The Outsider Perspective Issue 487 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! Especially to Polish robots named Edward Warchocki. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, let me catch you up. Edward is a four-foot humanoid robot in Warsaw. Earlier this week he walked out of somebody’s garage and took off, right at a pack of wild boars that had been tearing up the neighborhood. The boars took one look at the glowing bipedal thing advancing on them and did what any sensible mammal would do: they ran. Then Edward waved as they disappeared into the night. Three million views later, the Internet had its verdict: “the hero we don’t deserve.”

Two things I love about this. Poland, as a matter of historical experience, does not wait for a task force to decide who handles the boars. You build the robot, you deploy the robot, you wave when the boars run. And it is a reminder that the future is going to be stranger than anyone expected. I don’t know of any sci-fi movies where the robots are chasing pigs.

This week I’m writing about the four astronauts who came back from the Moon last Friday — and what they told America on camera, a week later, about what comes next – links to follow.

Quick Hits:

A week when the justices took it personally. Justice Sotomayor walked back the jab she took at Justice Kavanaugh at a University of Kansas Law School appearance on April 7, where she mocked his immigration-stop concurrence by saying a man “whose parents were professionals” does not know anyone “who works by the hour.” Her statement this week called the comments “hurtful” and “inappropriate” and confirmed she had apologized to her colleague. Justice Jackson went the opposite way. At Yale Law School on April 11, she tore into the conservative majority’s shadow-docket rulings as “back-of-the-envelope, first-blush impressions” and “scratch-paper musings,” and announced she wanted to be “a catalyst for change.” For those counting at home, the only change she’s been is to chase the left flank of the court to the right. And on Wednesday, Justice Thomas — speaking at UT Austin to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence — gave the most substantive speech of the three: progressivism, he said, “seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence” because it locates rights in government rather than in the transcendent order the Founders claimed. Three justices, three registers. The senior liberal apologizing for a cheap shot. The junior liberal torching the majority from a law school stage. The senior conservative making the argument at the level of first principles. Read them in that order and you get a clear picture of where the Court stands right now. Justice Kagan probably wanted a stiff drink.
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Where you can find me this week

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Iran’s Last Chip Just Left the Table – Conservative Institute

Thomas Friedman’s Iran Meltdown Is a Grudge With a Byline – Conservative Institute

Media Tries to Blame Trump for Tornadoes Instead of Reading the Forecast – Conservative Institute

The City on a Hill Has Moved

What four astronauts told America a week after they came home.

The commander of the first crewed mission to the Moon in half a century splashed down off the coast of San Diego last Friday. By Thursday, a week later, back in Houston under the studio lights of the Johnson Space Center press room, he still could not finish the sentence about the experience.

Reid Wiseman flew more than 700,000 total miles. He watched the Sun eclipse behind the lunar disc from the far side. He came home on the USS John P. Murtha, sat down on the deck of a Navy ship, and asked for a chaplain.

“I’m not really a religious person,” he told the press on Thursday. “But there was just no other avenue. I asked for the chaplain. I saw the cross on his collar, and I just broke down in tears.”

He had never met the man before in his life. It did not matter. The commander — a serving Navy captain, a test pilot, a man who spent ten days in a metal capsule no bigger than a minivan with three other people he describes as his best friends — saw a cross on a collar and he crumbled, under the weight of what he’d seen and one.

A few minutes earlier in the briefing, Wiseman had described the instant the Sun disappeared behind the Moon on the far-side pass. He turned to Victor Glover sitting in the pilot’s seat and said: I don’t think humanity has evolved to the point of being able to comprehend what we are looking at right now. He called it otherworldly. He could not find another word.

It’s one of the most meaningful interviews I’ve witnessed in a while, aside from all the other Artemis II crew interviews. It’s the moment that a country is remembering what it once did, why it did it, and wondering why it ever stopped.

Not a picture

Jeremy Hansen, the Canadian mission specialist, came home with a sentence that no photograph has ever delivered.

