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On a recent morning in central Vermont, where I live, it was raining, and the wood frogs had just begun to chorus. The sap run from the maple trees has started to dwindle as the branches begin to bud out. There is a timeless quality to a New England spring (or as timeless as anything can be in an age of rapid climate change), and part of that timelessness is the United States Forest Service, whose land boundaries I wander across most days on rambles through the woods. For more than a century, the Forest Service has been a fairly stable fact of life across vast swaths of the American landscape. Which is why last week, though in the big cities it was barely noticed amid the noisy horror of the war in the Middle East, there was much talk in rural America about the Trump Administration’s sweeping changes to—really, a gutting of—the Service, which operates under the purview of the Department of Agriculture. The Service’s regional headquarters will vanish, along with most of its research facilities and experimental forests—and also quite likely the sense of mission that has animated the agency for more than a century.

The Forest Service controls a hundred and fifty-four national forests and twenty national grasslands—at a hundred and ninety-three million acres, that’s the second-largest land base, public or private, in the country, trailing only the Bureau of Land Management, which runs the nation’s federal rangelands. Sometimes the national forests are confused with the (much smaller) national-park system, which is understandable—often those parks butt up against the forests, and the uniforms of the two services look a little alike, and that’s before we’ve even considered the Fish and Wildlife Service. But, if you see people driving a minty-green pickup, they’re from the Forest Service, a job that implies a very particular history.

The agency’s antecedents date to the nineteenth century, but it was at the beginning of the twentieth, under President Theodore Roosevelt, that it came into its own. Its first chief was Gifford Pinchot, a close friend of Roosevelt’s, who believed in protecting the country’s natural resources to help power its growth—he wanted there to be plenty of trees for the industrial needs of the country. “Unless we practice conservation, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day,” he said. In his time, however, Pinchot’s biggest confrontation was with the forces of what might be called “preservation,” saving forests not for their industrial potential but for their intrinsic meaning and beauty. The towering figure here was John Muir, and, while it’s easy to overstate the differences between the two men (they were, at worst, frenemies) and their visions, the differences were nonetheless very real. Muir and Pinchot clashed, for instance, over the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley, in Yosemite, with Pinchot’s take—that it was “the best, and, within reasonable limits of cost, the only means of supplying San Francisco with water”—prevailing, in 1913.

But, if providing resources for economic growth was the Forest Service’s founding ethos, over time it has, in patches, reflected a more Muirish view: the national-forest system now includes about half of all the designated “wilderness” in the lower forty-eight states. When you drive into a national forest (and you likely have, since the Service retains the largest road network in the world, eight times the length of the interstate-highway system), you pass a sign that proclaims it a “Land of Many Uses.” In the Green Mountain National Forest, near where I live, there’s not just timber production but, also, the Breadloaf Wilderness, big stretches of the Long Trail (America’s first long-distance hiking trail), snowmobile corridors, ski areas, and a Robert Frost Interpretive Trail with signs every few hundred yards quoting his poems. Although there’s always been pressure on the Service to “increase the cut” and harvest more timber for local mills and builders, and although this has often led to egregious clear-cutting (the Service was once reputed to employ more landscape architects than any other organization in the world, largely to make those clear-cuts less visible from the roads), there’s also been a measurable move toward sounder science.

Aldo Leopold, for instance, essentially invented the field of conservation biology while working on game management in the national forests of the Southwest; the U.S.D.A. website, as of this writing, still pays tribute to his un-Trumpian ideas about “the benefit that comes from slowing down and taking the time to listen to nature. In today’s world, being quiet is a valuable commodity; taking time to stop and listen for those minute details outdoors that weave a tapestry of stories all around us is a rewarding experience if we but stop and pay attention.”

The Service maintains many experimental forests, which have produced new understandings of woodland ecology, making it clear that the trees that cover about a third of the country are far more than machines for producing lumber or fibre. I was once told, over a beer with one of the heads of the Clinton-era Forest Service, that its research showed unequivocally that the greatest value of those millions of acres was not timber or even recreation but the way that intact forests absorb and filter water, which reduces both flooding and the need for expensive artificial filtration.

