On Artemis and War
Apr 8, 2026
Tags: war space photography antiwar
Yesterday I received a text message from a friend; “Dunno if you’ve been following the Artemis Mission. They’re about to come around from the moon orbit. Youtube.”
I had been following the space mission a little… but not too closely. You remember that old Simpsons bit about the family anxiously rushing to pull the plug on the television to avoid being subjected to a shuttle launch? I can kind of relate to that, not because science isn’t cool or the achievements of the space program are anything to be laughed at or derided, but because who cares? You know what I mean, who cares?
Up to this point I had paid enough attention to know what kind of photography equipment they brought along Nikon D5s, which have been used in other space missions and held up well. In fact I think this all came onto my radar because some armchair astronauts were talking shit about how dumb it was to bring along 10 year old DSLR cameras without even considering the possibility that a Canon R5 hasn’t been tested to deal with weightlessness and radiation. As the shuttle moved from the far side of the moon’s orbit back into range with Earth and all its inhabitants, they were greeted with a full solar eclipse! From space! They gathered incredible images and data from the event, including a full solar corona. How exciting! THIS is humanity at its best, on display in real time, streamed directly from outer-fucking-space to my big screen TV in the comfort of my own home. This. THIS is proof that humanity can achieve anything if it wants. This is proof that if there were a god, they would be looking down upon us from the heavens “My children, they ARE good.”
And as I wake up this morning, I, like so many others the world over, are slapped back into reality by a tweet from the president of the US VOWING! Promising! Committing to cause genocidal destruction to a country a half world away. We have been at war, “at war” with Iran for about a month now, and for nothing! We’ve destroyed schools and universities and hospitals and children and modern people living in the modern world wanting to do nothing more than to LIVE! This precious gift given to them from some heavenly decree that they may have the right to be here on earth and to live! It’s an infinitesimally small opportunity to see through the eyes of a human, literally not more precious a gift exists. And we as a society are threatening to and promising to and actually ripping that gift away. From Iranians. From Palestinians. From the Lebanese. So many more en masse. This! THIS is proof god is dead. This is proof that we did not deserve to see the 21st century. This is proof humanity will never achieve anything worth the cost of the lives lost. This is proof that god’s children’s have always been monsters. This is the proof that humanity has nothing to offer.
How can we celebrate these beautiful images and scientific achievements while life is being so callously disregarded? Why should we feel any semblance of civic pride or wave the american flag in support of a government agency, ANY government agency, even NASA? All of these things were built on the gains of the corrupt aerospace industry anyway, fueling the war in Arab countries and beyond. How long until the data collected from Artemis is used to power an AI model that will then be able to target a girls soccer team 12,000 miles away? Shame is all we have to celebrate. Shame is all we deserve, but only if we’re being polite about it.
