions of dollars into their own bank accounts.

Somehow, the chronically dysfunctional U.S. Congress, locked it is petty and shrill semipermanent infighting and gridlock, looked at the work NASA did on Artemis during the Biden years and said, “O.K, we’ll allow this funding to go through.”

Somehow, we saw advanced technology being used for peaceful purposes rather than for killing schoolchildren and teachers somewhere else and sowing chaos in the global markets. Artemis doesn’t just depend on American technology: Experts from eleven nations are involved in the project, and the Orion is powered by the European Service Module. In other words: Somehow, NASA was able to work with its international partners in a way diametrically opposed to how overenthusiastic populism and overwrought wokism seem to hold the great Silent Majority hostages to fortune and dominate the discourse.

How did everything go so right?

There was a moment when what counts as our ‘reality’ these days, replete as it is with the unavoidable, omnipresent news cycle, crossed paths with the Artemis event. During his April 1st address, president Trump did acknowledge the import of the moment before blasting off into a diatribe about sending Iran “back to the Stone Ages.” For that moment, for all his inherent contradictions this is the president who founded the U.S. Space Force and who does seem interested in space exploration. However, this is also the same president who has to balance NASA programs that could help keep Earth habitable with the many other priorities and demands that his administration faces. Forays into the final frontier are simply not cost effective.

This time, at least, as the citizen in Florida and many more besides him from all over this world watched the Artemis mission reach its apogee, splash down having safely delivered its space farers back home something must be kept top of mind. All of us were treated to a vision of things we used to take for granted, but that now seem nothing short of magical: competence, courage, pluralism, scientific prowess, and pride. It is a vision that could help us endure with some measure of lunar equanimity whatever rough times might lie ahead. It is a vision of the nation and a world that existed before and could exist again. Call it one small leap for humankind.

Let us continue to go boldly.

"Our problems are man-made—therefore, they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings."

- John F. Kennedy