Sound science, we have learned, is anathema to the Trump Administration, which moved within weeks of taking office this term to demand more timber production from America’s forests. So it was no surprise that part of the “reorganization” announced last week involved the ceasing of most of the experimental-forest research and closure of the research stations in the U.S.F.S. network. These are the sites of experiments that can reach back for decades; since trees, by definition, take a fairly long time to grow, that span allows scientists to understand how forests develop and to look for the changes that a warming climate is producing.

But there’s a deeper message in the reorganization, too, which shuts down the Service’s nine regional offices and relocates its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City. Utah is at the heart of what’s been called the Sagebrush Rebellion, which rose during the Reagan era to challenge the prevailing management of federal lands, and, indeed, the entire idea of federal lands. In recent years, Utah’s senator Mike Lee has led efforts to sell off huge tracts of those lands across the West to developers. The Senate refused to act on those plans last year, one of the few defeats suffered by the MAGA right. That was largely because of a huge swell of protests from hunters, fishermen, hikers, mountain bikers, and other recreational users of these lands—and from the businesses that cater to them. The Forest Service reorganization is a backdoor way to achieve some of the same goals: during Trump’s first term, his Administration moved the B.L.M. headquarters from Washington to Colorado, which led many of its key employees to quit. (The Biden Administration moved it back.) It is likely that the same will happen with Forest Service workers (thousands of them have already been DOGE-d). The Service will now have, instead of a regional headquarters, a “state coördinator” in the capitals of states where it has large holdings, and I think it’s safe to predict that these people will service connections to the interests that value timber more highly than those that value, say, water filtration, much less backpacking.

The U.S.D.A. last month announced big loans and grants to companies revitalizing sawmills and wood-processing infrastructure. The current chief of the Forest Service, Tom Schultz, as the Sierra Club explained, served as the vice-president of resources and government affairs with a company called Idaho Forest Group, one of America’s largest lumber producers, “where he led timber procurement operations and managed relationships with government officials.” As Schultz put it recently, “The value of National Forest Systems lands is demonstrated by providing various forest products, such as timber, lumber, paper, bioenergy, and other wood products.”

It is perhaps beyond obvious that the Trump Administration would look at a forest and see board feet of timber. But the gutting of the Forest Service couldn’t come at a more inopportune moment. This winter was by far the hottest ever recorded across the Western U.S., and that has left the mountains of the West, where Forest Service lands are primarily concentrated, with the smallest snowpacks in recorded history, which, a new study from Western Colorado University found last month, is intimately linked to wildfire danger. The possibility—the probability—of conflagration is on every Western mind. It turns out that conservation really does matter: when you burn too much oil, draw too much water, cut too many trees, you eventually end up in enormous trouble. The Trump Administration seems to have decided that, if we’re in this bad a fix, we might as well make the last few dollars out of it, on every possible front. To borrow, out of context, a Trump quote from last weekend, “All Hell will reign down.” ♦

It’s weird out there—you’re aging, the world is changing, and the economic landscape is shifting beneath your feet. The things you once cared about suddenly seem so stupid. The things you now care about objectively are. People are dying. Babies are crying. Everyone around you has a crazed look in their eyes. And, each time you meet up with an old friend, or a new acquaintance, or a person you’ve known sort of well for some amount of time, one thing is abundantly clear: they’re going back to school to become a therapist.

When the first friend mentions this, it comes as a delightful surprise. She’s been working at a fancy shoe store that’s really a fancy drug front for far too long. But, when the second, third, and fourth competent buddy with a bachelor’s degree divulges the same update, you may start to wonder—how does this make me feel?

It’s important to note that this phenomenon is beyond your control. We were all fed false promises in our youth about what we could achieve if we set our minds to it, or what we could be if we wanted it enough. Surely, every generation faces this devastating crossroads of actual adulthood. We can’t all be experimental d.j.s forever. Your own therapist had to have decided to become a therapist at some point, right?

