Amidst global fanfare, the Artemis II capsule containing its crew of four touched down in the Pacific Ocean on April 10. The mission launched on April 1, and spent the next week-and-a-half circling the Earth, launching to the Moon, doing a go-around and returning home.
It’s difficult to overstate the positivity of reactions, press, and general consensus surrounding the mission. NASA’s posts about the mission raked in millions of likes on Instagram. Legacy journalism lauded the astronauts as heroes; The Atlantic called them studs. Trolls dissipated; people from the furthest reaches of MAGA to left-wingers celebrated the mission’s success. Artemis–and space exploration in general–is one of the rare things deemed morally good by most people. Liking Artemis is like liking hot showers, or a good night’s sleep: it’s a bit boring and, well, obvious.
The astronauts themselves are global heroes. Few people can get a phone call from an authoritarian-aspiring president while simultaneously being championed as heroes in the resistance to his ideology. Media and viewers alike are obsessed with the naming of a crater after Commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife, as are they with mission specialist Christina Koch’s resonant quote from the trip: “We will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.”
Still, NASA has its detractors. Many of these critics cite its history of using scientific advancements in space to produce more destructive militaries. Others say that the billions spent on space travel to a lifeless rock would be awfully well spent filling bellies back home. Still others worry about humans’ future colonization of the moon and dread the inevitable carving up and exploitation of its resources.
Ross Douthat notes the lack of cultural warfare around space exploration in his piece for The New York Times titled “The Idealism of the Space Program.” He encounters the “purity” that surrounds spaceflight in “the distinctive way it showcases technological mastery, the operatic themes it strikes, the extraordinary aesthetic landscape that’s both discovered and created by sending humans into space.” Earthlings seem to be addicted to the sheer cinema of NASA’s photography (the photo of the Moon eclipsing the Sun from its far side does it for me). There is certainly a strong pop-cultural framework for the appreciation of space travel; take Interstellar, or the newly released Project Hail Mary. Space makes for transcendent viewing, and there’s a very specific pleasure garnered from watching people excel at their jobs (see The Pitt). Yet beyond the excellence of the astronauts in their stylish orange suits, the gospel of space in our culture is the uplifting of humanity as a whole.
The ideological purity that defines space travel has roots in John F. Kennedy’s Apollo-era philosophy: “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.” Yet Douthat is well aware that while “ambition and idealism” can get humans into space, it can’t keep them there. This explains, he says, the dissipation of the “Space Age” after the Apollo missions. Eventually, aspiration and self-justification run out, and it's up to profit to turn the heavy gears of space travel. Our collective vision of space travel for the sake of its beauty and the camaraderie of our species is not untrue, but it is naïve. The unknowable impact of Artemis and others like it on people’s psyches cannot be cashed, but the Moon’s mineral resources or other commercial opportunities even further afield might be.
The horrifying reality is that when Artemis looked back at Earth it saw an unlikely oasis of life drifting through the abyss, but it also saw the stage for endless brutality. Halfway through the mission, Trump produced a string of deranged Truth Social posts that proved to be arguments for the fickleness of our species. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F—’ Strait, you crazy bast*rds, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH!,” he wrote on April 5. Two days later, he posted “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” speaking of the over 90 million people living in Iran (that’s equivalent to California, Texas, and New York State combined). The ridiculous timing of these comments in the midst of the excellence of Artemis II were not lost on onlookers.
When the astronauts saw the iconic outline of Africa, they looked down at Sudan which is facing a catastrophic humanitarian crisis. When they saw the pale sweep of the Middle East, they looked at a region enveloped in a war zone wider than the continental US. When they looked north to the plains of Europe they saw Ukraine, locked in a bloody battle for survival.
Yet, the peaceable appearance of the continents from space is unnerving. The frothy atmosphere doesn’t look like it’s jamming up the global thermostat, and the glowing webs of cities are comforting.
To be members of an interconnected intelligent species with over 8 billion members is to bear witness to moments of transcendence alongside incomprehensible bigotry. We’ve entered a fleeting window of opportunity that allowed a tiny capsule to circle our moon. Yet even as Trump praises the Artemis crew, he continues to pummel NASA with threats of funding cuts–up to 50%. Warmaking surges, climate changes, and people tire of simply aspiring.
We love space, but to embrace space travel is to undergo a strange kind of heartache: the knowledge that the best of humanity is beautiful, but it is not its totality.