It was a lovely day above the Moon. The Artemis astronauts did some science, took lots of pictures, didn’t die or get replaced by bodysnatchers, and perhaps most importantly, made me bawl a couple of times. One was when Orion came back into communications range after 40 nerve-wracking minutes behind the Moon. Mission specialist Christina Koch, after confirming that she and mission control could hear each other loud and clear, gave a stirring little speech. Artemis isn’t the culmination of anything—it’s meant to be just the start of the exploration of the wider cosmos. But, Koch said, no matter where humans go, home is still home.
“We will explore,” Koch said. “We will build. We will build ships. We will visit again. We will construct science outposts. We will drive rovers. We will do radio astronomy. We will found companies. We will bolster industry. We will inspire. But ultimately, we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.”
The other time I must have gotten some space dust in my eye was a quieter, more personal moment. The astronauts were observing the lunar surface, and identified a pair of unnamed craters, possibly unseen before by human eyes, residing as they do in the borderlands between the near and far sides of the Moon. Mission specialist Jeremy Hansen on the mic relayed to Houston a request from the entire crew, that the craters be named Integrity, for their crew vehicle, and Carroll, for Commander Reid Wiseman’s wife, who died of cancer in 2020. I do urge you to watch the video, to hear Hansen’s voice cracking with emotion and to see the crew embrace Wiseman.
It was an extraordinarily human moment. Humanity feels a little more tangible when surrounded by nothing but machines and darkness; Wiseman’s is a soft beating heart in a big black void that has carried everything, even its grief, farther than any heart has ever been. And now when he and his daughters look up to the Moon, he’ll be able to point to Carroll Wiseman’s memorial. When we explore, we bring our humanity with us, and leave it wherever we go.
“As we prepare to go out of radio communication, we’re still able to feel your love from Earth,” pilot Victor Glover said. “And to all of you down there on Earth, and around Earth, we love you from the Moon.”
NASA struck gold with these astronauts, who have endeared themselves with their emergent idiosyncrasies—Wiseman’s quiet, no-nonsense competence; Glover’s gentle faith; Koch’s playfulness; Hansen’s, uh, Canadianness—to anyone watching for any real length of time. We send scientists to space now instead of test pilots, but personality is a big part of the astronaut selection process. That’s not just the ability to get along with each other in a confined space, or to solve problems in an emergency, but how easily viewers back on Earth can connect with them and root for them. This is because Artemis has to sell itself.
NASA has always felt pressure to justify its budget, but these are especially fraught times. We have an administration that is outright hostile to its less flashy scientific and climate endeavors, and a public, squeezed by inflation and cuts to services, wondering why we’re spending tens of billions of dollars circling the Moon when we can’t afford healthcare. We haven’t actually come very far from “Whitey on the Moon.”
Selling the president is easy. Donald Trump likes shiny things, like the prospect of putting boots on the Moon before the end of his term. NASA kept him happy by letting him talk to the astronauts Monday evening, a chat that mostly consisted of letting him ramble and claim credit while the Artemis crew tried their best to keep a straight face. It culminated, when he ran out of things to say, in an awkward full minute of dead air, after which the astronauts asked, more or less, Is he gone yet? Nope, he was still on the line.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman’s job is a little harder. He has to publicly grovel to Trump in increasingly unbecoming ways, in order to keep his position (which was already withdrawn once due to Isaacman’s donations to Democrats). Then, Isaacman can do his real job: lobbying Congress to restore the NASA funding that Trump attempted to slash. He’s been largely successful at that so far.
But NASA also has to sell itself to the wider public. To that end, Artemis II is extraordinarily well-documented, with 32 cameras aboard, and communications between the crew and Houston being livestreamed every waking minute. It is a mission for the streaming era, a mission that pumps out content even if it isn’t for strictly scientific purposes. It’s meant to be entertaining, and inspiring, and provide a steady flow of headlines. Every stunning new photograph released is, at heart, an act of public relations. If that’s not necessarily an ideal way to do science, it’s a realistic and relatively fruitful one in the world we actually live in.
I am sympathetic to the view that space exploration is a luxury. I don’t disagree, even. But NASA’s budget is not the reason gas costs $6 a gallon, or why we don’t have universal healthcare or pre-K. We don’t have those because those in charge, and the people who voted for them, have chosen for us not to have those. It is a false binary that we even have to choose at all. The U.S. is the richest polity that has ever existed; there is more than enough money to go around to satisfy basic human services while still funding spaceflight. The people denying us those basic services would very much like for you to identify NASA as the culprit for its $24.4 billion budget, which represents 0.35 percent of all government spending, at the same time a pointless and purposeless war costs us a billion dollars a day, and the government seeks a $1.5 trillion defense budget.
We can afford to go to space. We can, as a technical matter, build the rockets and spacecraft necessary to get us there. Why we go is simply because we can. I think we as a species need largely symbolic and inspirational projects like this from time to time, to keep us sane and optimistic and in touch with our humanity. That’s our big, beautiful Earth, I think when I see the photos from Artemis, and whatever the hell is going on down there. It’s not just four men and women circling the Moon. They’re backed by a crew of thousands around the world, from many countries and cultures, all pulling in the same direction for the greater good. They’re building upon thousands of years of accumulated knowledge. It takes an entire species to do this, and only one species we know of is capable. Yes, we could turn away from the stars, and retreat into our own rivalries and hatreds and selfishness. But when given the choice, as Koch said, “we will always choose each other.”