But, does having a lot of about-to-be therapists in your life mean that you should become a therapist, too? Does having zero therapists-to-be around you mean that you’re an unexamined brute with no hope for self-actualization? Let’s find out.

• If eight of your friends are slated to become therapists this year, I’m suspicious of your definition of “friend.” I wonder if those same “friends” consider you their “friend.” You may want to discuss the concept of friendship with your very own therapist (who, may I remind you, is also not your friend).
• If seven of your friends are about to become therapists, you have an M.F.A. in acting from a prestigious institution and a handful of legitimate IMDb credits. All seven of these friends are other actors you’ve worked with over the years, or, more likely, participated in an unpaid staged reading alongside.
• If six of your friends are becoming therapists, you’ve thought about becoming a therapist yourself. Many people have told you what a good listener you are. Little do they know, you’re just a freak for gossip.
• If five of your friends are currently completing their M.S.W., you identify as someone who is very good at therapy. You love therapy! You roll your eyes at people you know who are not in therapy when talking about them behind their backs. Your primary goal in your own sessions is to be the best at therapy ever. All you want is to be your therapist’s favorite. Which you are. You know you are.
• If four of your friends are in therapy school, you’re a big feelings baddie. You likely feel an immense amount of nostalgia for nearly everything from your past. You live for reunions, just so you can resuscitate shallowly buried negative emotions. You’re a glutton for punishment, because that punishment leads to more feelings.
• If three of your friends are about to be therapists, that seems kind of unremarkable.
• If two of your friends are getting into that therapy life, you are the child of therapists and have done everything in your power to avoid people who might become therapists. You have almost succeeded, but not quite. Do you want to talk about what might be triggering your sense of failure?
• If one of your friends is studying to be a therapist, it’s your wife and she’s thinking of leaving you.
• If none of your friends are becoming therapists, it’s time to look inward. Perhaps consider . . . therapy? ♦

Family-centered content creation is an overstuffed toy chest of contradictions. Its meticulous mise en scène is that of candid, improvisational home life. Its ostensibly D.I.Y. output is financed by brand partnerships and affiliate marketing. It takes private and noninstrumental moments of childhood—potty-training mishaps, menarche, barfing—and makes them public and transactional; see, for example, the prominent mommy vlogger Aubree Jones, whose tween daughter’s first period was effectively sponsored by a feminine-hygiene brand. Jones’s seventh child, born last year, is named Disney. If “Infinite Jest” were a conjuration spell, it would manifest a momfluencer.

The most successful and lucrative family vlogs are indiscreet almost by definition—and yet the wrong kind of indiscretion can derail the whole gravy train. The vlogger Jordan Cheyenne, for one, wrecked her sharenting career by accidentally posting footage of herself coaching her son, who was distraught over the family’s sick puppy, to make a specific kind of sad face for YouTube. (“Act like you’re crying, really quick,” she prompted him. “I am crying,” he wailed in reply.)

Perhaps the strangest paradox of the sharenting economy, however, can be found simply in the staggering number of views, subscribers, and advertising dollars flowing toward content that is excruciatingly boring when it is not excruciatingly uncomfortable. In her new book, “Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online,” the journalist Fortesa Latifi acknowledges that even some of the most popular sharenting content, which can net its creators millions of dollars a year, is “objectively not that interesting” and “almost wildly mundane.” The young stars of these videos might be opening Amazon packages, sitting in a dentist’s chair, lip-synching to Morgan Wallen in an all-white kitchen beneath a giant box-pendant light fixture, or barfing. The mystery of why anyone would watch these displays is compounded by how little we know of the watchers themselves or of how their views are monetized, because social-media platforms are generally reticent to share demographic breakdowns of user data and ad revenues. Or, as America’s greatest advertising mind, Don Draper, once said, “Who knows why people do what they do?”

