How to love the moon mission without guilt

Whenever someone likes to claim that the moon landing was faked — a fairly tedious conversation, even as conspiracy theories go — my general response is to ask, “OK, which one?” Most people seem to forget that there were six total crewed landings, all of them conducted by the U.S. government between 1969 and 1972. Aside from some robotic probes, no other country has put human beings on the massive rock that orbits our home planet.

Apollo 11 is the most famous of those, of course, but it almost seems that the main reason humans haven’t been back up there in 54 years is because we got bored, which is pretty remarkable in and of itself. We achieved something so mind-blowing that no other species could comprehend it, let alone accomplish it, something that truly speaks to rising above our animal nature, demonstrating the absolute limits that humanity can reach while opening the potential for even larger ambitions. Yet we kinda shrugged about the moon and moved on, at least until very recently. Was it really such a big deal to begin with?

There have been countless other important space-related milestones since Apollo 17, our last moon visit, but what’s more dramatic than bouncing around in one-sixth of Earth’s gravity and smacking golf balls between lunar craters? It’s why the conspiracies claiming we never went there are so unappealing, not to mention completely lacking in evidence. If, for some reason, America decided to lie about visiting the moon in ‘69 — a claim so thoroughly debunked it’s not even worth engaging with here, but I have been yelled at for trying to explain long exposure, etc. — technology has clearly evolved to the point that there’s nothing stopping us from going there now. Well, unless you count public sentiment.

Through NASA’s Artemis program, the U.S. government is trying to get us back on the moon’s surface soon, part of the new space race — this time against China, not the USSR. But it would appear that many Americans aren’t all that invested in who wins. “Americans have never been all that excited about going to the moon,” the New York Times reported last week, citing Pew Research data that suggests a return to the moon as one of the lowest priorities in terms of space exploration. Only a Mars landing ranks lower, while monitoring for deadly asteroids and measuring climate change are top priorities among Americans.

So last week’s launch of Artemis II and the subsequent circle around the moon just didn’t register for many people, judging by selective media coverage and internet comments, including only passing interest from our distracted president. This mission is a test flight designed to inform future treks, such as Artemis IV, a moon landing currently slated for 2028. (Artemis III is scheduled in between, but that’s a mission in low Earth orbit scheduled for next year, so expect even less fuss.) So far, Artemis II has flown human beings farther than anyone has ever traveled, doing a single lap around the moon before heading home and producing some stunning photos of celestial spheres in the process.

One of the leading dismissive comments is that this wasn’t even a moon landing, and only returning with dusty boots would be significant. Another major criticism is that this trip has little scientific merit. “The value of the images coming back from Artemis and its crew is artistic, not scientific,” Chris Lintott, a professor of astrophysics at Oxford, told the BBC, in a report questioning whether the photos beaming home simply amount to expensive vacation snaps. “This is a voyage of exploration, not lunar science and that’s fine!”

The Artemis program’s $93 billion budget has also been a sticking point for a lot of people, with each launch costing an estimated $4.1 billion. Some have even highlighted that a briefly malfunctioning space toilet cost about $23 million. “Don’t go back to the moon,” Gregory Asimakis argued in a Houston Chronicle op-ed, saying it wasn’t worth the price tag and we should’ve launched robots instead of four humans.

Regardless of cost, so far, the mission has been a resounding success. After leaving Earth on April 1 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the four astronauts are expected to travel more than 695,000 miles from launch to splashdown. Every member of the crew breaks a different record for being the first person of Category X to travel around the moon: Victor Glover is the first person of color, Christina Koch is the first woman, Reid Wiseman is the oldest person, at age 50, and Jeremy Hansen is the first non-American (he’s Canadian — yes, Mr. President, that’s different).

Other records may feel less significant: The flight path will hit a maximum distance of 252,760 miles from Earth, breaking Apollo 13’s record by about 4,000 miles, which doesn’t sound like much. The astronauts got a good view of the far side of the moon (sorry Pink Floyd, it’s not always dark), which only a tiny handful of humans, including Michael Collins in 1969, have ever seen.

Whether all of that was worth the cost, let alone worth tuning into, is up for debate. Maybe it’s redundant; maybe it’s purely symbolic. But there’s something to be said about scientific progress here as well. The data collected — including health monitoring and yes, troubleshooting fussy toilets — will inform future off-planet missions. The general consensus is that if we really want to put people on Mars someday, which will be exponentially more difficult, we have to start with the moon. That doesn’t answer the question about whether leaving our planet at all is worth the trouble.

In President Donald Trump’s speech on the night of the launch, he devoted just under 45 seconds to the endeavor before gaslighting the nation about the Iran war he started a month ago, alongside Israel. He didn’t even mention Artemis in his most recent State of the Union speech, instead doting on the U.S. Space Force, the made-up military branch he ratified in 2019, which he called “my baby” that is becoming “so important.” I won’t even touch the painfully awkward phonecall the president made to the Artemis II crew, which was filled with dead air, seemingly because no one had much to say.

