Think piece for today.
Slate, Joel Achenbach, 9 Dec 2025: Moondoggle, subtitled “Officially, America is supposed to land on the moon again in 2027—and Mars thereafter. Ask anyone inside NASA under Trump, and you will hear a far different story.”
(Achenbach is the writer of Captured By Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe in 1999, a book sitting down in my stacks.)
This piece is about the incoherence of NASA’s planning in the Trump administration.
As you may have heard, NASA plans to send a crew of astronauts around the moon in early 2026, followed by a lunar landing in 2027. Or maybe you haven’t heard. When I told one of my daughters about this plan to send people to the moon, she said, after a long silence: “But I thought we already sent a bunch of people there a long time ago.”
This is a standard response when I quiz people about Artemis, NASA’s program to return to the moon, and this time to stay. It’s named for Apollo’s twin sister and the goddess of the moon and the hunt. You can ask even the most news-savvy people for their opinion on Artemis and be answered with blank stares. The other day, I was in a gaggle with six neighbors, all highly informed professional people—two of them with long careers at the National Science Foundation—and none knew anything about Artemis except one thing: It’s a plan to send people to Mars.
Nope. Artemis is a moon mission. There is no Mars mission. NASA has no Mars rocket, no Mars capsule, no Mars mission crew. NASA has Mars aspirations, but it doesn’t even have a timetable for such a venture.
What it does have is a very troubled moon program. Artemis faces fundamental engineering challenges that have called into question the program’s basic architecture. Reconfiguring a mission this important is hard in the best of times, but the agency is being forced to do it during a year of unprecedented internal turmoil.
I grew up in a very idealistic America, in the 1960s, in which America was at the top of the world and beat the Russians in the “space race” to land people on the Moon. Sixty years later, the current administration has lost the ball.
Long piece, with much more history.
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One more piece for today.
Washington Post, Letters to the Editor, 12 Dec 2025: As a conservative, I’m beginning to wonder: Are we the bad guys?, subtitled “Republican bigotry, tariffs and defense spending, through readers’ eyes.”
A remarkable piece of self-reflection from a contingent always certain of their opinions. I will quote this entire letter.
Robert P. George’s Dec. 7 op-ed, “There are valid debates among conservatives. This isn’t one.,” argued that conservatives should stop promoting “white supremacy, antisemitism, eugenics, the subjugation of women, and other forms of ideological extremism and bigotry.”
You know what this means. It means it’s too late. Telling conservatives to stop being bigots is admitting they’re bigots. And I’m pretty sure a professor of jurisprudence telling them to cut it out isn’t going to work. Hey, you guys — stop being bigots! Oh, okay.
I served in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations and would like to believe conservatism wasn’t always thus, but I’m beginning to wonder. Was the virus from which today’s bigotry sprang lying dormant in us back then, like chickenpox leading to shingles? The moral herpes virus? Was it like a recessive gene long buried in our ancestral DNA that suddenly got switched on and has become dominant?
Are these new conservatives in fact our descendants? Were we always secretly like this but were pretending we weren’t? I’m hoping these new conservatives are mutants, but I’m not so sure about that anymore.
From Bruce Carnes, Fairfax
Of course this is the question many of us ask. Republicans used to be principled, if principled in basically selfish, close-minded ways; now they’re xenophobic, simplistic bigots. I think the idea of a virus lying dormant is apt; as I keep saying, base human nature lies within all of us, but usually culture and education manage to suppress those base inclinations in favor of our “better angels.” And somehow it does happen that the occasional trigger comes along and gives them permission to let down their civilized facades and indulge in base caveman behavior. We can only hope that at some point the trigger will be gone and those conservatives will realize, in horror, what they’d become.
