The Outsider Perspective Issue 485 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! And I do mean Good Friday. As you read this, four astronauts are hurtling toward the Moon aboard Artemis II, and on Easter Sunday they’ll enter the Moon’s gravitational sphere. But before humanity could take its next giant leap, it had to fix the toilet.

Shortly after liftoff on Tuesday, the crew powered up NASA’s $23 million Universal Waste Management System — the first toilet ever installed on a deep-space mission — and it promptly broke. A blinking fault light appeared during the startup sequence, and NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya confirmed at the post-launch press conference that it was a controller issue. The toilet could still handle solids but not liquids, which is the kind of engineering distinction nobody wants to think about at 17,000 miles per hour. The crew spent the next six hours on the line with Houston walking through the repair while at least one astronaut had to resort to a backup urine collection bag. Your tax dollars at work, literally floating through the cosmos.

The best moment came during the press conference, when a reporter asked NASA whether this was a “number one or number two priority” for the astronauts. The room lost it. CAPCOM’s eventual all-clear was just as good: “Happy to report that toilet is go for use.” Six hours, one bag, and one controller issue later — problem solved. Oh, and then the crew reported that both versions of Microsoft Outlook on their onboard computer were broken. We can put humans on a trajectory to the Moon, but we cannot make Outlook work with the best software and hardware engineers on the planet.

This week I’m writing about what Artemis II actually means — not the plumbing, but the 54-year gap that preceded it, and why civilizations that stop exploring don’t just stagnate but get passed – links to follow.

Quick Hits:

The Supreme Court seems ready to keep birthright citizenship. The Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in Trump v. Barbara, and it wasn’t close. A clear majority — including Amy Coney Barrett, who essentially demolished the government’s position — appeared ready to rule that the 14th Amendment blocks the Trump executive order. Trump attended the argument in person — the first sitting president to do so. I listened to oral arguments and don’t see 7 votes that would side with Trump. This is going to be, at best, a 7-2 loss for the White House. I could easily see it being a 9-0 decision, too (an Alito/Thomas concurrence seems likely). That doesn’t necessarily mean Trump is wrong about the topic. But this is an instance where an executive order does nothing. There’s been several reports in the last year about Chinese anchor babies (~1.5 million estimated babies), among their elites. The answer here will require Congressional intervention.

Where you can find me this week

Please subscribe, rate, and review The Horse Race on YouTube — the reviews help listeners, and readers like you find me. Make sure to sign up for the Conservative Institute’s daily newsletter and The American Almanac.

Inflation Wasn’t Solved. Iran Just Proved It. – Conservative Institute

Supreme Court to Democrats: The First Amendment Is No Word Game – Conservative Institute

By 2030, More Americans Will Die Than Are Born. Nobody’s Talking About It. – Conservative Institute

The Last Frontier Is Back Open

Artemis II isn’t a space mission. It’s an identity story — and the 54-year gap tells an unfortunate story decline, and now ascendance of America.

On December 14, 1972, Gene Cernan stood on the Moon for the last time. He spoke into his radio with the formality of a man who knew he was writing a line for the history books. “America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow,” he said. “We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”

Then he climbed back into the capsule. The lunar surface went silent, and it has stayed that way for over half a century.

It took 54 years to honor that promise, partially. On Wednesday, four astronauts launched from Kennedy Space Center aboard the Orion spacecraft on Artemis II. On Thursday, they completed the translunar injection burn that sent them hurtling toward the Moon. As you read this, they are on their way. The first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Cernan climbed the ladder and left his footprints in the dust of Taurus-Littrow.

I have lived my entire life seeing the moon mission as a mythic moment in American history, but not something we did anymore. I’ve wanted to see something like this for my entire life. A child born the day Cernan left the Moon is now either a grandparent or approaching retirement. The gap between the Wright brothers’ first flight and Neil Armstrong’s first step was 66 years. We nearly covered the distance from Kitty Hawk to the Sea of Tranquility faster than we covered the distance from Apollo 17 to Artemis II. The longest absence from deep space in the history of human exploration wasn’t caused by a lack of technology. It was caused by a lack of will.

This isn’t a space story. It’s an identity story. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how Trump taking the initiative on Iran was the reversal of “decline is a choice.” Returning to the Moon is another way we’re reversing that decline. The lunar surface represents American ascendance, and Artemis II reverses a 54-year absence that never should have lasted this long.

Space dominance and decline was a choice, and we should never repeat that gross mistake.

54 years in the dark

When the Space Shuttle flew its final mission in July 2011, the United States lost its ability to send astronauts to the International Space Station. A station it had built. A station it had funded. And for nine years, from 2011 to 2020, NASA purchased seats on Russian Soyuz rockets to get American astronauts to an American-led project in orbit.

