Artemis Captured Our Hearts Because We Want to Believe Again

When the Artemis mission to the moon launched I was barely paying attention. This was despite a deep interest in outer space and space travel that I’ve had since I was a child, in spite of the spine-tingling thrill I got lost year when visiting the Rocket Center in Huntsville, and despite having the Apollo missions documentary For All Mankind at the top of my list of comfort movies to watch when I’m in a funk. In recent years space had become the province of malevolent billionaires like Bezos and Musk. Something that had once represented a thrilling apogee of human ability and know-how had become just another toy for the fatuous overlords on top of a rigged system, and I had checked out.

After the launch I corrected my jaded ways. I soon realized this was a NASA project, very much in line with the spirit of scientific discovery and exploration, not self-aggrandizement for the worst of us. As the astronauts themselves stressed, this was again a mission “for all mankind.” It helped that this was a crew of different genders, races, and even nationalities, which really drove the point home.

A lot of other people embraced the Artemis mission as well, more than any other I’ve seen in my lifetime since the first shuttle launch, which touched off my childhood space fascination. Like a lot of people of my generation, this made the Challenger disaster in 1986 especially upsetting and heartbreaking. The dream I had seen visualized in so many books of a future of space exploration was dead. Last night, for the first time in forty years, I could actually feel that dream stirring again.

Against my better judgement I started to believe because I wanted to believe. Like many other Americans, I have been yearning for belief, feeling cast adrift in a society that seems increasingly cynical and nihilistic. The last decade of the Age of Trump was a result of these tendencies in American life, but it also fearsomely fed the nihilism in a fierce dialectic feedback loop. Now we have reached a point where everyday events are fodder for massive online betting schemes, where the president openly sells pardons, where the Secretary of Defense publicly proclaims his desire to commit war crimes and does, where dead-eyed influencers like Mr Beast get peopel to humiliate themselves for money, and where once august media institutions like CBS News have been turned into state media for a pedophile president by one of his billionaire cronies. It is a world ruled by the worst of us, wretched greedheads who tell us that everything and everybody has a price and nothing has any value other than money.

The Artemis mission is an antidote to all of this. It was a display of knowledge and competency and passion for something higher over the base desire to make a buck. It brought us back stunning images from the moon and space, but more than that, it brought back a feeling that human beings were made for something higher. The astronauts themselves modeled our ideas of what we wish we could be, from their joyful teamwork to the emotional naming of a crater after the deceased wife of one of the crew.

The juxtaposition between life in the Integrity and life on earth was pretty jarring. Its mission coincided with the misbegotten war with Iran, one that has taken many lives but started without any real justification. It now looks like it may end with the United States at a greater disadvantage than before. It is a microcosm of the awfulness of our current rulers, displaying their incompetence, idiocy, violent tendencies, and bigotry. While Pete Hegseth was firing military generals who were not men or not white despite his “white guys ueber alles” military philosophy failing big time, the diverse crew of the Artemis presented quite a contrast.

The Iran War and the Artemis mission present two visions of what American power can do in the world. We have the capacity to build bombs, ships, and planes and deploy them to deadly effect. We also have the capacity to send people to the moon at the price of a couple of days of deploying said bombs, ships, and planes. The Artemis captured our hearts because I truly believe it represented the vision of American power that a vast majority of Americans prefer, including many people who might self-identify as conservative. It is time for us to put despair behind and act on that knowledge.

The best response we can have to the dispiriting nihilism of the current moment is to think big about the future. Artemis allowed us to do that. Silicon Valley has tried to lay claim to the future, and unfortunately, we let them do this for decades. Now we see the fruits: a dystopian nightmare of enshittified social media apps making people miserable and AI agents based on the theft of scholars with the goal of allowing Sam Altman’s ilk to convert every turning of the economy and every knowledge query into money in his pockets. These Masters of the Universe want to present themselves as visionaries but they are merely a high-tech version of feudal barons building a lush life off of rents extracted from the peasants.

We let them hijack the future. If was are to have any future, it is time for us to wrest it from their avaricious hands. The Artemis experience is proof of how good that can feel.