He said the galaxy has depth.

Not brightness. Not beauty. Depth. He said that when the lighting was right and the four of them looked out the window of the Orion capsule, the stars were not scattered across a flat black canvas the way they appear in every image NASA has ever released. They were at different distances. Some were closer. Some were further. You could see it with the naked eye. The brighter stars pushed forward. The dimmer ones receded. The Milky Way stopped being a poster and became a place.

“What kept grabbing my attention,” Hansen said, “when the lighting was right and we were looking out the window, I kept seeing this depth to the galaxy that I just had never experienced before. Because of how bright they are and their differences, they look like you can tell where they are in 3D. That was mind-blowing for me.”

Every American under the age of 55 has seen the Moon only through a NASA still or a Hollywood CGI pass. The crew came home and told us the pictures are wrong. Not wrong in detail. Wrong in dimension. The thing we have been looking at for half a century is a flattened version of something that, in person, has depth.

Hansen is a Royal Canadian Air Force colonel. He is not a poet. He is a working engineer trained to describe instruments and anomalies. And he used his first public words back on Earth to tell us that our entire picture of what is out there is missing a dimension.

We have been doing the same thing with our own country. Looking at screenshots of its past and mistaking that for memory. We see, and maybe even remember, but the depth is missed.

A crew is not a committee

Five days before the Houston press conference, on April 11, the four astronauts stood on the tarmac at Ellington Field and spoke to their families, their NASA colleagues, and the American and Canadian public for the first time since splashdown.

Christina Koch came back changed, too. She is the only woman who has ever flown to the Moon. She previously held the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, 328 days on the International Space Station. She is not a rookie at spaceflight. She is a veteran of the hardest environment humans have ever worked in.

She said that from the Orion capsule, looking back at Earth, she saw something she had never seen from the Space Station: “Earth was just this lifeboat.”

Then she turned to the Earth and addressed it directly.

“Planet Earth,” she said. “You are a crew.”

That is not the language of a country nervously managing its institutions and worrying about risk. That is a far more personal language. It is what a commander says to her ship. And Koch, in the first sentences of her homecoming, refused to make the crew only the four of them. She extended it to the planet. The American instinct at its best is that we are special, there is work to be done, and anyone serious about doing it is one of us.

Jeremy Hansen stood beside her and made the same argument in two languages. He delivered part of his remarks in French — becoming the first person in the history of human spaceflight to speak French en route to the Moon.

“We are a mirror reflecting you,” Hansen said to the crowd. “And if you like what you see, then just look a little deeper. This is you.”

Four astronauts. Two American accents. One Black Navy pilot’s. One Canadian’s, in French. That is what a vanguard looks like when it is actually doing something instead of staging it.

Give them the keys

Artemis II was a free-return flyby. The crew did not land. The hardware for the first crewed lunar landing since 1972 — the Human Landing System, the surface suits, the descent profile — is the focus of Artemis IV in early 2028. Artemis III in 2027 will test the landing hardware in Earth orbit. Artemis II was supposed to be the proof-of-life: a crew, a capsule, a trans-lunar injection, a splashdown.

Wiseman did not see it that way.

Asked at Thursday’s press conference what he took away from the mission, the commander — without prompting, without hedging — made a statement that every NASA press officer in the room must have heard as a small earthquake:

“If you had given us the keys to the lander, we would have taken it down and landed on the Moon. It is not the leap I thought it was. It’s going to be extremely technically challenging, but this team needs to show up every day knowing it is absolutely doable, and it’s doable soon.”

That is the commander of the United States’ first lunar mission in half a century telling the agency — on camera, with his crewmates nodding — that the bottleneck is not physics, technology, or bravery. The bottleneck is institutional nerve.