The price started around $21 million per seat. By the end, Russia was charging over $90 million. The total bill approached $4 billion.

This happened during a period when Russia annexed Crimea, interfered in American elections, and waged a proxy war in Syria. The geopolitical relationship was deteriorating by the year, and Obama’s America kept writing checks to Moscow for a ride to space. If you want a metaphor for managed decline, there it is: the world’s preeminent spacefaring nation paying its principal adversary for ferry service to a facility it owns.

It took SpaceX, a company that didn’t exist when the Shuttle first flew, to end the dependence. Crew Dragon’s first crewed flight in May 2020 finally gave America its own ride again. The cost per kilogram to orbit dropped from $54,500 under the Shuttle to $2,720 on a Falcon 9. A twenty-fold reduction, built by the private sector while NASA wrote checks to Moscow.

The backup plan failed, too. In 2024, Boeing’s Starliner capsule launched two astronauts to the ISS for what was supposed to be a week-long test flight. Thruster failures and helium leaks stranded them for nine months. NASA classified it a “Type A mishap,” the worst safety rating the agency issues. The astronauts finally came home on a SpaceX vehicle.

Nine years dependent on Russia. A backup capsule that couldn’t bring its crew home. The Obama doctrine of retreat on space exploration matched his retreat in foreign policy. The progressive belief that America was not exceptional produced a very unexceptional space agency, with no vision or plan. We retired the Space Shuttle with not clear national vision of what would happen next.

The sci-fi cultural decline followed. When a culture’s space fiction stops looking at the stars and starts relitigating domestic politics — which is what happened when Star Trek went from Kirk and Spock featured in the famous pilot episode pitched as “Wagon Train to the Stars” to now featuring January 6 footage and Stacey Abrams cameos (Kurtzman-Trek is an unmitigated disaster) — it’s a symptom, not a cause. The culture had already turned inward, matching the decline.

The once aspirational fiction followed the self-destructive reality.

What happens when great powers stop going

Frederick Jackson Turner saw this coming in 1893. His frontier thesis argued that the American character was forged by the frontier. The individualism, the democratic instinct, the restless energy that defined the nation. All of it shaped by the open West. The open West wasn’t incidental to American identity. It was the engine. And Turner’s implicit warning was simple: close the frontier, and the character it produced begins to atrophy.

American was born by people seeking a new world. After that founding we explored and settled the far reaches of our wilderness. And after two world wars, which had us conquering global enemies, we looked up.

John F. Kennedy seized on this theme in his famous speeches. His “New Frontier” acceptance speech in 1960 channeled the same instinct. Space was the answer to a closed continent. And Apollo proved that point right. Technological revolution. National renewal. A nearly threefold increase in science and engineering PhDs over a single decade. The program returned an estimated seven to fourteen dollars for every dollar invested. It produced memory foam, scratch-resistant lenses, water purification systems, and the portable cordless vacuum. The frontier paid for itself, just as Turner’s thesis predicted it would. And it gave us an identity. American ideals could spread not just across the world, but throughout space – the final frontier.

Then America stopped going. And Turner’s warning started playing out. Trust in the federal government fell from 77 percent in 1964 to 17 percent today. Institutions calcified. Polarization accelerated. The shared national project, the thing that made Americans feel like they were part of the same country, disappeared. Correlation is not causation. But 54 years without a frontier and 54 years of institutional decay happened on the same timeline.

The pattern has precedent. In 1405, China’s Admiral Zheng He commanded the largest naval fleet the world had ever seen. Two hundred warships. Treasure ships with nine masts stretching a hundred meters long. Seven voyages across the Indian Ocean. The reasons the fleet was eventually scrapped were complex: internal politics, fiscal pressure, strategic reorientation toward the Mongol threat in the north. But the result was simple. The greatest maritime power on Earth chose to stop going, and it didn’t recover its relevance at sea for five hundred years. Within two generations of the fleet’s destruction, Portugal and Spain dominated the oceans. China watched from shore.

Spain tells the same story from a different angle. The empire that dominated global exploration in the sixteenth century collapsed despite owning the richest colonies on Earth. Wealth without will is just a bank account waiting to be emptied. The universal pattern is always the same: civilizations that stop going don’t just stagnate. They get passed.

America’s 54-year gap isn’t the Ming or Spanish scenarios. Not yet. But the risks should be readily apparent to anyone with eyes. There’s a reason conservatives have written about national decline for the last two decades. We sense this better than most, because that essence of America has gone missing.

Until now.

Easter morning

The crew that launched Wednesday is worth knowing.

Reid Wiseman is the commander, a Navy combat pilot out of Baltimore who flew F-14 Tomcats on two Middle East deployments before becoming a test pilot. He lost his wife to cancer. He’s been to the space station before, and now he’s going to the Moon.

