David M. Shribman: Artemis II symbolizes a half-century of change

Same destination, different country.

The nation that dares to send an Orion space vessel on a pioneering orbit around the moon is a far different place from the one that first ventured there and placed the original footprints on the lunar surface.

It is bigger, and yet its dreams are smaller. It is richer, and yet the character of its civic life is poorer. It is more powerful, and yet its influence is more constricted. It is smugger, and yet its confidence has been compromised.

No one who trod the Earth in 1969 would recognize the United States in 2026.

In a sense, that's not remarkable. No one who lived in 1912 would recognize America in the lunar landing year of 1969 — another 57-year span of great change that took automobiles from steam power to gasoline, that took American movie theaters from the "Keystone Cops" to "Easy Rider," and that would see the country grow from an afterthought in power politics to superpower status.

Even so, the comparison between the United States of Apollo 11 and the United States of Artemis II is an instructive venture, providing insights into our own time even as it illuminates the distance the country has traveled from the Archies ("Sugar, Sugar") to Taylor Swift ("The Fate of Ophelia"), from the median purchase price of a home of $25,900 to $405,300, from Tom Seaver to Paul Skenes, from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, from a typewriter ribbon (roughly $2.50 in a stationery store) to a two-pack USB C fast-charger block for a laptop ($21.99 on Amazon.com).

Along the way, gasoline at $0.39 (roughly $3 in today's dollars) has been replaced by gas soaring beyond $4 per gallon, presidential views have shifted from Nixon's state-dinner toast to the Shah of Iran (honoring "a nation and a people with whom we are proud to stand as friends and allies") to Trump's characterization of Iran's theocratic leaders ("a vicious group of very hard, terrible people"), from mainframe vacuum-tube computers occupying vast air-conditioned rooms to iPhones that slip into purses and pockets (and, now, vast AI data centers requiring massive cooling operations).

One surprise: The phrase "artificial intelligence" was already 14 years old in 1969. In 1955 — two years before the Soviet Union began the Space Age by launching Sputnik into orbit — a group of scholars proposed the Rockefeller Foundation fund an effort to develop technology to "form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves," explaining, "We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer."

That proposal for a summer project has become what you might think of as an endless summer — ironically the title of a popular film released in 1966, the year of Neil Armstrong's first space flight, aboard Gemini 8.

The gap between Apollo 11 and Artemis II is so wide that conservatism, the social and political creed that once was a shorthand for resistance to change, has changed in dramatic fashion.

The conservatism of 1969 was led by figures such as Ronald Reagan (then the governor of California), Barry Goldwater (back in the Senate after losing the 1964 presidential election), Gerald Ford (House minority leader whose furthest horizon of imagination didn't include the presidency he would occupy five years later) and William F. Buckley Jr. (involved that year in a heated debate with left-leaning Noam Chomsky on Vietnam and still feuding with Gore Vidal). In the White House was Nixon, whose brand of conservatism intersects with that of Trump mainly in their visceral hatred of communism.

But Nixon's conservatism had room for supporting an income floor for all Americans, a notion that would be anathema to Trump. The two presidents' temperaments couldn't be more different: one an introvert and brooder (but, as the White House tapes showed, only temporarily tethered to the textbook personal reserve and sense of private "correctness" of many conservatives), the other a voluble figure (prone to explosions of withering commentary and public denunciation of his foes).

One was a shrewd foreign-policy thinker, the other an intuitive man of action. One struggled against a Democratic-controlled Congress, the other dominated a Republican-controlled Congress. One vetoed the War Powers Act, which was passed over his veto, the other ignored it completely.

While both were admirers of the fixer and dirty trickster Roy Cohn, Nixon, who courted a "silent majority" and often, though in vain, spoke of national unity, would have been repelled by the public combativeness of Trump's MAGA supporters. Both presidencies were marked by war, though Nixon was a Navy veteran of World War II, while Trump in 1969 had just received a Vietnam-era medical deferment from military service.

Nixon killed the final three Apollo missions. Artemis II was sent moonbound not at the end of a space initiative, but as the beginning of a project that includes building a permanent colony on the lunar surface. "It is our strong hope," mission specialist Christina Koch said before being launched into the heavens, "that this mission is the start of an era when everyone, every person on Earth, can think of it as also a destination."

Space exploration is entering a new phase — no longer to notch milestones but instead to practice repeat operations that lay the groundwork for the creation of a lunar infrastructure.

"We're no longer doing things in space to prove we have great technology," said Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi School of Law. "It's not about national prestige anymore. It's about building something — a future for all of humanity. We have to create a firm foothold on the moon to be able to harness the vast resources of space."

The British novelist L.P. Hartley published a book titled "The Go-Between" that opened with this sentence: "The past is a foreign country: They do things differently there." It was published in 1953, the year Scott Crossfield, piloting the rocket-powered D-558-2 Skyrocket, became the first person to fly at twice the speed of sound. The world seems to have changed at about twice the speed of sound between Armstrong's 1969 small step and the 2026 giant leap that Artemis II is taking now.

•••

David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.