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National confidence, unfortunately, is in short supply these days. In this season of springtime renewal, Americans would do well to look up — literally. Artemis II, NASA's first meaningful manned space mission in over a half-century, has taken the nation by storm this month. In so doing, it has provided a timely reminder of what a great nation, acting with confidence and clarity of purpose, can still achieve.
Public polling confirms that Americans are a largely pessimistic lot. Our politics are fractured, our institutions mistrusted, and our birth and marriage rates have plummeted. Hope once sprang eternal, but today's zeitgeist is characterized by an unshakeable malaise. The daring Artemis II mission offers a rebuttal to this debilitating defeatism. Artemis II is a powerful symbol that the United States still possesses the will and the capacity to do big things. It presents a ripe opportunity to rekindle an inspiring national ethos that has been lost — one fostering greatness, rewarding courage and embracing the frontier spirit.
Put simply, a great country is not satisfied with managed decline. A great country thinks boldly and acts boldly.
In this respect, Artemis II is deeply consonant with — indeed, it is an embodiment of — the political ethos of President Donald Trump and the broader MAGA movement. Stripped of caricature and distortion, "Make America Great Again" is, at its core, a call for national renewal — to reject complacency and reassert American leadership and excellence. Whether in trade, foreign policy or space exploration, the premise is the same: America should lead, not follow.
Space exploration has long been one of the clearest arenas in which American leadership manifests itself. At the height of the Cold War, NASA's Apollo program had a loftier mission than merely beating the Soviets to the moon; the goal was to demonstrate to the world the superiority of American freedom and the American way of life. Now, Artemis II carries forward that legacy in a new geopolitical context — one in which rivals like China are racing to assert dominance on land, air, sea and beyond. If the 21st century is going to be an American century and not a Chinese century, missions like Artemis II will be crucial.
Yet Artemis II is not just a story about national power. It is also one about individual character. Consider Victor Glover, the mission's pilot. In an era obsessed with identity politics and the divvying up of individuals into racial, ethnic and sexual categories, Glover has offered a refreshing perspective. When recently asked about becoming the first Black astronaut deployed by NASA on a lunar mission, Glover fundamentally rejected the premise: "It's about human history. It's the story of humanity — not Black history, not women's history — but that it becomes human history." This is a tremendous, and inspiring, rebuke of today's suffocating wokeism.
Equally significant — if not more so — is Glover's openness about his Christian faith. He has openly spoken about the imperatives of studying God's Creation from orbit, and he took a personal copy of the Bible with him on the journey. Glover is a throwback to an older, bygone era — one in which the most renowned scientists, such as Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, understood their endeavors as a means of employing human reason to better understand G od's Creation. This is a much more cogent understanding of the scientific enterprise than the false tension between science and religion that is often peddled today.
Taken together, the Artemis II mission and the individuals who have carried it out offer a powerful counternarrative to the dour pessimism, censorious wokeism and rampant atheism of our age. This is a mission that embodies the best of America: technological prowess, individual excellence and a willingness to venture into the unknown to do big, bold and beautiful things. It is a story that has united Americans of all political, religious, racial and ethnic stripes.
In short, Artemis II is a feel-good story. And frankly, we could use more of those.
The United States has always been at its best when it chooses outward-looking hope over inward-looking cynicism. Artemis II is a reminder that such a choice is still readily available to us. The question is whether we will choose correctly — and, in turn, help make the 21st century a distinctly American century.
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Josh Hammer is senior editor-at-large at Newsweek, a research fellow with the Edmund Burke Foundation, counsel and policy advisor for the Internet Accountability Project, a syndicated columnist through Creators and a contributing editor for Anchoring Truths