Victor Glover is the pilot, a Navy Captain from Pomona, California, with more than three thousand flight hours in over forty aircraft, four hundred carrier landings, and twenty-four combat missions behind him. On this flight, he becomes the Black man to travel beyond low Earth orbit.

Christina Koch holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman at 328 days aboard the ISS and participated in the first all-female spacewalk. On this mission, she becomes the first woman to travel to the Moon’s vicinity.

Jeremy Hansen grew up on a farm near Ailsa Craig, Ontario, joined Air Cadets at twelve, earned his glider wings at sixteen and a private pilot’s license at seventeen. He became a CF-18 fighter pilot and rose to Colonel in the Canadian Armed Forces. He’s the first non-American to venture into deep space.

These aren’t aristocrats. A combat pilot, a fighter jock, a woman who spent nearly a year in orbit, and a farm boy who learned to fly before he could drive. That’s the crew. That’s also the American story, plus one Canadian who earned his seat. These are the very best we have, at the top of their professions and skillsets. They earned every single thing to get onto the ship to the moon.

Over the weekend, during Easter, the crew will enter the Moon’s gravitational sphere. Orion will swing behind the far side, passing within four thousand miles of the lunar surface. As the spacecraft crosses behind the Moon, the disk will slide between the crew and the Sun. A solar eclipse, witnessed from four thousand miles above the lunar surface. The Sun will vanish. The corona will flare. NASA’s Lori Glaze has said the crew will be able to see it. And for a stretch of minutes, communications will go dark. No signal in. No signal out. Four people, farther from home than any human being in 54 years, alone behind the Moon in shadow.

Then the Sun will return. Earth will rise over the lunar horizon. They’ll begin the trip home.

Artemis II doesn’t land on the Moon. It proves we can get there. Sometimes the hardest part isn’t the destination. It’s remembering how to leave. Artemis III, hopefully happening next year, fulfills the promise.

The frontier is open

The typical critics have a point that sounds reasonable: fix Earth before reaching for the Moon. Spend the money on schools, roads, hospitals. You can find this complaint every decade. It’s ridiculous.

The global space economy reached $613 billion in 2024, growing at nearly 8 percent a year. Private investment in space startups hit $7.8 billion, with $4 billion of that American. The market projects $1.8 trillion by 2035. SpaceX’s next vehicle, Starship, aims to put a kilogram in orbit for under twenty dollars. The space industry now employs 3.5 million people worldwide and added 184,000 jobs in the past year alone. Private capital doesn’t bet billions on waste.

And the window matters. Europe’s population peaks this year and begins a decline that demographers project at 14 percent by 2050. Russia has lost nearly 17 million people since 1992. China’s population is already shrinking. The competitors are aging out of the race. If America doesn’t fill the exploration vacuum, nobody will (and as I noted in my column, the U.S. is facing demographic issues, too).

NASA’s budget is less than half a percent of federal spending. Apollo’s spinoff technologies, from the water purification systems that now clean swimming pools to the scratch-resistant coatings on your eyeglasses, returned an estimated seven to eight dollars on every dollar invested, with some analyses pushing the figure higher. The argument that space exploration competes with earthly needs gets the economics exactly backward. The technologies that help Earth come from the programs that leave it.

When we push the limits of what is possible, that is when we invent and make new things that improve the world. When we sit idly by and do nothing, innovation fades. There’s no reason for it.

Artemis survived four administrations and both parties. Obama’s NASA Authorization Act in 2010 created the rocket and the capsule. Trump’s Space Policy Directive in 2017 aimed them at the Moon. Biden thankfully didn’t touch it. Trump signed the budget that funded Tuesday’s launch. Sixty-one nations have signed the Artemis Accords — the practical, sovereign framework for lunar cooperation that replaced the collectivist Moon Treaty no spacefaring nation ever ratified. In a country that agrees on almost nothing, the Moon is consensus.

Cernan said we would return. It took 54 years. Half a century of deteriorating tech, paying rivals for rides, of watching the frontier thesis collect dust, of debating whether a nation built by explorers still had the nerve to explore.

On Wednesday, four people answered the question. Right now, they are crossing the void between the Earth and the Moon. Americans are once again answering the call of a generation to do the impossible.

Americans are the people who go. The Artemis missions send us in the right direction: out. The frontier is open again. The only question left is whether we continue to push through, reverse this long decline, and ascend the heights we belong as a people and nation.

Quick Hits:

Where you can find me this week

The Last Frontier Is Back Open

54 years in the dark

What happens when great powers stop going

Easter morning

The frontier is open

Links of the week

X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week

Satire of the week

Thanks for reading!