The space capsule Artemis returned to Earth late Friday, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. Artemis II was NASA’s first crewed mission to the moon in more than 50 years. It’s a reminder that America is at its best when it is pushing boundaries and exploring new frontiers.
Artemis II was launched on April 1 on a 10-day mission with four astronauts aboard. Its object was to fly around the moon as a test flight for future missions to return humans there on a more permanent basis than was achieved by the Apollo missions half a century ago. This is the first crewed mission outside of Earth’s orbit since 1972.
During the lunar flyby, Artemis set a record for the farthest distance that any human has traveled from Earth, 252,756 miles from the astronauts’ home planet and 4,700 miles beyond the moon itself. NASA hopes to return by 2028, and the success of Artemis suggests that these ambitions will be fulfilled.
But Artemis tells us something more. It tells us again that America is an exceptional country and its best days can still be ahead. Ever since the Apollo program was shelved, America has gone through an extended period of retrenchment and self-doubt, only prepared to look at outer space through a telescope but never prepared until now to go there again.
The United States has never lacked naysayers and declinists. Indeed, in recent decades, it has become common to hear refrains about what America can’t do and to hear a litany of the limitations and constraints the nation must now face. Events in recent decades, including military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 fiscal crisis, rioting in America’s streets, and political disorder, have added to that narrative.
America, we have been told, is not what it once was. As the great historian Arthur Herman noted, the idea of decline in Western civilization dates back more than a century and is linked to the view that history itself is predetermined. This coincides with the idea that “development, even in its most sustainable form, has become a Western curse on the world.”
Unsurprisingly, the rise of declinism in America was accompanied by a lack of space exploration. For decades, America told itself, or was told by the left side of the political spectrum, that it was merely a nation like any other, or worse, that it was an inherently evil force.
It is hard to do great things when one is being fed a diet of self-loathing. “Great ambition,” Napoleon Bonaparte famously observed, “is the passion of a great character.” Self-belief is essential to a pioneering spirit.
America can do great things. The U.S. is at its best when it defies its critics and reaches for the stars.
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,” then-President John F. Kennedy declared in a September 1962 speech that schoolchildren throughout America once had to learn, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one in which we intend to win.”
America did precisely that. Less than seven years later, on July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed the Lunar Module Eagle in the Sea of Tranquility. Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon and, as he stepped onto the lunar surface from the lowest rung on the ladder from the module, he declared, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Too often in the ensuing decades, we have forgotten that it was an American step. The progress was astounding. A little more than a decade after NASA’s 1958 creation, the U.S. had put a man on the moon.
REPUBLICANS SHOULD END THE DEMOCRATS’ SHUTDOWN THREAT
Artemis II shows that we can do it again. And we should. “There are no inevitabilities in history,” the writer Philip Roth once observed. America’s fate is not predetermined, and its future has yet to be written. We are its authors, and the inheritors of a proud tradition. The same people who came to the New World and conquered it.
There are many frontiers left to explore. America is the country to do it.