NASA has been defined by delays for most of its modern life. Commercial Crew slipped. The James Webb Space Telescope slipped ten years and ten billion dollars. The Space Launch System itself slipped through three administrations. Nobody in the agency, nobody in the contractor base, nobody in the press expected Artemis II to lift off on the first scheduled window. And it did. Right on time. A Block 1 SLS stacked and ready. An Orion that worked. An ESM that worked. A heat shield that brought the crew back without a burn-through.

That is not a country that tolerates its own delays. That is a country that has started refusing them. And the people who build rockets for a living can feel it. The industry is energized in a way it has not been since the first Space Shuttle rolled out of the Vehicle Assembly Building. Everyone at SpaceX, Blue Origin, Axiom, Firefly, and inside NASA itself has been told by a commander who just came home from the Moon that the next step is not a dream. We can possess it.

But possession requires decisions. And decisions require a White House that keeps making them.

Wiseman said the next phase requires the country to “accept a little more risk than we were willing to accept in the past, and to trust that we will figure it out in real time.” He is not asking the agency to skip Artemis III. He is asking it to walk through 2027 and 2028 with more confidence than its own institutions currently have — because he knows what every program manager in the room knows, and what every voter should know: the window for this kind of push is not open forever. The next president may not keep going. This could be a limited window. The astronauts are asking us not to waste it.

The argument they’re making

Hansen made the same argument in different language.

“We have to be willing to accept a little more risk than we were willing to accept in the past,” he said, “and to trust that we will figure it out in real time.”

Then: “We’re not going to be able to pound everything flat before we go. We’re going to have to trust each other.”

Then: “You need the support of others to do big things. Share your goals. Be brave enough to share them, and then you’ll be surprised how people surround you and lift you up to accomplish them.”

Then, as a simple declarative: “Accomplishing the near impossible is exactly what we do, and what we just showed that we can do.”

That is not the language of a risk-averse, committee-run, focus-grouped country. That is the language of a people who build.

It is also, if you listen carefully, an economic argument dressed in human clothes. Risk tolerance is what capital is. A country that trains itself out of risk trains itself out of growth. A culture that tells its brightest young engineers to hedge, to delay, to commission another study before committing — that culture is not being prudent. It is being slowly euthanized.

Hansen said it as an engineer. He meant it as a citizen. And Koch, who has spent more time in space than any other woman in American history, sat next to him on the dais and nodded.

“Share your goals,” Hansen said. “Be brave enough to share them.”

The United States used to do that out loud. For a while, it stopped.

What we retreated from

In 2010, the Obama administration canceled the Constellation program — the George W. Bush-era successor to the Shuttle that was supposed to return Americans to the Moon. The following July, the Shuttle itself was retired. For the next decade, American astronauts rode to the International Space Station on Russian Soyuz capsules at a price that climbed from around $21 million per seat to more than $90 million. The country that put twelve men on the Moon became a paying customer of Vladimir Putin’s launch service.

That was the space program. The rest of that period rhymed with it. The 2009 Cairo speech. The apology tour. The “leading from behind” doctrine that ceded the Arab Spring to Russian and Iranian arbitration. A foreign policy built on the premise that American initiative was the problem, not the solution.

The Biden years made it worse. Afghanistan did not end in withdrawal. It ended in collapse, the natural consequence of a worldview that treated American confidence as the vice and American hesitation as the virtue. The airport footage was not the bug. It was the feature.

For 15 years, Americans were told the country was too tired, too guilty, or too divided to do anything hard. The Moon missions were killed. The Shuttle was grounded. The ambition was pathologized.

But almost overnight, we’ve reversed. The second Trump term struck Iran’s nuclear sites, squeezed Venezuela, reasserted freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, and last Friday splashed four humans down in the Pacific after a lunar flyby. That is not a coincidence. That is a country remembering what it is for.

Who else is doing this

Look at the rest of the world.

On April 10, the same day Artemis II splashed down off San Diego, China’s Chang’e-7 spacecraft arrived at the Wenchang launch site for an expected liftoff later this year. Chang’e-7 is China’s attempt at serious engineering: a lunar south pole mission with a water-ice hunt and a hopping probe. Chang’e-8, slated for 2028, will test in-situ resource utilization and evaluate humanoid robots. Beijing has a roadmap to a crewed lunar base.

