We Can Still Do This

Artemis II and the return of "competence porn" in Trump's era of chaos.

Illustration by Riley Levine

Somewhere over the Pacific, four human beings are hurtling back from the Moon at nearly 25,000 miles per hour.

They launched last Wednesday evening from Kennedy Space Center, a mixed crew of Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Jeremy Hansen, strapped atop the most powerful rocket ever flown with crew, heading farther from Earth than any human has traveled since the Apollo 13 crew limped home in 1970.

They raced around the back of the Moon, used its gravity like a slingshot, and are arcing back toward a splashdown off San Diego tonight. The whole journey covers 695,000 miles. The margin for error, particularly on reentry, when the capsule hits the atmosphere at temperatures approaching half the surface of the sun, is essentially zero. All of us who saw Challenger and Columbia know why.

Watch the NASA coverage of the last week for ten minutes, and you feel something shift in your chest.

The flight controllers in Houston speak in calm, clipped sentences. The checklists are exhaustive. Every contingency has been gamed out, rehearsed, and stress-tested. Commander Wiseman, a former Navy test pilot, described the moment before the translunar injection burn, the burn that committed them to the Moon, like this: “We just kind of looked at each other as a crew.” Then they executed it flawlessly.

Call it what it is: competency porn. And God, we are starving for it. Dying for it.

Because look at everything else.

The war in Iran, a conflict that arrived with no clear doctrine, no stated endgame, and a rotating cast of officials who seem to be surprised each morning by the country they’re ostensibly running, grinds on in ways that defy strategic logic. Call if Schrodinger’s Ceasefire; bombs are dropped, the Strait is closed except to Iran.

More American troops and gear still flow into the Middle East for a war Trump says has been won. Press conferences are held where no one knows who is in charge, or even what we’re negotiating on the alleged ceasefire. Contradictions multiply. We are asked to feel confident in people who have repeatedly demonstrated that they have not thought past the next news cycle.

Washington itself has become a performance of governance rather than governance itself. The corruption is no longer even hidden; it’s aestheticized in Trump’s White Trash ballroom, his triumphal arch, his grubby merch, all branded and sold as strength, honor, patriotism, but leaving a ghoulish, shameful stain.

Agencies are hollowed out, sold to the industries they were meant to police. Congressional hearings are theater, and not even good theater. The gap between the seriousness of our problems and the seriousness of the people tasked with solving them has never felt wider. The two-tiered system of justice, where the Epstein victims are viewed with contempt and the powerful men who raped them go without punishment. Pardons are for sale to any billionaire fraudster, making a mockery of the law.

Meanwhile, the economy squeezes. Inflation is back. Prices are rising. Gas and groceries, those pillars of Trump’s 2024 promise, are high and rising higher. Confidence is rattled. The sense that the institutions that are supposed to hold things together, all of them, legal, financial, political, and civic, are being run by people who are either in over their heads or just want to watch the world burn is no longer a fringe suspicion.

It’s the ambient condition of American life in 2026.

And then: a rocket lifts off, a marvel of human engineering and determination, carrying four people toward the Moon. They sent home images and data of utterly heartbreaking clarity and beauty, named craters on the dark side of the Moon for loved ones lost, narrated their journey for school kids to see an example that there’s more to life than being an influencer or a streamer.

The Artemis II mission didn’t happen by accident. It is the product of thousands of engineers, scientists, and technicians who spent years solving problems that had never been solved before; new life support systems tested and retested after failures, heat shield materials scrutinized down to their molecular permeability, orbital mechanics calculated to tolerances that would make most people’s heads swim.

The zero-gravity indicator flying inside the capsule, a small plush figure of the Moon wearing Earth as a baseball cap, designed by an eight-year-old boy from California, was selected from 2,600 submissions across 50 countries. Even the mascot was done right.

A ten-year-old, interviewed at the launch, asked why he was excited to see the launch, saying, “Because we’re going back to the fucking Moon.”

This is what competence looks like. Not arrogance. Not bluster. Competence: the slow, grinding, unglamorous accumulation of expertise deployed toward a goal that matters.

Know your systems. Memorize the boldface items. Fly the brief. Run the checklist. Aviate, navigate, communicate. Do it just like you practiced in the sim. Fix what’s broken. Do the work. Never panic.

That’s the pilot’s way, the astronaut’s way, aviation stoicism. It scales in aviation and in life, as we should scale it more often.

Christina Koch, peering out of Orion’s window at the full face of the Earth on the mission’s first morning, is looking at the same planet the rest of us are trapped on. The same one running out of patience for its own dysfunction. The one where evil is having a pretty strong showing this bleak year.

But she’s also proof, she and Wiseman and Glover and Hansen and the crews on the ground in Houston and Cape Canaveral, and every engineer who touched any part of this remarkable machine, all are, that the dysfunction is not the whole story.

We still have people capable of extraordinary things. The institutions that produced them, however battered, are still producing them. The knowledge that built Orion was an astounding collection of physics, aerospace engineering, medicine, logistics, and international cooperation, which didn’t disappear when the political class lost the plot.

There is a version of America and the world, alive and operating right now in on a fast trajectory home and down in Houston’s Mission Control, that knows how to do hard things. That plans ahead. That checks its work.

That version hasn’t gone anywhere.

Godspeed, Artemis II. Thanks for reminding us of the way.

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