I’m watching NASA’s preparations for the April Fool’s Day launch of Artemis II, their first crewed circumlunar mission since Apollo 8 in 1968. My twenty-five year-old self watches with me, that long-haired, incurably hopeful New Leftist I used to be jammed into a neighbor’s living room with my then girlfriend and most of the rest of our ambivalent crew, waiting for Walter Cronkite to light up my neighbor’s 13 inch Sony TV with the confirmation that Neil Armstrong had become the first human being in history to set foot on another celestial body.

NASA representatives still talk like automatons, still use unnecessarily cryptic words/phrases like ingress and egress, capcom (capsule communicator), extravehicular activity, translunar injection. It’s all so cult-like, so pious, so oblivious to the atrocities being commited in our name elsewhere on our own celestial body, that blue marble of aspiration, the one we keep betraying. The word then was Vietnam, the word today is Iran. But never mind. For now we are watching a special civilian operation. The special military operation will have to wait until tomorrow.