We know a little, though. We know that pedophiles make up a disturbing proportion of the audience for family- and child-centered social-media content, and that the advent of generative A.I. has turned these images and videos into potential fodder for child sexual-abuse material. (Last month, a jury in New Mexico found that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, failed to protect young users from sexual exploitation and ordered the company to pay three hundred and seventy-five million dollars in damages; Meta plans to appeal.) Bots are often in the mix, too, along with the hate-watchers who populate the “snark communities” devoted to family vloggers on Reddit. But, when Latifi conducted her own survey of hundreds of fans of sharenting content, she identified another, perhaps overlooked category of viewer: a child, teen, or young adult searching for an outlet from a lonely or volatile situation in their own home. The “presentation of perfect family life from vloggers,” Latifi explains, “was how they achieved that escape.”

“Like, Follow, Subscribe” is decently reported, if clunkily written; it lacks the legal and philosophical acumen of Leah A. Plunkett’s “Sharenthood” or the sociological insights that Kathryn Jezer-Morton brings to her studies of momfluencers. The strongest and most original passages of Latifi’s book, however brief, are devoted to her survey participants, who say that clicking on kidfluencer content helped them feel like “part of a community,” even like “part of their family.” One of these fans, who described herself as a onetime “isolated homeschooler,” told Latifi, “It was my way of experiencing the world when I was stuck at home all day.”

Ironically, this isolated homeschooler was likely watching other homeschoolers. Traditional school systems are not a draw for mega-momfluencers such as Hannah Neeleman, of @BallerinaFarm (nine children, more than ten million Instagram followers); Jessica Ballinger, of @BallingerFamily (six children, more than three million YouTube subscribers); or Kristine Pack, of @FamilyFunPack (eight children, more than ten million YouTube subscribers), all of whom have homeschooled. Aubree Jones, in a 2023 post on her TikTok account (more than two million followers), offered three reasons that she homeschools, starting with “efficiency”—she boasted that her kids could complete their daily schoolwork in two hours or less, and suggested that an average day at a traditional school stretches to six or more hours to provide “day care” to working parents. Two was “flexibility”: Jones can choose what her children learn and, just as important, when they take vacations (which generate great content!). Third and last was “mass shootings.”

A fourth reason, obvious but unspoken, is that homeschooled kids have more time and availability to make stuff for the family vlog. In this respect, power sharenters may homeschool for the same reason that schools in farming communities used to close down during spring planting and fall harvests: so that the kids could stay home and work.

The social-media ascent of the religious-conservative “trad wife,” and of the von Trapp-size brood skipping blondly behind her, is inextricable from the material conditions necessary for a typical family-vlogging operation, in which a stay-at-home mother is the main producer-director and, ideally, adds fresh infants to her cast of characters on a roughly biennial schedule. (Several of Latifi’s sources in the family-vlogging industry believe, incredibly or not, that some sharenters “are explicitly choosing to have more children for brand deals.”) In its specific appeal to evangelical Christian and Mormon communities, including the semi-apostates of what’s often referred to as MomTok, mommy vlogging has striking parallels with multilevel marketing: both industries offer money-making opportunities that are supposedly compatible with traditional homemaking, and both demand constant leveraging of personal relationships in order to achieve and sustain success.

What makes sharenting far more ominous, of course, is that its practitioners must chase the mood swings of the social-media algorithm if they want to extract maximum value from family life. Positive pregnancy tests and squishy newborns usually deliver strong returns. So does footage of a child in physical or emotional pain. As a lower-tier mommy vlogger tells Latifi, “The videos that got the most eyes on them are the ones that had the bloody noses, or the broken arms, or the emergency room visit, or whatever.” One of the pinned posts on the Instagram page of Jamie Otis Hehner (a million followers) is a video of her toddler son suffering a febrile seizure as one of his siblings sobs in the background.

The abundant risks and perverse incentives of the sharenting industry have, in recent years, inspired some well-meaning legislation. In 2023, Illinois became the first state to pass a law explicitly intended to safeguard the earnings of kidfluencers, requiring that a percentage of profits from monetized content be placed in a trust until the child reaches the age of eighteen. Since then, several more states—including the nation’s two busiest sharenting hubs, Utah and California—have either passed new laws or amended existing ones to similar ends, extending the same protections to the child stars of social media that have long been in place for their counterparts in film and television.

