Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been preparing to cover the launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission. This launch aims to bring humans near the moon for the first time in more than 50 years, with the eventual goal of landing humans on the moon and learning to live there for the long term.
I expected to feel unadulterated excitement for this moment. I have been fascinated by space since I was 8 years old. I dreamed of being the first woman to land on Mars and search for alien microbes. I followed this passion to an astronomy degree and a career as a space writer, for the joy of sharing my cosmological enthusiasm.
One of the things I love most about space exploration is its power to inspire and potential as a unifying force. The first moon landing is remembered as a moment when the entire world looked up in amazement.
“For a priceless moment in all of human history, all people on this Earth are one,” President Richard Nixon said in his speech. phone call to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin after their landing on the Moon in 1969.
So in early January, as I eagerly listened to lectures on lunar science at an astronomy meeting in Arizona, I wondered if Artemis II would evoke the same feeling. We could definitely use it in 2026.
Two days later, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot and killed a woman about a mile from my home in Minneapolis.
This woman, Renée Good, was demographically identical to me. We both moved to Minneapolis less than a year ago and had children the same age. She had observed many of the thousands of ICE agents who flooded Minneapolis as part of the Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge. It is the largest deployment of immigration enforcement in U.S. history. continuous resistance many Minnesotans.
I came home from the conference to find masked agents in military vests circulating in my neighborhood. I saw them arrest someone in front of my house while they were surrounded by neighbors who were whistling and shouting, “You can’t do this!”
Thousands of protesters filled parks and streets, enduring freezing temperatures and chemical weapons deployed by federal agents. The situation intensified when immigration officers shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse who was observing enforcement actions.
My immigrant neighbors hid in their homes with sheets drawn over the windows in a way that reminded me of my Jewish parents hiding during the Holocaust. My children were scared. I was scared. It was very difficult to think about anything else.
Meanwhile, NASA was preparing to launch Artemis II. I sat looking at the preview draft of my article with a hollow feeling in my chest: Who cares about people going to the moon?
This feeling was a departure, not only from myself, but from history – or so I thought. All my life, I have bought into the popular image of the Apollo missions as a symbol of the amazing things people are capable of when they work together. But this picture is incomplete. It turns out that many people felt deeply who cares about the Apollo moon landing – or worse, that it was a shameful waste of money and effort.
The 1960s, like today, were marked by deep political divisions and social unrest. The civil rights movement, the nascent gay rights movement, and the Vietnam War were just a few of the events that pushed people into the streets.
It’s probably a coincidence that NASA’s two moonshots took place at a time of massive protests, says historian Neil Maher of Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. But in the 1960s, some of the protests were aimed at the Apollo program itself.
Many of these movements criticized the fact that the U.S. government was investing resources into sending men to the Moon rather than helping people on Earth, Maher said. Civil rights activists staged a sit-in under a model of the Apollo lunar landing module in Houston and staged a three-day “Moon Rock March.”
On the eve of the Apollo 11 launch, activist Ralph Abernathy, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and advisor to Martin Luther King Jr., led a peaceful march to the gate of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Abernathy brought 25 poor African-American families and four mules pulling two wagons to illustrate the contrast between “the perceived backwardness of African-American agriculture and the technological marvels of the space race,” Maher says. He held a sign that read “$12 a day to feed an astronaut. We could feed a starving child for $8.”
While the Apollo 11 landing was televised around the world, African Americans at a Chicago bar pointedly watched baseball, Maher says. In Harlem, some 50,000 people attending a cultural festival booed the news. After the astronauts returned to Earth, activists disrupted ticker tape parades and dinners held in honor of the astronauts.
Scientific news Apollo cover was also ambivalent. “It is impossible to minimize the accomplishments of the astronauts,” wrote editor Warren Kornberg in the July 26, 1969, issue. “But the verdict of history may well be that while the world was erupting, we ignored the real challenge and pursued a rocket course to the moon.”
A few letters from Scientific news readers called this view “naive” and argued that the lunar program was not that expensive, in reality. Others were even more critical of the moonshot.
“Anchors who ‘ooohed’ and ‘aahed’ about Armstrong landing on the moon noted such delusions as ‘All Americans are proud tonight!’ “wrote one reader. ” Mad… [many suffering people] were NOT proud. We are frustrated and ashamed.
Even the sense of awe at the human achievement of leaving the confines of our home planet was not a given at the time.
“What happened to fear?” lamented space science editor Jonathan Eberhart in a sidebar to the 1969 article detailing the Apollo 11 landing. “Maybe it’s just become old-fashioned, uncool.” He implored readers to “try, briefly, to ignore the flashy rockets and the heroic astronauts. Try to feel the smallness of the man and the immensity of what he does.”
I feel strangely comforted knowing that not everyone was excited about Apollo. Maybe that means it’s okay for me not to be excited about Artemis.
Yet I mourn this feeling of unity and common purpose in the exploration of space.
NASA certainly wants Artemis II to evoke this feeling. Like Apollo 11, “this is another chance where the whole world can look up and see something fantastic happening, which is the result of hard work, dedication and ingenuity,” says Marie Henderson, the mission’s deputy lunar science manager and planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
But I’m having a hard time understanding that feeling right now, with the government behind Artemis. slash the country’s scientific infrastructuredenying the basic science in dangerous means And defend your agents by shooting civilians in the streets.
Maybe both things can be true. Space exploration “can be this incredibly powerful thing that can bring us together,” Maher says. “It can also be this thing, like a mirror, that illustrates that we have a lot of divisions and problems. That’s the beauty of it, that it can do both things.”
I still believe in the power of space exploration to give us humans perspective on our problems on Earth. I don’t want to get cynical about the moon. I hope my sense of transcendence in space returns.
In the meantime, I find this feeling of unity among my neighbors in Minneapolis: the protests were centered on community singing. The ubiquitous 3D printed whistles. The intimidatingly organized networks of everyday people who organize school and grocery store runs for families afraid to leave their homes. The courage and tenacity that we demonstrate here every day.
People are capable of doing amazing things when they work together.
