On April 1, 2026, NASA's Space Launch System lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida carrying astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Jeremy Hansen toward the moon. It is the first crewed mission to travel in the vicinity of the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972 — 53 years ago. The crew will fly around the moon and back in a nearly ten-day mission, serving as a crucial dress rehearsal for a future lunar landing. It is a real milestone for American spaceflight. It is also a milestone built on decades of work by thousands of NASA employees — including a significant number who were fired over the past year by an agency that Elon Musk's DOGE operation deliberately hollowed out.
The Achievement Is Real. The Context Matters.
Let's be precise: Artemis II is a genuine scientific and engineering triumph. The SLS rocket, the Orion capsule, and the teams that built them represent years of serious work. The four astronauts strapping into that vehicle are brave people doing something extraordinary. None of that is in dispute. What is in dispute is who deserves credit, who came close to killing this program, and who profits from the way NASA now operates.
Under the Trump administration's DOGE-driven federal workforce reduction in 2025, NASA lost roughly 20% of its workforce. CNBC's reporting on the Artemis II launch specifically noted that the mission's success "provided positive talking points for a space agency that lost roughly 20% of its workforce under the Trump administration's federal downsizing efforts last year." The people fired weren't dead weight. They were engineers, scientists, and support staff who had spent careers building toward exactly this kind of mission.
Trump Is Taking Credit. Musk Is Cashing Checks.
During his primetime address to the nation on the Iran war — delivered the same night as the Artemis II launch — Trump paused to comment on the mission. "It's amazing," he said. "They are on their way and God bless them, these are brave people." He's not wrong that it's amazing. He is, however, the person whose administration spent 2025 cutting the workforce that made it happen.
The deeper problem is Elon Musk. Musk ran DOGE — the operation that cut NASA's workforce by roughly 20%. Musk also runs SpaceX, which holds billions of dollars in NASA contracts and has become increasingly central to how NASA operates, including ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station. NASA has been deliberately shifting toward SpaceX as it reduces its own internal capacity. That is not a coincidence. That is a man engineering a situation where the federal agency he is gutting becomes more dependent on his private company. That is the definition of a conflict of interest, and it is operating in the open.
DOGE cut 20% of NASA's workforce. SpaceX holds billions in NASA contracts. The man who ran DOGE runs SpaceX. Trump is taking a bow for a mission his administration tried to make harder to complete.
What Artemis II Actually Is.
The Artemis program was established in 2017 to build a long-term U.S. presence on the moon as a stepping stone to eventual missions to Mars. Artemis II is the program's first crewed test flight — a mission around the moon that will put the spacecraft through its paces before any actual lunar landing attempt. The crew will venture deeper into space than any humans since the Apollo era. If the mission proceeds as planned, it will validate the hardware and pave the way for Artemis III and eventually a lunar landing — the first since 1972. That's what's at stake, and that's what the people who weren't fired built.
Give Credit Where It’s Due — and Accountability Too.
The scientists and engineers who built this mission deserve every ounce of recognition coming to them. The astronauts risking their lives deserve it even more. But the administration claiming the win while having spent the prior year cutting the agency's workforce, redirecting its contracts toward a politically connected billionaire's private company, and letting that same billionaire run the operation that did the cutting — that deserves to be said out loud too. Both things are true. The launch is incredible. The hypocrisy is documented.
Sources
- CNBC / Reuters: Artemis II launches April 1, 2026 — first crewed lunar mission since 1972. The success "provided positive talking points for a space agency that lost roughly 20% of its workforce under the Trump administration's federal downsizing efforts last year."
- Spaceflight Now: Launch timeline and mission details for Artemis II.