But the texts of these new laws—which are heavily predicated on a kidfluencer’s willingness to sue his or her own parents—are at turns vague, confounding, and possibly toothless. Utah’s law, which came into effect last year, specifies that family vloggers “shall use the formula E = (A/T) * (Q/S) * (M/2) or the formula E = 245 (A/T) * (1/X) * (M/2) to determine the qualifying minor’s earnings”; this alphabet soup of variables requires tallying “all paid minutes featuring any qualifying minor.” As is the case in other states, Utah not only puts parents in charge of this complex bookkeeping but also appoints them as their children’s trustees—and all in the name of protecting children’s earnings from greedy parents. The fox is still guarding the henhouse, but at least now the hens can sue.

Some legislatures are attempting to find additional legal remedies for former kidfluencers who believe that they were harmed by oversharing parents. Utah and Minnesota have recently codified formal processes that allow minors to request the deletion of content in which they appear, but these seem open to any number of challenges on First Amendment grounds. Arkansas’s Child Content Creation Protection Act, which will take effect in July, makes it “unlawful to financially benefit” from airing “any visual depiction of a minor with the intent to sexually gratify or elicit a sexual response in the viewer or any other person.” This provision, which is aimed at parents who share images of their underage daughters in bikinis and leotards for a monetized audience of perverts, describes an objectively abhorrent phenomenon, but in inevitably subjective terms.

As more and more kidfluencers come of age, and as they confront all that may have been lost or broken in their childhoods, they are likely to find that the law is an imperfect instrument for restitution. Multiple U.S. Supreme Court decisions, dating to the nineteen-twenties, have strongly favored parents’ rights to determine the best interests of their children, as the attorney Shreya Agarwala explained in a superb 2025 article in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. Privacy law may apply to, say, a stranger who broadcasts a toddler’s febrile seizure to a potential audience of millions, but the same child generally cannot claim a legal right to privacy from his mother or father. Similarly, a minor may feel that her reputation has been permanently warped by embarrassing childhood footage of her tantrums or bathroom accidents, but, Agarwala writes, defamation law is a bulwark against falsehoods, not against the disclosure of true events that your parents immortalized for clicks. Agarwala briefly mulls whether public-health campaigns on the dangers of sharenting might be more effective than legal action—and the answer may well have been yes in a pre-COVID, pre-R.F.K., Jr., era of institutional trust.

Maybe it’s not too fantastical to hope for a surprise shift in the Zeitgeist, one that compels members of the family-vlogging élite to start withdrawing their kids from view. Maybe quiet parenting, like quiet quitting and quiet luxury before it, could catch on as a meme among key influencers. Maybe concealing one’s children from social media could become a status symbol, and putting them on public display could acquire a useful stigma—not that I’d want to wish disgrace on mommy vloggers. I’d rather not know anything about them at all. “It’s a dark place to be,” a former sharenter tells Latifi, “watching other women do things.” ♦

This past Wednesday, at the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, the four-person crew of Artemis II strapped into a tiny metal capsule atop a skyscraper-size rocket. A column of fire, fuelled by millions of pounds of propellant, carried the astronauts into orbit, en route to the far side of the moon. Christina Koch, a mission specialist on the crew, had looked back at her planet before, during nearly a year aboard the International Space Station. Yet the I.S.S. orbited at a distance of only two hundred and fifty miles—too close to see the entire globe. The moon, in contrast, is a quarter-million miles away. On her way there, Koch saw the entire Earth for the first time. It eventually shrank to the size of a golf ball.

