It’s fair to say that a lot of national and world news of late has been pretty dour.

A modern rendition of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” would be incomplete without mentioning the genocide in Gaza, Trump’s tarriffs threatening the stability of the global economy, the U.S. kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the beleaguered release of the Epstein files (and the sinister content within), the ramping up of ICE deportations to strange countries, the war started by the U.S. and Israel against Iran spiking oil prices and so on and so on …

It’s hard to take anything good from current events, especially when they start to directly affect the lives of the people you know. Housing, food, fuel, education and other everyday necessities continue to grow more expensive as wages stay stagnant. Our infrastructure is quite literally collapsing, making it harder for people who still have jobs to get to work.

But there’s one national story that has a chance to raise our spirits: the Artemis II mission.

Launched last week, the 10-day mission around the moon is the first time in nearly 50 years that humankind has left low Earth orbit. Artemis II named for the Greek goddess of wilderness, is also the first time a woman astronaut, a Black astronaut and Canadian astronaut have ventured this far into space — the furthest any humans have gone before.
 

Tuesday also saw the first time a moonship and a spaceship had ever conducted a long-distance call when the Artemis II crew rang the International Space Station to speak to three NASA and one French astronaut according to AP News.

Despite the historic firsts for space travel and science, we’d be remiss if we didn’t cite the parallels between what’s happening now and what was happening in the 1970s that led Gil Scott-Herron to write “Whitey on the Moon:”

“I can’t pay no doctor bills / But whitey’s on the moon / Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still / While whitey’s on the moon / The man just upped my rent last night / Cause whitey’s on the moon / no hot water, no toilets, no lights / but whitey’s on the moon.”

Artemis II is an exceptional story in the context of space travel and social advancement, but it’s also a small blip in a large field of news noise that has more direct effects on the every-day person. It’s not a distraction, but it also isn’t the most important thing right now.

The astronauts aboard Integrity — NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen — are on their way back to Earth at time of writing. We wish them a safe return back to Earth and a genuine “thank you” for providing us a little bit of good news during these tumultuous times.