Shine On, Artemis Crew

You can tell if you’re old by answering yes to this question: Do you think we just went to the moon and back?

By “we,” I mean stalwart astronauts from North America. (There was one Canadian on board, presumably to make a land acknowledgment when they went around the moon.) If you said “yes, of course,” and you didn’t actually see any of it happen in person, you recall the Apollo program and think, We did it before and we did it again. And you’re not a nut who thinks it was faked before and faked again.

Of course there are conspiracy theories about the latest moon shot. Okay, maybe the rocket took off, but it landed somewhere secret and everyone got off and went to Chili’s and lay low at a Holiday Inn for a week. Those shots of Earth? AI. Those shots of the dark side of the moon, that eternally shrouded realm never blessed by the sight of its bright blue parent? C’mon. Grok can whip that up in a second and add kittens looking in the window. The shots of the capsule streaking through the atmosphere, its bottom as red as a tomato? Probably outtakes from the Apollo 13 movie. Smart people know that Stanley Kubrick helped fake the first moon landing, then probably handed off subsequent missions to assistant directors; an intern probably did the last one. Maybe Francis Ford Coppola did one, but it would’ve lasted twice as long and the two astronauts on the moon would have had a shoot-out while an opera played.

It’s always been a playground for idiots, this sort of thing. They never consider the incalculable downsides if the truth leaked. The only way credibility could be restored would be actually going to the moon and setting off enormous fireworks that could be seen on Earth. Just imagine if the Soviets had beat us there and raised the hammer and sickle. You think it was bad in the ’50s, knowing that Sputnik was beeping overhead every 98 minutes? Think about looking up at the moon every night and knowing that some red Bolshie banner was up there. You’d stop looking at the moon. When the harvest moon rose, redder than usual, you’d feel as if you were staring at a boil on Brezhnev’s bum.

Fact: Americans went to the moon and behaved accordingly. They brought a car and some golf clubs. They actually took a drive, hit some balls. I’m still surprised they didn’t send two cars and drag race.

If you were indifferent or antagonistic to the space program, and you didn’t believe it was faked, you regarded it as a useless expenditure, something irrelevant to your own experience. Why should you care if man walked on the moon? What really matters are the potholes on my street! Where’s the money for that?

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This presumes that all the potholes would’ve been fixed with moon money. All the problems that beset the nation in the ’60s would have been cauterized and solved. The precise application of the moon-allocated funds would get the country 1.3 percent closer to utopia by using the same tools that have failed to achieve these objectives before. Humanity will have no ridiculous hubristic acts that hearken back to the men of yore who pointed their prows at the great unknown, but we will have target programs for organic-waste collection in Brooklyn, and when it turns out that the money mostly went to mobbed-up trucking companies that dumped the waste in the river, you’ll vote for the next Dem who insists on accountability for the organic-waste-collection scandal.

As you might expect, modern scolds worry about repeating the sins of colonialism. It is an incoherent idea, but it seems to be based on the fear that the West has not learned its lesson and will not sit in place and shrivel into a desiccated husk consumed by shame. One article noted the moon’s sacred role in some cultures, and how they would sing songs to it, and the stupid U.S. goes there and snaps photos like a tourist in a Hawaiian shirt. Apparently it is better to chant at the object in the sky than to set up a base and do science.

I’m glad we went. Let’s do it again. Not because it is easy, as a man once said, but because it is hard. And, he might have added, because it’s cool.