This lackluster interest from Trump seems bizarre, given that he was the president who greenlit the Artemis program during his first term, as part of Space Policy Directive 1, which also aims to someday send humans to Mars. He did, however, boast about the launch on Truth Social, saying that “we are WINNING, in Space, on Earth, and everywhere in between — Economically, Militarily, and now, BEYOND THE STARS.”

Even if getting stuck on caps lock equals excitement, Trump’s track record doesn’t suggest that he’s a big fan of his own project. Last year, he slashed the budget at numerous science agencies, including NASA, which shifted the agency’s priorities around Artemis, and killed the planned lunar Gateway space station that was supposed to orbit the moon. Trump badly needs wins these days, given the heat he’s taking over another useless war with no exit and the Epstein files, but whether or not Artemis is it, he only frames his concerns about space in terms of dominance over China.

Meanwhile, social media seems divided between apathy, awe and anger. My social feeds are largely filled with enthusiastic folks, but a noticeable amount of posts are highly defensive about the cost, both in terms of finances and attention. As for the more negative folks, who can blame them for feeling cynical? From Cuba to Ukraine to the Middle East, violent, unnecessary conflicts are chewing up what’s left of the federal budget, already shredded by incompetent man-children with a vendetta against any public service that isn’t weapons development. And then there’s the utter, and largely ignored, collapse of the little sphere we exist on. Oh, and gas prices are pretty high, jobs are evaporating in the heat of a robot revolution and health care and abortion access and…

There are echoes throughout of Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 poem “Whitey on the Moon,” which feels like it could have been written last week. In the spoken word piece, Scott-Heron raises numerous salient points about the burden of medical debt, inflation, rising rent and more, contrasting the burden of the poor with the Apollo 11 landing, which was crewed by three white men. Scott-Heron’s sentiments were shared by many in his era, including painter Faith Ringgold’s whose 1969 oil on canvas “Flag for the Moon: Die N***er Die” is not subtle, nor meant to be. Even before the moon landing, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his final book:

Today our exploration of space is engaging not only our enthusiasm but our patriotism. … No such fervor or exhilaration attends the war on poverty. … Without denying the value of scientific endeavor, there is a striking absurdity in committing billions to reach the moon where no people live, while only a fraction of that amount is appropriated to service the densely populated slums. If these strange views persist, in a few years we can be assured that when we set a man on the moon, with an adequate telescope he will be able to see the slums on earth with their intensified congestion, decay and turbulence.

Again, King’s thoughts feel like they could have been written last week. King and Scott-Heron use a rhetorical device that Jenna Loyd of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee calls “lunar criticism,” summed up this way: “‘If we can put a man on the moon, we can do X, Y or Z’ – to question U.S. national priorities and narratives of progress”:

Scott-Heron’s lunar criticism is not so much concerned with the otherworldly as a space for imagining the earthly impossible, but for assembling earthly sites of decolonization and liberation. … “Whitey on the Moon,” by turn, revealed the truth that state abandonment is not just an afterthought, but a productive absence directly abetted by state violence.

In other words, throwing cash at NASA while people struggle under mass incarceration and poverty is by design. By that framework, little has changed since our last moon visit. Artemis II pilot Victor Glover, now the first Black man to travel beyond low Earth orbit, has said he listened to “Whitey on the Moon” every Monday on his way to work at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “That song is a reminder that everybody wasn’t having a good time in 1968 when we launched the first Apollo missions. People were struggling,” Glover told Space.com.

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Some Americans aren’t just bored with space, they’re frustrated with who controls access to space. That’s as valid an issue as the scientific progress that’s being made. Perhaps the space race — long incubated by the military-industrial complex that lobbies for endless war and mass surveillance — has never fully divorced itself from extractive capitalism and incipient fascism, cute robots on Mars aside. Perhaps some folks need a gentle reminder that NASA was built with the help of Project Paperclip, a post-World War II intelligence program that helped actual Nazis get jobs in the U.S. aerospace and science industries.

Today those dynamics are arguably just as twisted with Elon “I swear it wasn’t a Nazi salute” Musk helming NASA’s favorite client SpaceX as Trump toady slash Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos joyrides into space aboard his Blue Origin rocket while many of his warehouse employees struggle to feed and house themselves. Meanwhile Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin — the companies who built the rockets and capsule for Artemis II — are reaping enormous windfalls from the Iran war, sitting on billions worth of backorders as more and more bombs drop.

While we all need periodic reminders that pierce through the monotony and horrors of the day, awe of nature and our fragile existence being paramount, we also need reminders that a better future is possible. We don’t need to trash NASA’s budget — we could instead stop burning cash on useless wars and bribes for the ultra-rich. Images from space, especially those that portray our little planet as the puny, beautiful thing it is, are a great frame for examining these issues, offering what’s been called  the “overview effect” — the transcendental awareness occasioned by looking at our tiny globe and realizing that it’s suicidal to keep fighting each other over it, and that we should work to protect it instead. That’s a feeling I doubt Trump or rocketeer tycoons or moon-landing truthers have ever experienced.