But every move is state theater. Every taikonaut is a demonstration of regime capacity. Every photograph is released only after the politburo has approved the frame. Chinese astronauts do not weep on carrier decks. They are not permitted to.

Russia is something else. Moscow conducted 17 orbital launches in 2025, the lowest total since 1961, the year Gagarin flew. Proton upper stages are failing. The new Soyuz-5 test stand failed to ignite. The replacement for the Soyuz crew vehicle has, in the words of Russian aerospace analysts, “no chance” of flying before the 2030s. Putin’s Russia cannot launch an idea bigger than a grudge. Its space program has become organized crime with a cosmodrome.

Europe is the third option, and it is the saddest. The European Service Module that powered Orion on this mission worked. Credit where it is due. Airbus in Bremen, with contributions from ten European nations, delivered 33 engines of propulsion, power, and life support that carried the crew home. ESA will keep providing that module through Artemis VI.

But Europe has no independent human spaceflight program. It has no European Artemis. No European lander. No European lunar mission of its own. Europe partners. It does not lead.

That is the global field. Regime theater. Rent extraction. Committees.

And then there is the country where four humans, one of them Canadian, came home from the Moon and asked for a priest, and then asked for the keys to a lander.

Every other great power is building things. The United States is the only one still building upward. Americans are striving to break limits.

A series, not a movie

At the end of Thursday’s press conference, a reporter asked the crew what Hollywood would need to get right if it tried to tell this story.

Victor Glover answered without thinking.

“A movie wouldn’t do it justice,” he said. “It has to be a series.”

That is the assignment.

A movie is a monument. A series is an ongoing commitment. Glover — the first Black astronaut to fly to the Moon, a Navy test pilot who spent the previous year training for the mission he just flew — was telling the country, in the only cultural grammar we still share, that this cannot be a one-off. One lunar flyby, one splashdown, one crew that briefly reminds us we used to do this. That is not the story. The story is what comes next, and the one after that, and the thirty that follow.

The galaxy has depth. It also has risk, danger, and the great unknowns. And yet, they all said the same thing to the country: do not stop.

The city on a hill has moved

In 1630, aboard the ship Arbella in the North Atlantic, John Winthrop delivered the sermon that would become the founding metaphor of the American experiment.

“We must always consider,” he told the Puritans heading to Massachusetts Bay, “that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”

The city on a hill, in Winthrop’s 1630, was a harbor town that did not yet exist. Boston was an idea. The hill was a shoreline. The city was a promise.

In 1989, at the end of his presidency, Ronald Reagan returned to the same metaphor and gave it the version most Americans alive today remember.

“In my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace,” Reagan said. “A city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”

In 1989, the city on a hill was a nation with open doors.

In 2026, the city on a hill is four humans in an Orion capsule, 239,000 miles from home, telling Earth it is one crew and the galaxy has depth.

The city has moved.

America is no longer the destination. America is the vanguard. The hill is no longer a harbor. It is no longer a border. It is the edge of the universe itself. And the eyes of all people are still upon it — not because the country is a model of something completed, but because it is the only country still walking forward at the frontier.

Our astronauts said the galaxy has depth. They meant it literally. But the line applies everywhere the country has been training itself to see in two dimensions. The economy has depth. The border has depth. The alliance structure has depth. The republic itself has depth. None of it is a picture. None of it is a committee memo. None of it is a flat black canvas with evenly-spaced stars.

The astronauts looked out the window and saw a universe that had been right there the whole time, waiting for us to come close enough to notice.

They came home and told us.

Do not stop. Do not hedge. Do not let another 54-year gap fall between us and the Moon. Do not let the next administration decide the window is closed. Push the limits. Accept the risk. Trust each other to figure it out in real time.

That’s what we have to do.

Give them the keys.