Astronauts have not explored the lunar surface since Apollo 17 landed there, in 1972. The Artemis program aims to go further, not only bringing humans to the moon but also building a permanent base there. Artemis II, the program’s first crewed flight, is essentially a practice run. In the course of ten days, the Orion capsule—dubbed Integrity—is swinging around the moon, without landing on it, and then returning to Earth. NASA is evaluating every aspect of the mission, including space-toilet reliability and manual-pilot controls. On April 10th, Artemis II is expected to splash down in the Pacific Ocean.

The mission commander, Reid Wiseman, in front of a view of the Earth.Photograph courtesy NASA

Some issues demanded attention soon after takeoff. Just before maneuvers that would move the spacecraft out of Earth’s orbit and into a lunar trajectory, the capsule flashed an emergency message: a suspected cabin leak. Jeremy Hansen, a Canadian astronaut on the mission, mentally prepared to don a spacesuit and figure out how to get the crew home. The message turned out to be a false alarm. Other difficulties have been more down to Earth. “I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working,” Reid Wiseman, the mission commander, told Mission Control. The crew has learned to navigate shipboard life, too. Victor Glover, the pilot, reported that the spacecraft was uncomfortably cold, and donned a knit cap. Then there was the question of where one sleeps while weightless. Koch took to hanging from the ceiling, like a bat.

NASA has hailed the mission’s many firsts. Most notably, its diverse crew was travelling farther from Earth than anyone ever has. Key moments in the mission were memorialized with charmingly clunky scripted remarks. “When the engine ignites, you embark on humanity’s lunar homecoming arc and set the course to return Integrity and her crew safely home,” Chris Birch, the capsule communicator in Mission Control, told the crew. Koch replied, “With this burn to the moon, we do not leave Earth—we choose it.” This is NASA’s most important crewed effort in a generation, and so far it has been textbook. Close observers of the space program are not only celebrating milestones but feeling a wave of relief. Artemis II follows thirty years of false starts.

This week’s mission represents a beginning and an end. It gives NASA a new focus beyond the moribund I.S.S., and it sets the stage for a revived space race. This time, the main rival is China, which has a disciplined and effective program, called Chang’e, to land humans on the lunar surface by 2030. (Like Artemis, Chang’e is named after a goddess of the moon.) Artemis also represents the end of something essential. Artemis II is arguably a product of Old NASA, and it would still be recognizable to the architects of the Apollo missions. Although it features cutting-edge alloys, carbon-fibre composites, and digital avionics, the mission is managed by the same NASA centers. Many of the same contractors that built Apollo hardware were responsible for building Artemis II, often in the same buildings.

Beginning with Artemis III, in the name of efficiency, NASA will start handing major elements of the lunar program over to private companies, including SpaceX and Blue Origin. NASA will neither build nor own the next generation of lunar landers. It will basically hire a rideshare service to bring its astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface, and it will even rent its spacesuits from a contractor called Axiom Space. In the Trump Administration’s budget for the fiscal year 2026, it sought to cancel the Artemis rocket, known as the Space Launch System, in favor of commercial alternatives still in development, such as SpaceX’s Starship. The NASA of old was spread across the country so that many communities would benefit from its investments; the new space program will be increasingly privatized and concentrated in Texas and Florida. One wonders if it can live up to NASA’s longstanding motto: “For the benefit of all.”

To land the first two men on the moon, in 1969, NASA depended on about four hundred thousand workers. Only three years later, the Apollo program ended, and the technical capacity to build, assemble, and operate millions of parts quickly degraded. By the time President George H. W. Bush laid out systematic goals for NASA, in the late eighties, it was no longer feasible to repeat what had worked before. Bush envisioned multiple advances: a space station, a return to the moon, and a Mars landing. But setting foot on the moon again would require starting largely from scratch, technically and psychologically. “NASA programs require sustained political support and financial support over many years,” Emily A. Margolis, the curator of contemporary spaceflight at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, told me. “During that time, the multiple Presidential Administrations and Congresses valued spaceflight differently. NASA had to work against that challenging backdrop.”

