Journey around the Moon is ending soon

It is a curious thing, to watch a nation turn its gaze once more toward a cold, dead ball of rock that hangs in the blackness, a place we have not troubled ourselves to visit in half a lifetime.

The great machines are being rolled to the pads, the names of the four souls chosen for the journey are being printed in the papers, and the machinery of officialdom is grinding away with its briefings and its countdown clocks.

And so the United States of America, with great ceremony and expense, sent four human beings to loop around the Moon.

They will not land, you understand. They will simply go there, swing around it, and come back. A grand tour with no souvenir but the view.

One cannot help but feel a certain weariness watching this modern iteration of a thing we did when the computers were the size of rooms and the flight suits smelled of duct tape and sheer nerve.

We are told this is Artemis, a sister to Apollo, and it is all being done with a straight face, as if we had not already solved this particular problem decades ago and then, in a fit of pique or boredom, abandoned the answer.

Now, we are to celebrate the “first crewed mission” of a new era, as if we are pioneers again, rather than a people slowly retracing their own faded footsteps.

The crew themselves seem capable enough, fine people, the sort you would trust to drive your children to school, but they are being sent on a ten-day journey to test the “life support systems” and “lay the groundwork.”

This is what passes for bold exploration in the year 2026.

You hear the language of it, the officialese that drips from the press releases and the mission briefings. “Tanking operations.” “Translunar injection.” “Splashdown.”

It is all so very precise and technical, designed to make the whole affair sound like the most natural thing in the world, a simple commute, a routine check of the plumbing.

But there is a strange hollow ring to it, a kind of nervous energy that suggests we are trying to convince ourselves as much as anyone else. We are breaking the record for distance from Earth, they say, surpassing the mark set by Apollo 13.

That is a fine bit of trivia, though one might note that Apollo 13 achieved that distance only because it was a crippled vessel, its crew fighting for their lives against a ruptured tank. It is a strange sort of milestone to chase, a record set by a catastrophe.

The machinery of spectacle is what hums the loudest, and the Epstein files are not buzzing like they once did.

There will be live streams on the various platforms, and downlink events where the crew will speak to us from the great silence, and news conferences where the administrators will speak of “scientific discovery” and “economic benefits” and the eventual, perpetually distant journey to Mars.

It is the same music we have heard before, the same promises, but the audience that craves such spectacle is smaller than ever.

A crowded area where one might view the liftoff seems like a soft target for the Islamic Republic with which our president recently started a war, but intrepid Americans still probably have better things to do.

Gasoline and groceries are rising in price, so people who can are working extra hours instead of watching the skies.

While the cameras are pointed at the rocket, and the commentators fill the air with breathless enthusiasm, one wonders if anyone is paying attention to what is not being said.

We have not solved the problems that face a human being living for months in deep space. We have not built a thing that can get them down to the surface with the kind of reliability that would make a sane person bet their life on it.

We are, instead, conducting a test. A very expensive, very public test of a capsule that is, for all its new paint and digital screens, essentially a very complicated way to fall back to Earth.

There is a grim sort of comedy in it, the kind that would have made a fellow in a white suit and a cigar lean back and chuckle darkly.

We are spending a sum that would feed a small city to send four people on a sightseeing trip, a journey that accomplishes no scientific goal that a robotic probe could not do for a fraction of the price.

We do it in the name of inspiration, a word that has become a cudgel to beat back any question of practicality or sense. The official schedule is laid out with the precision of a railroad timetable.

The crew will arrive, they will quarantine, they will strap themselves into a tube atop a pillar of fire, and we will all watch. And when they come back, when they splash down in the Pacific and are fished out by the waiting ships, we will pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, and begin planning the next “increasingly difficult mission.”

But the question hangs in the air, unanswered, and it is the only question that ever mattered.

What for? We went to the Moon when it was a race, a matter of national pride and technological supremacy against a rival that no longer exists.

We once went with a fury and a focus that seems almost alien to our current age of committee meetings and public-private partnerships. Now we are going back, not with the urgency of a nation possessed, but with the cautious, halting steps of a government agency fulfilling a mandate nobody voted for.

Like President Donald Trump’s war against Iran, Artemis is a mission in search of a purpose, a journey undertaken largely because we have the means to do it, and the collective attention span to sustain it for a news cycle.

It’s an astronomical expense that will add to America’s nearly $40 trillion national debt, which is part of the $163 trillion unfunded liabilities facing our children.

It won’t house homeless veterans, feed impoverished children, or tend to the needs of the millions of Americans without health care coverage.  It may distract from the unreleased Epstein files, which appears to be the highest priority in Washington.

So the countdown will continue. The rocket will ignite, or it will not. The four will go, or they will wait.

Although we will be told, again and again, that we are witnessing the dawn of a new age. But a man who has seen the sun rise before knows the difference between a new morning and a stage light.

As the cameras roll and the officials speak, one cannot shake the feeling that we are watching a very serious, very expensive rehearsal for a play we wrote a long time ago, hoping that if we say the lines with enough conviction, we might convince ourselves that the glory is still there, waiting for us just beyond the horizon.

It is a fine thing to look up at the Moon and think of men walking there. It is another thing entirely to spend a king’s ransom to send a new set of footprints next to the old ones, just to prove we still remember how.

A famous quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, which someone should definitely mention to Donald Trump, comes to mind as this excursion emphasizes the senselessness of war and waste.