Sunlight floods the interior of the Orion spacecraft a few minutes after its launch from Kennedy Space Center.Video courtesy NASA

The Clinton Administration abandoned the Bush plan in favor, ultimately, of the International Space Station. In 2004, President George W. Bush called for the creation of what would become the Constellation program, which sought to complete the station before moving on to lunar missions, and then to landing astronauts on Mars. President Barack Obama cancelled Constellation, prioritizing an asteroid landing and opting to try for Mars next. But the first Trump Administration ended the Obama program, instead establishing the moon-focussed Artemis program. President Joe Biden’s support cemented Artemis within NASA. “Artemis is a survivor program,” Margolis said. “The Orion crew capsule was part of the Constellation program. Three of the rocket’s four engines flew on Space Shuttle missions.” The Artemis launch vehicle, in turn, was based on Constellation’s Ares V design, and its booster rockets were an innovation of the Space Shuttle era. “NASA often reutilizes technologies that ultimately survive political transitions,” she told me.

The Apollo program was centrally planned and ruthlessly methodical. Back then, the path to the moon was more or less a straight line. Commercial spaceflight is comparatively laissez-faire. SpaceX and Blue Origin are developing their technologies independently; a breakthrough by one company is not a breakthrough for others. Both companies are also years behind schedule. SpaceX is now supposed to land Artemis astronauts on the moon in 2028, using its Starship system, but significant technical barriers remain. Starship is as yet incapable of reaching the moon, let alone delivering a lander to it. The China National Space Administration, in contrast, has spent the past few years landing rovers on the far side of the moon and retrieving moon rocks for study. About four years ago, China built its own sophisticated space station, called Tiangong, a dramatic demonstration of its human spaceflight capability. Its path to the moon looks a lot like Apollo’s. The next flag on the moon may well be a Chinese one.

As fantastic as NASA’s missions can seem, there is something intimate and relatable about the agency. Every year, more than a million people tour the Johnson Space Center, in Houston, and tens of thousands attend space camp, in Huntsville, Alabama. “It’s a rare and incredible thing that NASA welcomes the public—the American taxpayers and others—to come see what they do,” Margolis said. “NASA’s business is space exploration, not hospitality, but the visitor centers create good will among the people who fund this program.” The public is invested in each mission; Magellan may have sailed the world, but “we” went to the moon. Will we feel the same way when NASA astronauts climb out of a SpaceX moon lander? The commercial space race is defined by secrecy and competition, not collaboration. At SpaceX’s Starship facility in Texas, armed guards stand watch. A sign outside says that if you want a tour you should get a job there.

Only three types of crewed spacecraft have ever flown to deep space: Apollo capsules, Apollo landers, and now the Orion capsule. NASA compares Orion’s interior to that of a Winnebago camper van. When I sat in a replica used for training simulations, at the Johnson Space Center, the space felt small for one person. Four inhabitants seemed inconceivable. The Artemis II astronauts are unable to stretch out an arm without touching someone else—and that’s the least of their worries. Every square foot of a spacecraft, at pressure, is under about one ton of force. In the vacuum of space, Orion essentially wants to blow up. If its heating system fails, the crew could freeze to death. They depend on rebreathers to keep them from dying of carbon-dioxide poisoning or hypoxia. During reëntry, only a few inches of heat shielding will separate their feet from the exterior of the spacecraft, which will warm to five thousand degrees—about half as hot as the surface of the sun. Even when things are going well, an astronaut in flight is remarkably close to oblivion.

The Artemis II astronauts approached the apex of their journey knowing that, on April 6th, they would lose sight of—and communication with—Mission Control. The far side of the moon, which is never seen from planet Earth, would be the size of a basketball at arm’s length. For about forty minutes, they would be truly alone. In an interview from space, Koch, her hair floating in a crown around her head, told NBC News about the curious duality of space exploration: they were speeding through the heavens, but she felt as human as ever. One minute, she was gazing out at unfamiliar parts of the lunar surface, thinking, That is not the moon that I’m used to seeing. The next, she said, her mind was on more terrestrial matters: “Hmm, maybe I should change my socks.” ♦